I did not see the masses of Blacks loading up their cars and SUVs on route to the highways or to in-land hotels in cities and towns. Instead I watched and worried as those people lined up to enter the New Orleans Superdome. It would be for a day or two, at best, I thought. I am sure they thought so too. So I waited and watched until horror turned to anger. The winds died down, and the cameras showed women with children wadding through street after street of flood water. The women';s faces reflected quiet determination. Jeanne Meserve and Cooper Anderson, voices from CNN, provided the soundtrack. Things were bad. At a press conference carried around the world, Michael Chertoff, Head of Homeland Security, said he did not know that thousands of people were at the Convention Center. Michael Brown, head of FEMA held press conference and said he was doing all he could do to help the victims. The cameras rolled on passed dead bodies floating in murky waters. Senators talked of efforts to help, and the President joked about helping friend Senator Trent Lott rebuild a "fabulous" home. Mayor Nagin strutted from one camera to the next cursing and showing his anger. He thought the Federal government, riding on white horses, would arrive to rescue a population that should have been his, the mayor's, first priority days before Katrina struck land. Who did not know to expect a cat 4 or 5? Who did not know about troubling levees? How could a mayor not know Blacks without transportation, the ill, and the elderly, at least, would need assistance leaving the city? How could he not know that many of the young Black women with small children would not be able to hop in cars and escape to hotels in some inland part of Louisiana? And he does not know this? Cameras continued to find more and more of the predominately poor and Black poor standing alone in front of the Convention Center, crying out for help. From high above the flooded streets of the Ninth Ward, helicopter cameras found the word "help" several times. People beneath these signs stood atop roof tops. The cameras continued on to more roof tops where arms frantically waved white scarves. Reporters on the scene became angry. They saw people with no clean water or food. Some were dying. Crying children had been separate from families. At the studios, attention focused on photographing Blacks expressing anger by the third and fourth day. Then some one spoke to the cameras about snipers shooting and looting. "Angry Blacks" -- the worse kind of Black to have under any circumstance. I watched as pundits at broadcast stations in New York or Washington argue that the unfolding scene in New Orleans had little or nothing to do with race. They understood class. Yes, there is a possibility that the poor who happened to be Black did not have a means out the city. But it was not about race. They had not seen any thing reeking of racial disparity in 20 years. Look at Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and look at how more Black preachers come up the stairs of the White House to sit at Mr. and Mrs. Bush's table. Look at Oprah and the other Black millionaires about now. But these folks trapped and the dead were the "underprivileged," always poor and generally violent anyway -- all of them! This narrative sounded good, well encoded -- wink, wink in the cameras. Bill Cosby, for the most part, agreed. While law enforcement and FEMA feared the threat of these young thugs, the majority of those trapped in the Convention Center were momentarily "blacked" out. Everyone must be on the alert for the mayhem by those classified as criminal and lawless. Mid-management workers, teachers, social workers, and nurses as well as the unemployed youth, grandmothers and grandfathers were angry by day five, the media could not condone their anger. Yet, reporters could express emotions and be rewarded. Where are the cameras now? Where is the outcry, for example, on behalf of the prisoners of Katrina? Scholar and activist Angela Davis appeared on Radio Nation with Laura Flanders to call attention to those "simply trying to survive" in the wake of government inertia. Prisoners of Katrina, Davis explained, are those charged with looting in the days immediately following the hurricane. Of those arrested and charged with looting, many were caught transporting their own food and clothes. Davis wants the court records of theseindividuals "expunged so they don't have to pay a price for the rest of their lives -- for the repercussions will linger and affect the lives of their children for generations. On the other hand, the "failure of the government to respond to the needs of the people in this community, particularly poor Black, constitutes a human rights violation. |
| Voices/Dr. Jean Daniels Cameras on human rights violations? |
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