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.

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, a series of poems written by Juliana Spahr, is about 9/11 and the differences and similarities in how it has had effects on people around the world. The poems are split noticeably based on when they were written. The first section is entitled “poem written after september 11/2001,” and the second section, “poems written from november 30/2002 to march 27/2003.” This divide separates Spahr’s initial experiences of the terrorist attacks that occurred on 9/11/01 from her thoughts on the events later on, as well as her reflection on the United States’ invasion of Iraq.

Spahr’s first poem explores the connection between all people. Our bodies are made up of the same organs and operate in the same ways. We all, as human beings, breathe the same air in and out. We all share the same space. She wrote the first poem in Brooklyn, New York, a place where people were physically effected by the effects of 9/11. The toxic chemicals that were released into the air upon the impacts of the planes into the Twin Towers physically effected all of New York’s residents: even with all their differences and diversity in values, views and lifestyles, all people living in New York City were effected by the air that they all breathed in and out of their lungs.

When I lived in New York in 2013, I worked in a cafe with a back door to the kitchen that slammed loudly whenever someone walked through it. One night when I was working the late shift, a disgruntled neighbor to the cafe came in and informed me that she needed to speak to the owner of the establishment, as the slamming door was putting her on edge every time an employee went down to the kitchen. She told me that she had lived through 9/11 and that she suffered from PTSD. After promising her that I would speak to the owner on her behalf and that we would make an effort to close the door quietly, she went back home. After her departure, a fellow employee commented that we had all lived through 9/11 and that if the sound of a slamming door bothered her, she shouldn’t be living in noisy Manhattan. She was appalled that the woman had “pulled the 9/11 card.”

Immediately following 9/11 occurred, a sense of community within New York as well as the United States formed. I remember learning in a friend’s Sunday school class about how people banded together and that a lot of kindness came from 9/11 as a result of people’s ability to relate to each others’ experience, as well as a need for support. New Yorkers were there for each other in their losses. The U.S. as a whole banded together in their fear and and grief in order to become stronger. However, the U.S. as a country isolated itself. Instead of opening up and relating with other countries, the U.S. separated itself from other countries, upped its security and planned counter-attacks.

America’s reaction to 9/11 exemplifies the dichotomy of “we” and “others” that is discussed in Judith Butler’s book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, and has been so throughly explored in many of my classmates blogs. New York, and the U.S. as a whole opened up their “we” to include all New Yorkers and all Americans, but in doing so, also made their “others” more distinct and to include more people. As time has progressed, the people of New York have relapsed into their old ways of the self-centered isolation. On a day to day basis, I would argue that our “we” usually only includes those that we have positive interactions with. The woman who came in to the cafe where I worked to complain about the noise wasn’t taking into account the fact that 9/11 was something that had effected all New Yorkers, all Americans, and all those that breathe, as Spahr argues. She had re-isolated herself, and her “others” had grown to include those of us working in the cafe. Additionally, my rather insensitive co-worker, instead of being understanding and accepting the woman into her “we”, excluded her. The two were unable to connect with each other over the traumatic events that they had both experienced, and much like the U.S., shut down and isolated themselves. Though we are all connected as humans, we often choose not to expand our “we” and connect with strangers unless we are forced to by extreme conditions, such as 9/11.

References:

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Berkley: University of California Press, 2005. Print.

Our discussion about Poems from Guantanamo in the past couple weeks made me think about Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in a way I never had before. I didn’t really know that much about Guantanamo Bay, other than that they torture people there and that I think that is wrong. I never considered that the people there might be innocent, that they might have families or that they might only be children. I distanced myself from the unpleasant thoughts that I associated with Guantanamo Bay, and never took the time to think of the prisoners there as people. I didn’t think of them as inhuman, I just didn’t really think of them as people with lives outside of their link with the word ‘terrorist.’

In Poems from Guantanamo, each poet has a biography prefacing their poems, illuminating their circumstances. These biographies create an obvious bias favoring the prisoners, painting them in a favorable light. Though this can be seen as an exaggeration, trying to convince the reader that the detainees are all innocent, I would like to argue that the extent to which all of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are portrayed as evil is most likely also an exaggeration. There were at one time fourteen year old boys at Guantanamo Bay: it seems unreasonable to me to pin crimes of terrorism on children. Though not all of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were found to be guilty, some of them have been, and this book of poems helps us to realize that even if the authors of the poems are evil, they are still humans.

