Hurricane Katrina and racism are topics that have come up in the past few weeks in my ASTU, Sociology, and Geography classes. In ASTU, we have been studying Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, a book about a Syrian man’s experiences in Hurricane Katrina. I thought the book was interesting and brought to light some very important issues regarding racism and misuse of power and resources in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but I also thought the story put some very important issues that rose out of Katrina in its shadow. I would like to talk about my own personal experiences with Hurricane Katrina and with racism in the South, but before doing so, I feel that I need to note that I am in a position of privilege. I don’t have a full understanding of what it is like to struggle though a natural disaster as extreme as Katrina, or what it is like to be discriminated against based on the color of my skin.

I was only 2 or 3 the first time I visited New Orleans. My parents would pack up the whole family and take us to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in the spring time. We’d spend a long weekend listening to good music, eating incredible food and spending time with close friends. I went to my first concert in New Orleans, and associated the place with friendly people, colorful parades and good times from a very young age.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, my family was devastated. We knew people living in New Orleans at the time, though as far as I know, all of them evacuated before the storm. I remember everyone donating money to organizations like Oxfam America and talking about going down to New Orleans to help out. Many people went on mission trips to New Orleans in the weeks following to clear away debris and rebuild homes, and many families in Nashville took in families that were displaced by the storm. It seemed like every driveway, including mine, had a lemonade stand at the end of it with children promising their profits would go toward Hurricane Katrina relief. I do not, however, have any memories of the racism that played a huge role in Hurricane Katrina. This is probably partially because it wasn’t presented to me in an obvious way by the media, and partially because I didn’t see it as anything out of the ordinary.

Growing up in the South, racism has always been something that has occurred around me. I think that even though most people acknowledge that racism exists in the South, on a day-to-day basis, the issue is mostly ignored. Coming from a multiracial family, racism has always been something I was aware of and noticed, but many of my white peers are rarely confronted with these issues, as they spend most of their time with other white people. Regardless of what people would like you to think, the South is still basically segregated. Generally, white people are richer, so they live in nicer neighborhoods and send their children to better schools. Black people live in poorer, less convenient areas and their children do not have access to quality education. This is not to say that there is no intermingling between races and that all black people are poor and all white people are rich, but it is the general trend, and has allowed cycles of poverty and racism to continue for decades after segregation was ended.

Last week in my Geography discussion, we were discussing the racism that was present in the aftermath of Katrina, and it occurred to me that I had never though of racism as the issue here. When Katrina was happening, I was aware that it was the poor people who were being effected, but never considered it to be linked to racism that the majority of these poor people were African Americans. However, my discussion made me realize that this was, in fact, entirely the case. It isn’t because of racism that poor people were the one’s effected (though it is still inequality, as most poor people, regardless of race did not have the ability to evacuate and were not provided by the government with adequate means to do so), but racism is the reason that these poor people are predominately black. In her editorial “Katrina: the Public Transcript of “Disaster”, Karen Bakker discusses how the “process by which poor residents of New Orleans were abandoned was a longstanding one” (803). She goes on to discuss how poor, black Americans are not benefiting from Democracy, and were abandoned by the government long ago. The government does not serve these people adequately when it comes to providing social services, and most certainly does not protect them, as has recently been brought to light by a multitude of incidents such as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson MS. Poor black people are not protected the same way rich, white people are, and this was amplified by Hurricane Katrina.  People were in life-threatening conditions, and still the government was more concerned with insuring that they abided by the law than with their survival.

I have been back to New Orleans twice since Katrina. 10 years later, the city is still healing, but still the culture is vibrant as ever. Both times I visited, I stayed Uptown in the Garden District, a neighborhood with beautiful, large old houses and trees covered in Spanish Moss. Both of these times I noticed how everyone living there was white. There is still evidence of the high water levels in some areas, and the Lower Ninth Ward, a poorer New Orleans neighborhood, is not what it once was. In her editorial, Bakker discusses how “white privilege [underlies] the spatial location and racial composition of communities most vulnerable to flooding” (797). The Lower Ninth Ward was the area hit the hardest by the flooding, and is inhabited mostly but poor African Americans. The fact that mostly poor African Americans live in this neighborhood is racism in itself; the same quality of life is not made available to them that is to white people. Racism is embedded in American culture, and in the South, this is amplified. Katrina didn’t produce racism, it only brought it to the surface, making clear the racial disparities that are present in the United States.

Works Cited:

“Katrina: the Public Transcript of ‘Disaster.'” Editorial. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 2005: 795-809. Print.