Mark Naison: George Bush, Hurricane Katrina and the Unmasking of American Conservatism

[Dr. Naison is Professor of History and African American Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of Communists in Harlem During the Great Depression, White Boy: A Memoir, co-editor of The Tenant Movement in New York City, and over 100 articles on African American politics, social movements and American culture and sports. Dr. Naison is the Principal Investigator of the Bronx African American History Project.]

I saw New Orleans
Saw the people left for dead
I heard every bald faced lie
You politicians said
I've seen it for myself
And you can't fool your sight
Well we'd better make a change
And we'd better start tonight

Mavis Staples"My Own Eyes," from the 2007 album We'll Never Turn Back

In America's long and painful struggle against racial injustice, certain visual images have assumed powerful historic significance, because they highlight, in simple and dramatic form, the cruelty and inhumanity of America's treatment of its black population. One of these, coming at the very dawn of the post-war Civil Rights movement, was the battered and swollen face of 14 year old Emmett Till, put on display in a Chicago church after his mangled body was recovered from a river in a Mississippi town where he was cruelly murdered for comments he made to a white woman in a small country store. To the tens of thousands of mourners who walked by Till's casket, and the millions who saw his face on the cover of Jet magazine, Till's brutally battered visage was a visual indictment of a Jim Crow regime willing to resort to unspeakable acts of violence to intimidate African Americans and deprive them of their rights and dignity.

Eight years later, in the Spring of 1963, Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor provided another indelible image of America's brutal treatment of its Black population when he unleashed water hoses and police dogs on a peaceful group of African American high school and middle school students marching to desegregate Birmingham's down town business district. One image in particular, of a German Shepard biting the stomach of a 15 year old Black male demonstrator was disseminated by wire services around the world and has come to symbolize, to billions of people woldwide, the cruelty and irrationality of the America's system of racial segregation, which forced many African-Americans to live as second class citizens

Now, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, the world has been given a new and equally haunting image of racial inequality in America- that of tens of thousands of poor Black people left stranded amidst rising flood waters outside the New Orleans Coliseum or the roofs of houses That you could have so many people abandoned by their government, in the richest nation in the world, after a national catastrophe everyone knew was coming was shocking in itself. But that nearly all of these people were Black and poor showed that 40 years after the Civil Rights movement, the nation was still profoundly segregated by race and class.

The reaction of George Bush to this catastrophe would forever tarnish his presidency. Having starved the key federal agencies responsible for flood prevention and emergency management and having sent the bulk of the National Guard to fight the war in Iraq, Bush had no emergency response team in place capable of rescuing people quickly when the levees broke in New Orleans. But equally significantly, Bush displayed no empathy or emotional identification with the tens of thousands of Black people and poor people stranded in New Orleans. He refused to change his plans and take personal charge of relief efforts until five days of the levee broke and seemed perplexed that the images of desperation from the flooded city were provoking worldwide outrage.

Blinded by his own conviction that responsibility for environmental issues and the relief of poverty were best left in private hands or devolved onto local governments, Bush failed to see most Americans-even those who voted Republican- expected their federal government to take the lead when there was a natural catastrophe the same way it did in the face of a terrorist attack. They also expected that relief efforts would be timely, efficient and competently led, and would rescue people based on level of need, not on their economic status, racial background or ability to pay. Even to many conservatives, it was embarrassing to have America paraded before the world as a racist, classist nation that so relied on private transportation in an emergency that middle class white residents escaped to safety while black and poor people were left to die.

As in the case of photos of Emmett Till's and of the Birmingham teenage protesters attacked by hoses and dogs, the visual images of New Orleans stranded citizens provided an inescapable reminder- and for some a wake up call--of how powerful racial divisions in American were and how much cruelty those divisions could inspire.

But they also served to demystify the Bush presidency and the entire Republican philosophy that had been ascendant for the past 25 years. Because what took place in New Orleans, unlike what took place in Webb Mississippi, or Birmingham Alabama, was not the result of actions by private individuals and government officials designed to preserve white supremacy, but the result of a systematic weakening of public institutions by conservatives who claimed their motives were non racial. If you eviscerate the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Relief Management Agency; if you refuse to fund public transportation, public housing, and public health care; if you have no plan to help indigent people in the case of an emergency, than when a crisis like Katrina takes place, you will see, WITH YOUR OWN EYES, how truly divided and unequal American society has become.

And your eyes won't be lying. In a recent New York Times column entitled"Enough is Enough,"(June 30, 2007) Bob Herbert pointed out that what Katrina revealed in New Orleans is only one example of a problem that is truly national in scope:

" Have you looked at the public schools lately? Have you looked at the prisons? Have you looked at the legions of unemployed blacks roaming the neighborhoods of big cities across the country? These jobless African-Americans, so many of them men, are so marginal in the view of the wider society, so insignificant, so invisible, they aren't even counted in the government's official jobless statistics."

Now that we have seen these divisions, what are we going to do? I for one, am for following the lead of Mavis Staples, whose new album"We'll Never Turn Back" is the most inspiring collection of freedom songs I have heard in the last ten years:

We'd better make a change
And we'd better start tonight