In Abdullah Thani Farris Al Anazi’s biography, he is quoted: “In the world of international courts, the person is innocent until proven guilty. Why, here, is the person guilty until proven innocent?” I don’t fully understand how these men can be held in prison without being convicted of any crime and the policies that keep this from being wildly illegal. Though I understand that when it comes to matters of national security, the US is very careful, which may be necessary, it is not necessary to remove even basic human rights from people who have not even been proven guilty. As Judith Butler explores in her book Frames of War: when is life grievable?, we are all vulnerable to each other. The detainees at Guantanamo Bay are held in the utmost state of vulnerability. They have no means of defending their vulnerability. It can be argued that the crimes some of these men committed were inhumanly heinous. This can be said to justify the fact that the men at Guantanamo Bay are made so vulnerable that they are hardly even human. However, the fact that I didn’t even think of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay as human before I read these poems shows that these men are criminalized and dehumanized to an extreme. The media doesn’t even allow people to see these people as humans. These men are not even given the opportunity to defend their vulnerability or innocence or to be seen as human, and this, in my opinion, is not right.

Works Cited:

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: when is life grievable? New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Falkoff, Marc. Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. Print.

I lived in Manhattan for about 5 or 6 months last year, and though I’d rather be outside hiking or doing some other outdoor activity most all of the time, something about New York hooked me. For the first 3 weeks I was there I hated it, feeling like I couldn’t breathe or stretch out my arms. But something changed at about 3 weeks, and I fell in love. New York accepts everyone, and I think thats what I love most about it. Because the city is so densely populated, everyone and their differences are out on the streets influencing other people’s lives, and creating this beautiful collective identity and energy that I have not experienced in any other city. Though I haven’t been to most cities, I have never been to another city that is home to so many distinct individuals that are so connected.

New Yorkers have the reputation of being unkind and impatient. Of course this is true of some, but the majority of New Yorkers are friendly. I’ve made connections with unexpected people in unexpected places in New York. These experiences have made me realize that we all have things in common with everyone, and that the world is much more connected than I previously thought. If nothing else, New Yorkers are able to connect over the fact that they are a part of the city. The terrorist attacks on the twin towers on 9/11/01 were a terrible tragedy that negatively effected every resident of New York City as well as people all around the world. However, it seems that this time of need brought not only New Yorkers together, but the United States as a whole. People were were willing to drop everything and help those who were in need and grieving. This is exemplified in Jonathan Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oskar, a little boy who’s father died in the attacks on the twin towers, goes on a quest to find answers about his father and his death. In his journey, he meets people who help him deal with the pain of losing his father who he so loved. This willingness of the people he meets to help Oskar through his pain is an example of this connection that was formed all across the United States, and especially in New York after 9/11.

Oskar discovers first-hand that everything in New York seems to be interconnected and that it is possible for him to be very close to something he wants without even knowing it. An example of this is at the end of the book when Oskar has found the final Mr. Black. Around the same time as the Oskar’s mother was putting up missing posters around New York with Oskar’s father’s face on them, Mr. Black was putting up posters also trying to find Oskar’s father in order to try and discover something about his own dead father (299). Oskar realizes that people are very interconnected, even though we don’t realize it.

It is always a surprise to run into people you know in New York. Once, I got onto the subway and sat down across from someone I went to high school with three or 4 years ago who I didn’t even realize lived in the same city as me. Because it is such a small island that is home to so many people, Manhattan forces an interconnectivity that is difficult to find re-create in any other city. You can be walking down the street a block behind someone you know very well and never know it. There is so much happening at all times in New York that it is easy to miss connections that would be hard to miss in a slower-paced setting. It can also be easy to make seemingly random connections that take you by surprise and can have an influence on your life’s path. Oskar has experiences with this in his interactions with he people he meets in his journey, and it helps him cope with his pain for the loss of his father.

Works Cited:

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin       Harcourt Publishing Company, 2005. Print.

Digging through old things is always interesting. When someone has produced something like a book, an album of music or some other work, it is always fascinating to see what sorts of things are behind it. While exploring the Joy Kogawa Fonds, I happened across a series of letters between Joy Kogawa and someone named Michico, who after a few letters I realized was her sister. The letters discussed the children’s adaptation of Kogawa’s book “Obasan,” entitled “Naomi’s Road.” With the business talk, some personal, family issues were included in the letters as well. Kogawa had sent her sister the draft for the children’s book, leaving all editing and decision making about what to keep and what to discard from the book up to her sister and the editor. It didn’t sound like Kogawa was very invested in the book. This made me question her motives behind writing this book. Why would she even spend the time to made a children’s edition if she didn’t even really care how the final product came out?
I was surprised at how much of a role the editor played in shaping the book, and this made me wonder if the editor had as much of a role in the direction Kogawa’s more famous work Obasan went. It made me realize that these books, albums of music, and other works that I so love are so often polished to the point where they are no longer really a true representation of their creator. This plays into the whole concept of memory that we have been discussing so extensively in our ASTU class for the past semester. Even Obasan is not just one person’s memory; it is a collection of people’s interpretations of these memories and events. Though Obasan gives you many different primary sources in the way of letters and documents that allow you to draw your own conclusions, the book is still in no way raw. It has been processed by editors and peers to Kogawa who all have different opinions about how the story of the book should go. There is not only the bias and perspective of Kogawa in the book, but that of the editor and Kogawa’s sister, and probably that of many others as well. Memories are passed down, going through many sources, like the game telephone. And like in the game of telephone, they often do not come out very accurately on the other side. In saying this, I am not doubting the story that Kogawa tells in her books, but rather am suggesting that as readers, we need to be aware that this phenomenon exists. We need to read responsibly, not immediately accepting all that we read as the truth or as the only truth.

