Catastrophe Resulted in Affirmative Inaction

[struggle4progress]

By Julianne Malveaux, BET.com
Contributing Columnist

<snip> The notion of equality, of equal protection under the law, has been shattered by a week of harrowing images of African-American people crowded into the New Orleans Superdome like slaves crushed into the hull of a ship. <snip>

But the disorganization begins with having a former horse trader with no qualifications head up FEMA, the federal agency that manages the response to national disasters. Michael Brown was actually briefed on air by news anchors and admitted that he did not know what was going on. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said that he didn’t know because he preferred to stay in air-conditioned Washington than to come to New Orleans and see the carnage for himself. When such a bumbler is put in charge of a disaster agency, and when the agency is weakened because it is submerged into the Department of Homeland Security, there is a prescription for disaster.

Disorganization has different consequences for different people. Those who had cash, credit cards and automobiles were able to evacuate New Orleans. Those who were hard hit, at the end of the month, and had nothing, were stuck. In a city that is two-thirds Black and disproportionately poor (it has a poverty rate of about 30 percent, compared to the national rate of 12.7 percent), disorganization had deleterious consequences for African-American people. While the disorganization may have had no evil intent, it had an absolutely evil outcome. And given the known vulnerability of the poor population in New Orleans, a disorganized response to a Category 5 storm was a death sentence for thousands of people.

We have moved troops and dropped meals to Bosnia and Iraq within 48 hours, but it took five days for the people of New Orleans to get help. Why? The President was doing a fair imitation of the Roman emperor Nero, fiddling while his nation burned. The FEMA head was clueless. Would the President have responded more quickly if the images flashing across the television screen were of vulnerable White people? In my opinion, absolutely. <snip>

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