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August 2006 - Article 2
 Did the disaster in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina take place because of racism? Or was it simply an unfortunate calamity of errors that produced the horrors, witnessed by many after the storm of 8/29 blew away? In "Come Hell or High Water", Michael Eric Dyson explores this question, trying to sort out how the issues of race and class affected governmental response, and the aftermath of one of the worst national disasters in American history. The book explores the question of whether the black poor even warrant a second glance by the American public and government. Although a professor, Dyson does not write this book as a dispassionate scholar. Without question his bias is clear: Kanye West seems to have gotten it right, because based on the response to the black poor suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, George Bush, or at least the federal government, doesn't really care about black people. Dyson's accusations are not limited to the Republicans, as he cites that President Clinton's decision to enact welfare reform hurt the black poor as well. It is more the idea of limited government, and how in the end, the black and poor wind up on the bottom of the scale every time with that sort of that practice. In a sense, what Katrina did, Dyson suggests, is expose what the practice of limited government has on the poorest and most untouchable, so to speak, of the American people in a national crisis. Instead, limited government is a means by which only a few voices are heard, while those who are too inconvenient to be listened to can just be pushed aside, or swept under a rug. Too often limited government can be used, Dyson argues, to enforce stereotypes and only express the views of an elite few, such as rich capitalists who use "disaster capitalism", a term coined by Naomi Klein describing businesses capitalizing on the cleanup, to benefit a few in the tragedy and ignore plight of the many. Dyson believes that the tragedy has exposed a latent racism that usually can be buried until something as extraordinary as this disaster uproots its reality. It becomes easy to use education, class, and even God to support the most subtle of racist thinking. Dyson cites examples of people, including blacks which he refers to as the "Afristocracy", who blame the victims of New Orleans for their own predicament of being left behind in the floods. The media and government were all to happy to enforce the idea of "hooligans" looting, he cites, almost always referring to blacks. Dyson shows the subtlety of language that posits how whites were just trying to survive, but blacks were now using the tragedy to be thugs. And of course, the idea that suddenly the city of New Orleans turned in a carnage scene out of Lord of the Flies, which in the end, turned out to be largely exaggerated. This instant misconception, which plays into the urban legend that the blacks are out to rape, loot, and pillage if you let them, is a stereotype which Dyson attacks vehemently. To him, it is an example of how the surface may seem more egalitarian, but underneath it all, the specter of racism still exists. It's only more sophisticated, so if one challenges it, one seems "oversensitive", and the subtle prejudice can continue unabated. Though Dyson raises and explores a great many theories on racism and class using jargon he is likely to use in a college classroom, the book is a fairly easy read and not overly scholarly. Obviously with a bias that he does not fail to admit, it is a polemic that definitely takes a side in the political issue of Hurricane Katrina. In this respect, the personal is political, or more accurately, the natural is political. It is a fierce questioner of what went wrong with our federal government on 8/29, and a searing accusation of how American society uses freedom as an excuse for apathy. |