2.30 Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (2006)

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

2.30 Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (2006)

I've been doing a lot of reading about Hurricane Katrina recently. I was inspired by the second Spike Lee documentary to revisit this issue - because it was a genuine puzzle to me. I could not believe that the response to a disaster could be so incompetent in the first world.

I made a donation to the American Red Cross and as I did so I remember being astounded that I was sending disaster relief to the richest and most powerful country in the world because they just could not get their act together to help their own citizens.

So I've read several books and they list a whole lot of factors. The National Guard was depleted because of Iraq; Bush was focussed on terrorism and had subsumed FEMA into the Homeland Security Department; FEMA was headed by an incompetent who reported to a moron; the White House had poor relations with Louisiana because it was held by a Democrat; Mayor Nagin didn't use his buses before the storm and after it they were flooded; FEMA kept telling active lies about sending buses so no one else organised any; FEMA would not let people in to help. But the elephant in the room is, of course, why these factors were allowed to sway the relief efforts.

Apparently FEMA had very competently organised relief the year before in Florida (in an area where there were Republican voters to woo). But the entire rescue effort in New Orleans was stunningly bad, bad beyond belief.

Dyson just goes all out and says yes, this difference is because the people who were stuck in New Orleans were, largely, poor and black. Some of his information is just astonishing - such as the fact that people leaving the fancy hotels were allowed to jump the queue for the buses. That is to say, people wealthy enough to stay at nice hotels, people who had gone through the hurricane without wading through fetid storm water and who had had access to food and water for the days of waiting for help, those are the folks who were put at the head of the queue to get the buses out of town.

It is a relief to find someone willing to put an overarching narrative together rather than getting bogged in the details of when Heckofajob Brownie sent this email or that, and how many New Orleans school buses were working. His overarching story is that people got treated badly because they were mostly poor and mostly black.

That's certainly how it appeared to my outsider's eyes. Though, again from my uninformed outsider's perspective, the American belief in limited Government seemed to make things work. The evacuation order given for New Orleans basically said ' Get out if you can; if you can't abandon all hope because we're doing bugger all for you'.

Dyson quotes the head of the 9/11 fund who said that a similar fund need not be set up for those displaced by Katrina. The interviewer asked if 'the underlying philosophy here.. [is] that I'm responsible for my own life and if something bad happens, too bad.' He affirmed his - 'It's the United States after all. Our heritage is limited government. The government is not a guarantor of life's misfortunes.'

I guess I find this concept of citizenship odd. I imagine the State's role is to protect its citizens but this isn't an argument that Dyson spends a lot of time on. (I guess this is a fish doesn't see the water thing, where Dyson also accepts this heritage of hands off Government and rugged individualism.)

In short, this is the least factually informative of the books I've read on Hurricane Katrina, but it is the most emotionally satisfying as it does argue an overall story rather than a collection of snippets about what happened.

Comments

[livii.livejournal.com]

Great review, thanks for taking the time!

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

A very interesting review--thanks for posting. I especially like what you have to say about the underlying philosophy about the role of government, and how it feeds into these attitudes.

If you're interested in Katrina and incompetent responses to disaster, I cannot recommend highly enough Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. She looks at five disasters in North America--the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 Halifax explosion, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11 in New York City, and Katrina--and Katrina really benefits from being put in that context.

There are some interesting parallels, I think, between the outbreaks of anti-Chinese racism that occurred in the wake of the SF earthquake and the anti-black racism that marked the response to Katrina, and the way the government response in each case went beyond incompetence and into endangerment. Solnit is especially good on the rise of racist white vigilantism in New Orleans during the Katrina disaster.

She's also very interested in the underlying philosophy of how people respond to disaster and how that guides official relief efforts, for good and for ill, which you seem like you might enjoy. She actually has a chapter on how Hollywood disaster movies reinforces certain political ideologies that come into play during real disaster relief efforts, and her theory on the role of "elite panic" is incredibly provocative.

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reference to the book. I will see if my library carries it as it sounds so interesting.

What you say about how people respond to disaster is interesting. I had a friend who was in America for Burning Man when Katrina struck. They went in to a media blackout with the last news being the hurricane had missed New Orleans. Then they spent days in a radical experiement in communal living - and then came out to see the media was saying things were so very bad in New Orleans. As it turned out there was community level cooperation in New Orleans too, but it was not at all what the media narrative was about at the time.