I am writing in response to Brooke Bosler’s op-ed piece “Put aside the race card” posted on Dawgnet 09/11/05.  While hurricane Katrina was an act of nature, planning for the event and its aftermath were not. The aftermath reflected the social and cultural priorities of the nation. What we witnessed was that poor people—disproportionately the elderly, the young, and African American—are not national priorities.

While American class and electoral politics influenced decisions about where to place resources in the days before Katrina, race and class politics have shaped our response and thinking about the disaster. It is, in the end, merely wishful thinking to contend that the response to Katrina’s aftermath was not shaped by US racial politics.

While Kanye West’s comments may have been inopportune as a few selfishly may decide not to donate, West’s statements were not dangerous or irresponsible. Irresponsible was the criminally slow response to the disaster by the Federal government. Irresponsible was the appointment of a political crony to oversee FEMA. Irresponsible was a generation of neglect of the levees (with blame to be shared by Democrat and Republican alike). Dangerous is the possibility that white Americans will divide the region into deserving (white) and undeserving (black) victims and respond accordingly.

To-date George Bush has done little to refute West’s claims that Bush does not care about Black people. Perhaps, however; West should have been more careful to say that George Bush does not care about poor African Americans who do not live in Florida. Significantly, Bosler failed to adequately address the fullness of West’s remarks. As West first queried, why indeed, do we insist on calling whites who are foraging for food survivors while calling African Americans searching for food looters?  Why are African American citizens in their own homeland refugees instead of evacuees?

Bosler may indeed have the luxury of putting aside the “race card” in her quotidian existence; many of us do not or choose not to.  The survivors in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama black, white, Latino, and Asian certainly must live with the presumption of their blackness and its consequences, the limits of generational poverty, longstanding political neglect, and government inefficiency or what amounts to a dangerous brew of race and class politics. What we as a nation must decide now is whether they go it alone as they attempt to build new and better lives. As for me and my family, we’ll share the burden.

Dr. Vivian Deno
Assistant Professor
Department of History