Published on Sunday, September 11, 2005 by the
Observer/UK
Exiles From a City and From a Nation
by Cornel West
It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the
misery we saw among the poor black people of New
Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty.
It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.
What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was
the most naked manifestation of conservative social
policy towards the poor, where the message for decades
has been: 'You are on your own'. Well, they really
were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and
it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the
fittest. People said: 'It looks like something out of
the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World
long before the hurricane.
It's not just Katrina, it's povertina. People were
quick to call them refugees because they looked as if
they were from another country. They are. Exiles in
America. Their humanity had been rendered invisible so
they were never given high priority when the
well-to-do got out and the helicopters came for the
few. Almost everyone stuck on rooftops, in the
shelters, and dying by the side of the road was poor
black.
In the end George Bush has to take responsibility.
When [the rapper] Kanye West said the President does
not care about black people, he was right, although
the effects of his policies are different from what
goes on in his soul. You have to distinguish between a
racist intent and the racist consequences of his
policies. Bush is still a 'frat boy', making jokes and
trying to please everyone while the Neanderthals
behind him push him more to the right.
Poverty has increased for the last four or five years.
A million more Americans became poor last year, even
as the super-wealthy became much richer. So where is
the trickle-down, the equality of opportunity?
Healthcare and education and the social safety net
being ripped away - and that flawed structure was
nowhere more evident than in a place such as New
Orleans, 68 per cent black. The average adult income
in some parishes of the city is under $8,000 (£4,350)
a year. The average national income is $33,000, though
for African-Americans it is about $24,000. It has one
of the highest city murder rates in the US. From slave
ships to the Superdome was not that big a journey.
New Orleans has always been a city that lived on the
edge. The white blues man himself, Tennessee Williams,
had it down in A Streetcar Named Desire - with Elysian
Fields and cemeteries and the quest for paradise.
When you live so close to death, behind the levees,
you live more intensely, sexually, gastronomically, psychologically. Louis
Armstrong came out of that unbelievable cultural breakthrough unprecedented
in the history of American civilization. The rural blues, the urban jazz. It
is the tragi-comic lyricism that gives you the courage to get through the
darkest storm.
Charlie Parker would have killed somebody if he had
not blown his horn. The history of black people in
America is one of unbelievable resilience in the face
of crushing white supremacist powers.
This kind of dignity in your struggle cuts both ways,
though, because it does not mobilize a collective
uprising against the elites. That was the Black
Panther movement. You probably need both. There would
have been no Panthers without jazz.* If I had been of
Martin Luther King's generation I would never have
gone to Harvard or Princeton.
They shot brother Martin dead like a dog in 1968 when
the mobilization of the black poor was just getting
started. At least one of his surviving legacies was
the quadrupling in the size of the black middle class.
But Oprah [Winfrey] the billionaire and the black
judges and chief executives and movie stars do not
mean equality, or even equality of opportunity yet.
Black faces in high places does not mean racism is
over. Condoleezza Rice has sold her soul.
Now the black bourgeoisie have an even heavier
obligation to fight for the 33 per cent of black
children living in poverty - and to alleviate the
spiritual crisis of hopelessness among young black
men.
Bush talks about God, but he has forgotten the point
of prophetic Christianity is compassion and justice
for those who have least. Hip-hop has the anger that
comes out of post-industrial, free-market America, but
it lacks the progressiveness that produces
organisations that will threaten the status quo. There
has not been a giant since King, someone prepared to
die and create an insurgency where many are prepared
to die to upset the corporate elite. The Democrats are spineless.
There is the danger of nihilism and in the Superdome
around the fourth day, there it was - husbands held at
gunpoint while their wives were raped, someone stomped
to death, people throwing themselves off the mezzanine
floor, dozens of bodies.
It was a war of all against all - 'you're on your own'
- in the centre of the American empire. But now that
the aid is pouring in, vital as it is, do not confuse
charity with justice. I'm not asking for a revolution,
I am asking for reform. A Marshall Plan for the South
could be the first step.
Dr Cornel West is professor of African American
studies and religion at Princeton University. His
great grandfather was a slave. He is a rap artist and
appeared as Counselor West in Matrix Reloaded and
Matrix Revolution
