Not So Colorblind Katrina: Race as a Subtext to Poverty

Much hoopla has been made over the role race played in America’s response to Katrina. There have been accusations leveled by many black leaders and others in the liberal community that race played a factor in the nation’s neglect. However, as evidence that poor whites in Louisiana faired no better than poor blacks has come to light, the arguments made in William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race, that class has supplanted race, seem to ring most true. While some have held on to the notion that race still played a major role in the poor service given to some and not to others, many have retreated from this stand and the mainstream media (save a few) have been sharp to reframe the issue as one of class.

Yet, it seems to me still that race played an important role that cannot be overlooked. First, one cannot talk about class in this country without talking about race. The two have always been inextricably linked. From the antebellum days until the Civil Rights Movement, blacks were proscribed to the lower rungs of opportunity through coercion, terror, adjudication, legislation, social structures, etc. Indeed, between 1865 and 1954 (especially in the Nadir) it was common that when blacks, small in number though they were, started to achieve modest and more than modest business success, which many times brought them in direct economic competition with whites, the response by whites was to riot, destroy, and many time lynch under the false guise of protecting the ever-sacred white womanhood. The Tulsa race riot of 1921 is perhaps the most destructive example of this practice.

With the Civil Rights Movement came economic mobility for some in the community, yet most still suffered in the same conditions as before. The gains of the Civil Rights era were by and large middleclass gains. Affirmative Action was expanded broadly by the Nixon Administration in an effort to drive a wedge either between some combination of middleclass blacks, the rest of the community and the Democratic Party, or between whites and the Democratic Party. Today’s political alignments prove this to be a rather prescient political strategy. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Acts were important but did little to change the economic conditions that plagued blacks in this country. For these reasons, Martin Luther King at the time of his assassination was attempting to address the issues of poverty and economic mobility. This too was one of the primary concerns of the Black Panther Party, an organization that like King was the subject of relentless harassment and abuse of power at the hands of the Justice Department's COINTELPRO.

As nothing was ever done to address the initial poverty that blacks experience worse than any other group in this country, save perhaps the indigenous populations, present-day conditions look little different from conditions in 1954 where blacks continue to be disproportionately poor, experience unemployment rates at higher than average levels, still have an overwhelming wealth deficit as compared to whites, live in the poorest, most social-capital deficient communities. Given all of this, it seems very difficult to separate class from race. The Oprahs, Jay-Zs, Stan O'Neils, and Bob Johnsons are the exceptions rather than the rules.

But there is another way in which race factored into this equation. While it is true that poor whites and poor blacks received similarly poor relief during and in the aftermath of Katrina, a question of why still remains. And race here comes into play. Black has become the color of poverty, creating a façade that blacks constitute the only or even majority impoverished in the nation. When exposes or articles or documentaries of poverty are relayed, blacks are disproportionately represented in pictures, video and print. Studies have shown that in the late sixties and increasingly in the seventies, blacks began to be disproportionately represented in images for stories related to welfare. These same studies have shown an inverse relationship between the perception of blacks as the recipients of welfare and America’s support of it. And by the eighties, Ronald Reagan, an old-time conservative ala Strom Thurmond, was decrying “welfare queens,” an ugly implicit reference to black women, thereby placing the responsibility of welfare on the backs of blacks, rather than on those of the majority of its stakeholders, whites. This did two things. First, it singled out the unsympathetic poor blacks as welfare’s face, and second, it then capitalized on the historic stereotype of African-Americans as lazy (insert: shiftless), sex-craven people to portray welfare recipients as loose mothers who functioned as baby factories and refused to get jobs.

This all goes to show that to the extent that America views poverty as black, the country looses sympathy for poverty as a public cause. So while poor whites and blacks are equally affected by the nation’s neglect of the poor, it is the combined effect of racist attitudes towards blacks and poverty painted as black that has led to a generally reduced commitment to America’s poor of all colors.

These lessons about America’s subtextual racial tensions playing themselves out in very meaningful yet harmful ways in the lives of both blacks and whites have broader applicability in our society. If we think about the way in which blacks were portrayed as predatory dealers and violence-craven addicts for years, and how our policies toward users reacted to theses images, it was a less-than-honest look at the problem of drugs in our society, and did a disservice to all members of it. What this all goes to say is that the lesson the country never seems to learn continues to ring true year after year. Blinders of bigotry obfuscate fiction from fact, dream from reality, illogic from logic and will have consequences that will look color-blind to the untrained eye but will never be able to completely separate themselves from the cold fact that their roots lie American racism.