“Miss, with great respect for your race, I don’t see no white people here. Where they at? I live here, I know there’s plenty of white folk in New Orleans.”

The Globe and Mail‘s Christie Blatchford has written one of the best pieces I’ve read on the “unequal toll” of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

While race remains the “back story” in the MSM, Blatchford puts to words what the images out of NOLA have been screaming all week…white folks got out of town, poor black folks didn’t (and the initial reponse of the government has been to treat the those remaining firstly like criminals and secondly like refugees).

Katrina’s unequal toll
‘Miss, with great respect for your race, I don’t see no white people here,’ Christie Blatchford is told in New Orleans

By CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
Saturday, September 3, 2005 Updated at 1:59 AM EDT
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail (September 3, 2005)

Ernest (Dutch) Morial, after whom the New Orleans Convention Center was named, was the first African-American to graduate from the Louisiana State law school and later became the state’s first black assistant district attorney.

He necessarily must have been a proud, brave man.

On the small bronze plaque erected in his honour at one end of the sprawling building, which, for days now, has housed upward of 10,000 hurricane refugees, Mr. Morial is called “The Man of Firsts.”

Well, this week has marked another first, one that might have enraged and tormented him.

It is Mr. Morial’s people — African-Americans — who in the main as of late yesterday were still living in this battered city’s most appalling conditions and who, despite reports to the contrary, are weathering them with a terrible grace.

The people crowded into the convention centre are overwhelmingly black, yet the Big Easy is — was? — a relatively diverse city, with about 62 per cent of the population black and 28 per cent white. Yet rare are the white faces to be seen among these folks who have suffered so dreadfully, and rare are the white faces who even dare enter the fetid, revolting building.

As Autherine Algere said yesterday, as she took Globe and Mail photographer Fred Lum on a tour of the centre, past the foul, overflowing latrines, in one of which sits the body of a disabled woman who died in a handicapped stall; past the quiet area where the world’s maddest unofficial paramedic, Derrick Trahan, has set up a makeshift first-aid station; past J Section, which, unbelievably, because people will often self-segregate if it is not forced upon them, houses the Little Saigon part of the convention centre and is exclusively Vietnamese.

“Miss, with great respect for your race, I don’t see no white people here. Where they at? I live here, I know there’s plenty of white folk in New Orleans.”
Ms. Algere, who clutched her Bible in her right hand, looked upward to beg the Lord’s forgiveness for what she was about to say. “It was to hell with us Negroes.”

It was the closest to overt recognition, let alone complaint, of what television reporters call the “back story” of this horrific natural disaster: As the American South was once divided into slave and master, so was the aftermath of hurricane Katrina clearly divided along racial lines. The white folks in the main got out of town; the black ones didn’t — not, as they are quick to tell you, because they didn’t want to go, but because they couldn’t.

Donelle Deffina and Davonna Good, a couple from Eldorado Hills, Calif., near Sacramento, were two of the rare white faces still in the convention centre yesterday. Tourists who were booted out of their hotel after the storm hit, they were brought here Tuesday about noon, when the cavernous place was virtually empty, occupied only by the families of local police officers (who, the women say, were shortly afterward taken out).

“Last night,” Ms. Deffina spat furiously, gesturing at all those collapsed on the hard concrete floor all around her, “these people were told by a Louisiana state trooper that in four hours, 300 buses would be here.

“Well, they put their elderly and their sick up front, all neat, and the babies. They cleaned up their own areas and then they stood in line until well after midnight. Not a single bus came.

“We’ve been here four days and we have not seen one person of authority. No FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Authority]. No Red Cross. No National Guard. No one.

“Don’t you believe what you’ve been hearing,” she said fiercely. “These people are great. They were brought here, as we were, by the authorities, lots of them rescued from rooftops, and they haven’t received any medication attention, any water, or one word of encouragement.”

Earlier this week, the convention centre was the site of some of the worst rioting New Orleans has seen since the levees burst and almost 80 per cent of the city was flooded. And there was truth in those widely reported stories, as people will tell you in the most awful straightforward way.

Two young girls were apparently raped in one or another of the bathrooms; there are reports a 13-year-old boy was also raped, his throat slit; and two days ago, when the felicitously named Regina Hamilton was parking her car on the second floor of a downtown garage, to keep it safe, she was carjacked by an armed man who then began to paw her. “Please,” she whimpered, “not after everything else.” He grabbed her hard on one arm, rape his clear intent, and Mrs. Hamilton slipped from his grasp and jumped to the ground below, snapping both ankles in the process.

She was crawling, painfully, back to the convention centre when two young men in a golf cart saw her and came to her rescue.

As of yesterday, reunited with her 19-year-old daughter Kelley, Mrs. Hamilton had not yet received even an Aspirin for the pain; her pleas for medical help to the police officers outside fell on ears that were, if not deaf, numb.

Not until Mr. Traham, who relying on a high-school first-aid course, appointed himself the convention centre medic five days ago, came to pick her up on the little flatbed wagon he drives throughout the centre, did she even receive any quasi-expert medical attention.

Everyone from President George W. Bush on down is now talking cheerfully about all the aid pouring into the New Orleans area.

But virtually none had arrived by day’s end yesterday — only heavily armed reinforcements for the local New Orleans police, much-praised by the refugees here for their kindness, if not their ability to do anything.

The new show of force has served to quell the lawlessness and looting, but it is also intimidating. When there was an explosion (a fire, it turns out, down by the pier) on Wednesday night, Ronate Walker, who is 24, decided he’d had enough and decided he had to get his extended family — wife, sister, her husband, two grandmas and one grandpa and his own three little daughters — out of Dodge.

He found a parked car with the keys in it, drove around the block (so he’d be on the side closest to his relatives) and tried to corral his gang. But they wouldn’t leave; they were too afraid.

So Mr. Walker parked the car where he’d found it, keys where he’d found them, and found himself surrounded by armed police, telling him he was lucky the jails were closed. “The ground was shaking,” he said tearfully. “I was just trying to look after my family.”

Everywhere Fred and I went yesterday, people came running up to us. They knew, by Fred’s cameras, we were press. They knew we couldn’t help. But they were so grateful that their story might be told (and, I believe, to see a couple of white people who were not afraid of them because of their skin colour) that they embraced us like friends.

Most of them were brought here, or told to come here, from the safe high ground of local highways where many of them spent days waiting for buses and help, after they were rescued from roofs and attics.

Nothing happens. Nothing changes. And yet as each new rumour arises of an army of buses on its way, they line up, orderly-like, their old people and babies up front and wait.

“They’re treating us like animals,” Rozz Smith, a 44-year-old motivational speaker, said yesterday. She also gave us a tour, hobbling because of the toe she broke when she was trampled in a stampede over something — gunshots in the night, rumours of food or buses, I forget which now. “Every night they say the buses are coming. They never come.”

The medic, Mr. Traham, said nine people have died in the centre named after Dutch Morial. They’re kept in what everyone calls “the fridge.” They were taken there, not by any authorities, not by police, but by the people who watched them die and wither away, and who now can hardly bear to remember that for a few days here, these strangers were family.