As humans, we belong to many communities, varying in size and our involvement in them. On a very local scale we are part of our family, as well as our communities (i.e. school, social groups), and cities. On a more global scale, we are part of our culture and our countries, as well as a part of an all-encompassing community: humanity. As members of the human race, it is generally part of our nature to empathize with other members of the human race. We support each other physically and mentally in times of need. We care about each other’s well being. We are very good at this on a local scale, but when it comes to being empathetic about issues on a global scale, we sometimes turn a blind eye to avoid discomfort.

It can be argued that in order to stay sane and not be swallowed by all the negativity in the world, one must turn their back on difficult social issues and focus on positivity and normality. In Persepolis, Marji does this frequently. She is fortunate enough to have grown up in a higher social class that allows her to have certain freedoms and privileges, enabling her to remove herself from the violence that is happening in her country. Marji goes to parties (p. 102), goes on vacation (p. 77), and engages in normal rebellious teenager right-of-passage activities such as smoking cigarettes (p. 117). As was discussed in Hillary Chute’s essay “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis”” as well as in class, Satrapi juxtaposes images of Marji partaking in normal childhood/teenage activities with images of violence. This normality of violence leaves little room for Marji to spend much time reflecting on the horrific and unjust events happening around her, as she has to fit in a childhood as well. This visual juxtaposition of the extreme good and bad aspects of Marji’s life represents the actual disparity between these two worlds a child would have to navigate and try and connect.

Chute also discusses how Satrapi’s use of graphics  personalizes her narrative and gives the reader explicit insight into her experience that wouldn’t be possible if the novel was written in only words. As humans, we need personalization to associate and empathize with a situation. When we are just given facts about issues that are effecting large communities of people, we have a hard time feeling anything for them, but when we are made to feel like we know an individual who is effected personally, we are more empathetic to their situation. In Persepolis, Marji doesn’t really take the violence in her country seriously until something extreme happens that effects her directly. This happens twice: once when her Uncle Anoosh is killed (p. 70) and once when her neighbor and friend perishes when her house is bombed (p.142). Marji changes drastically both times; when Anoosh dies she pushes God out of her life and when her neighbor dies she becomes extremely rebellious, to the point that her parents send her our of the country for her own safety. It takes something close to home for her to realize that the violence that is happening around her is not ok and should not be normal.

Another example of this can be drawn from my previous blog post in which I discussed an article on the torture and death of a women’s rights activist in Syria. As westerners, far from the violence in Syria, we know that there are injustices being done to women there, but not until a specific case arises and is focused on, we are able to fully empathize. We need lower-level details of a story or situation to begin to care about higher-level issues. Our privileged lives go on until something stands out to us and makes us uncomfortable enough to pay attention. Usually we have to be able to imagine such a thing happening to us or to someone we love for this discomfort to occur, and this requires personal stories. We like to think we are able to empathize with humanity as a whole, but realistically, the smaller the community, the better our ability to be empathetic.

In my last blog post, I discussed ISIS, the Islamic Extremist group, as an example of a culture that has a negative impact on large groups of people, but a positive one on those who are seeking a group to be a part of.  This week in class, we have been talking about Persepolis and the struggle between Fundamentalists and the “modern” citizens of Iran in the 1980’s. Marjane Satrapi personalizes the violent struggle in Iran by telling the story of the revolution followed by the oppression of the Irani people by Islamic fundamentalists that took over after the government through the eyes of a little girl, Marji. The oppression of women is particularly focused on, as Marji is having to follow the rules set by the fundamentalists for women. The current struggle between ISIS and Syria and the conflict in Persepolis are quite similar in nature. Both are instances of relatively small but powerful groups trying to impose their beliefs on the general public and control the public and private lives of thousands of people.

