The white man, in dress shoes and a tie, held a shirt or something over his head, and for one shocked, delusional second, the television viewer could imagine him floating gently to the ground. Then gravity's wind ripped the cloth from his hands, and he plummeted to the bottom of the World Trade Center. Still disbelieving, on some level, that the September morning's events were real, I let out a nervous laugh that still echoes in guilty moments.
The next scene, in memory if not on the screen, was of a black woman in professional clothes sobbing, “They's jumping.” Contrasting her reaction, on the site, with mine, safe at home, and in the sheer magnitude of the day, it seemed that racial strife must thereafter be a moot abstraction in America. As much as slavery and racism have marred the story of the United States, there must come a time when its citizens look up from the smoke of a shared travail and realize that the story has moved on. And for many, no doubt, September 11 was that travail.
Four years later, however, another catastrophe has revealed that race is too simple and useful a symbol for others to allow the remaining joists and studs of racial division to be torn down and removed from the landscape. Jack Shafer, writing on Slate, was among the first to insist that race be made explicit: “broadcasters covering the New Orleans end of the disaster demurred from mentioning two topics that must have occurred to every sentient viewer, race and class.” Presumably sentience would also require acknowledgement that most of the people seriously harmed by, say, a blizzard in Vermont would be white and poor.
The reason it should be obligatory for broadcasters to mention something that every viewer can plainly see requires some explanation. For Shafer, it is their responsibility to hammer home the opinion that “we aren't one united race, we aren't one united class.” It might be adequate reportage to investigate why so many people remained stranded in the wake of the storm and flood; it raises all sorts of questions that liberal arts graduates are peculiarly qualified to ask (if not answer) when the investigation concerns so many black people.
It would be more edifying, though, to examine the traits that the quality of being black is supposed to involve. What does it mean to say, as CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer did, that the people wading through the streets of New Orleans were “so black”? What unique qualifications for hurricane relief does Barbara Walters believe Colin Powell to possess by virtue of his race? How, exactly, did “skin color… a significant role in who survived and who did not,” according to Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean?
Louisiana State University geography and anthropology professor Craig Colten explained, on National Public Radio, that New Orleans was once one of America's most integrated cities, but “as the 20th century progressed, segregation has become much more pronounced,” with “low-income people in general,” many of them black, moving toward low-lying areas and wealthier people transferring a large segment of the city's tax base to the suburbs. With the local administration being, according to Colten, “largely African American,” interviewer Renee Montagne could not do otherwise than wonder, “So is this at its heart a question of class?”
Therein lies the small comfort in the media's handling of hurricane Katrina: More so than has seemed to be the case in the past, racial observations were studiously coupled with socioeconomic observations. Rapper Kanye West may have won the award for most successful self-promoting controversy with his on-camera, during-a-charity-telethon, assertion that “George Bush doesn't care about black people,” but progress can be seen in the fact that he had so little real competition. Too many people, one hopes, have managed to move on to Montagne's question for controversialists to avoid giving the impression of ignorance.
The lingering tragedy is that a group as influential as the media class hasn't learned — or doesn't care — that we will become “one united race” when we choose to see ourselves as such. That day will come when even the sentient do not notice the race of disasters' victims any more than that woman in New York noticed for whom she was crying.
Justin Katz writes for the blogs Dust in the Light and Anchor Rising.
