What Happens to a Race Deferred – New York Times

What Happens to a Race Deferred – New York Times

THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time.

What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn’t just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment.

The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity – of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie – had taken a Conradian turn.

In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

Even people who had spent a lifetime studying race and class found themselves slack-jawed.

“This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets left behind in this society – in a literal way,” said Christopher Jencks, a sociologist glued to the televised images from his office at Harvard. Surprised to have found himself surprised, Mr. Jencks took to thinking out loud. “Maybe it’s just an in-the-face version of something I already knew,” he said. “All the people who don’t get out, or don’t have the resources, or don’t believe the warning are African-American.”

“It’s not that it’s at odds with the way I see American society,” Mr. Jencks said. “But it’s at odds with the way I want to see American society.”

Yup. Me too. I knew it was bad, I know how racist the South is. But – it’s got to stop. It’s got to end. And we have to restore the balance to our society. Not just along color lines, but along the line between rich and poor.

The free ride is over for the rich. And yes, I include myself and my husband – our income is from two engineering jobs over the years, and an inheritance that while not huge, was substantial. We are the fortunate, lucky people who have done well for ourselves in this society. But so many, so many, never get the chance.

For the last time, to all those who believe otherwise : The poor are not stupid. The poor are not lazy. The poor are not condemned by God for sin. The poor are not anything more than unlucky victims of a society that couldn’t care less about them. And it has to change.

The last class war, for civil rights and women’s rights, now has to be followed by the class war for human rights. Everyone deserves to have a chance – without discrimination, without religious zealots telling them what bad, sinful people they are being punished by God, without politicians voting their friends pork and tax breaks while so many suffer.

We want national health care. We want a basic standard of living for everyone in this country. We want education for all kids, not just the rich kids. And most of all, we want this horrible, terrible tragedy of NOLA to mean something in this society. We want it to mean that it will never happen here again.

To those who think it doesn’t matter who is in office, now you know how much it does matter. Now you know – and you have to decide, finally, what kind of person you are, and what kind of country you want to live in. I hope, fervently, I will not have to move out of America to live in the kind of compassionate, caring, considerate country full of people who are willing to take care of those less fortunate them themselves that I want to live in. I will work my ass off to make this that kind of country.

No more excuses, Democrats – you have your disaster now, your own 9/11. The Republicans drummed 9/11 into everything they’ve done for four years – let’s see the Democrats come out and support those people who have been most ignored by all of them, by all the Republicans as well, by everyone with means in this society.

NEVER again.