Just today, an article was published in The New York Times announcing the execution of a woman’s rights activist, Sameera Salih Ali al-Nuaimy, by ISIS. She was tortured and put to death as have been countless other outspoken women as well as women and girls of religious minorities. (Cumming-Bruce, 2014) Though I am obviously biased as a western female, it seems rather strange to me that a group of people would turn against literally half of their own kind and decide that they are sinful and should hide themselves from the other half. It seems they have forgotten that the person who gave birth to every single member of the ISIS was a woman. The whole idea of sexism frankly doesn’t make much sense to me. As it appears it is human nature to discriminate against a minority, I suppose I understand the discrimination part, but women are not the minority. If you are oppressing half of your own kind, you are doing nothing but oppressing humanity as a whole.

When issues such as feminism are made personal through stories and narratives, insight is given toward what its like to be in a position where you are being discriminated against. Satrapi does an incredibly good job of this with Persepolis. The article discussed above achieves this too, as it explains the fate of an individual instead of focusing on middle eastern women as a whole. It is far more effective to tell personal stories to make a point or to promote a cause than to give generalizations or statistics. When people are forced to realize that those who these things happen to are actually individuals and not numbers, it creates a much bigger impact and generates responses that might otherwise not have happened.

Sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/world/middleeast/womens-rights-activist-executed-by-islamic-state-in-iraq.html?action=click&contentCollection=Middle%20East&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article

Thursday, September 18th, 2014

Sophie Campbell

I grew up in a community of middle to upper class liberal white people, like myself. There was some diversity of religion and some of race, but for the most part, everyone was from the same cultural background as me. Part of this culture is striving to be understanding and worldly. I grew up in a metropolis in the southern United States where racism, sexism and homophobia are alive and well. The community of people around me did not believe these things, and I was always taught that these discriminatory, “ignorant” people were bad, and basically not to be associated with. But is this not in itself, discrimination?

We are conditioned by our families, our communities, our societies and our countries to think certain ways. We are pushed to think as a unit. We are handed information by these people who “know” and are expected to swallow it as fact. But what happens when you question these people who “know”?  Is it even possible to know what is right and what is wrong if no one told you as a small child to share your Legos and not to pull the cat’s tail? These values are part of your culture, and your culture is part of your identity.

In the essay “The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning”, Farhat Shahzad writes extensively about how parents, teachers, peers and other influences in an individual’s life formulate their memories and opinions about social issues. What happens, however, when one does not have a network of people to associate with home? Where do these people who don’t have a cultural identity fall? What happens when your “interpretive community”, the “active agents, technologies of memory, and collectivity of significant others” (Shahzad, 302), is ever changing, as you are ever shifting cultures?

Culture can be a beautiful, constructive and supportive thing, but it can also be biased, and instill a set of values in a large group of people that have negative impacts on other large groups of people. A rather extreme example of this is Islamic Extremist groups. I found an interview from NPR, discussing ISIS, an Islamic Extremist group in Syria that many foreigners are joining, including Americans. When asked why people would want to leave their countries and join this violent group, Jessica Stern, one of the interviewees replies, “They may have had an identity crisis. They feel more connected with a group abroad than with their neighbors.” Also discussed in this article is the fact that many people from different countries who join these extremist groups don’t necessarily have any interest in the religion that drives them. Many of the group members who do associate with the Islamic religion “haven’t had much exposure to the traditional or classical teachings.” According to the article, the members of these groups are generally people who have done something bad, and want to prove somehow that they can do something good. In this case, though killing people for religion is not seen as morally correct by most of the world, and certainly not from the western viewpoint, it is by the ISIS community. It seems as though the people who join these communities, though they are based around a core set of values on how to better one’s self and the world, join them to be a part of something. They give up their own personal ideals and beliefs in exchange for membership and inclusion in something greater than themselves.

It is human nature to desire inclusion and importance among other humans. Those who don’t have a network of support are often left feeling anomic. But it is also human nature to rebel from your community and push against the information that has been fed to you. There is a balance to be achieved between being so much involved in a group that you hardly have your own identity, and being a free floater. The participants in the NPR article referred to above might argue that growing without roots can lead an individual to cling to a group and allow their identity to be taken over. As young humans, our moral compasses need direction form outside sources and authorities, and if these needs aren’t fulfilled we are left vulnerable, easily swayed, and craving answers.

I am lucky in that I was raised in a culture that, for the most part, allows me to have my own views. However, if I decided that, for example, I thought homosexuals shouldn’t have the right to vote, my “interpretive community” might begin to reject me little by little. Every society has moral rules and ideals, some of which are more relaxed than others. I personally try and see things from the perspectives of others and understand where their views come from, but at some point, we all draw a line and won’t accept what other believe if they are too unrelated to our own beliefs, as in the example of ISIS. To some degree, we are all discriminatory.

NPR Interview: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/foreign-fighters-join-islamic-state/

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