9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and American Culture

1. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and American Culture • Toby Keith, “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” (2001) • lyrics • The Legendary K.O., George Bush Doesn’t Care about Black People • lyrics

2. Hurricane Katrina -- August 29, 2005 -- greatest natural disaster in U.S. history • storm surge breached the city's levees at multiple points • 80 percent of the city submerged • over 1,800 killed • tens of thousands stranded • hundreds of thousands scattered to shelters around the country • Hurricane Rita reflooded much of the area three weeks later Devastation in the Lower Ninth Ward, two months after Katrina, photographed by Andrea Booher, FEMA.

3. Katrina and 9/11 • After 9/11, FEMA placed within Dept. of Homeland Security • shift from natural hazard mitigation to worries about terrorism and WMDs • only two of 15 scenarios that FEMA asked state and local agencies to prepare for were natural hazards

4. Problems with Katrina Response • Insufficient pre-disaster planning and preventive measures • State and local officials delayed evacuation order • Federal response to Katrina was slow • Poor coordination between federal, state, and local officials and agencies • Delayed response to flooding of New Orleans

5. A crowd of Hurricane Katrina survivors await entry to the Superdome http://www.hurricanekatrina.com/hurricane-katrina-pictures.html

6. Social Problems, Policy Failures • Widespread poverty • Lack of resources for community development • Katrina disproportionately affected low-income, minority residents in places like the lower 9th Ward • Poorest residents tended to live in low-lying parts of city • Limited access to vehicles (27% of New Orleans households lacked pivately owned transportation) • Many of poorest residents dependent on welfare, Social Security (checks come at beginning of month) • Mistrust of government officials • Lack of education and information in general and specifically on emergency preparedness

7. Katrina in Historical Perspective • In 2005, Katrina revealed how far country had come from optimism and idealism of the 1960s • In 1988, resurgent problems of racism and poverty led Ronald Reagan to declare the poverty had won the War on Poverty “Katrina created poignant images and left a liquid arc of almost unparalleled destruction, but it has not effectively nationalized the issue of inequality or significantly altered the civic debate over social and economic rights and privileges.” • Kent B. Germany, “The Politics of Poverty and History: Racial Inequality and the Long Prelude to Katrina,” Journal of American History 94:3 (Dec. 07), 743-751. Four Hurricane Katrina survivors carry a man who collapsed http://www.hurricanekatrina.com/hurricane-katrina-pictures-7.html

8. http://www.hurricanekatrina.com/hurricane-katrina-pictures-6.htmlhttp://www.hurricanekatrina.com/hurricane-katrina-pictures-6.html

9. Katrina redistributed over one million people from the central Gulf coast elsewhere across the United States -- largest diaspora in U.S. history A line of school buses prepare to evacuate Hurricane Katrina survivors http://www.hurricanekatrina.com/hurricane-katrina-pictures-10.html

10. New Orleans • One of the poorest metropolitan areas in the United States in 2005 • Eighth-lowest median income ($30,771) • Orleans Parish had 24.5 percent poverty rate, the sixth-highest among U.S. counties • August 28 mandatory evacuation made no provisions to evacuate homeless, low-income, or carless individuals or households • Also no plans for evacuation of elderly and infirm • Those stranded were overwhelmingly poor, elderly, or sick.

11. Three months later the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers still was checking for human remains while it sifted through debris. Photograph by Marvin Nauman, FEMA.

12. Kanye West: I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, 'They're looting.' You see a white family, it says, 'They're looking for food.' And, you know, it's been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I've tried to turn away from the teacher-the TV because it's too hard to watch. I've even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I'm calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help — with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way — and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us! • “A Concert for Hurricane Relief,” NBC live broadcast, September 2005

13. 'Looters carry bags of groceries through floodwaters after taking the merchandise away from a wind damaged convenience store in New Orleans on Monday, Aug. 29, 2005.' A similar Agence France-Presse (A.F.P.) photograph of two caucasians was labeled, 'Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store in New Orleans . . .'

14. In New Orleans and in other places, many of our fellow citizens have felt excluded from the promise of our country. The answer is not only temporary relief, but schools that teach every child, and job skills that bring upward mobility, and more opportunities to own a home and start a business. As we recover from a disaster, let us also work for the day when all Americans are protected by justice, equal in hope, and rich in opportunity. • President George W. Bush, 2006 State of the Union Address

15. A New Orleans neighborhood the day after Katrina, photographed by Jocelyn Augustino, FEMA.

16. Lower Ninth Ward • Increasingly impoverished and ignored by politicians and the police since the 1950s • high rates of crime • infrastructural decay • Also characterized by: • neighborhood loyalty • sense of community among the residents • municipal activism. • In the 1960s, residents' activism led to school desegregation. • Residents are now working with other communities to push for restoration of the Lower Ninth Ward in the wake of Katrina. • The ward's residents dismiss claims about the area’s geographic vulnerability to flooding with the fact that the more affluent, predominantly white neighborhood of Lakeview is equally vulnerable to flooding but had been almost completely rebuilt by the close of 2006. Broken water pipes near Deslonde Street in Lower Ninth Ward. New Orleans, Louisiana, January 22, 2006 www.asergeev.com/.../2006/490/browser.htm

17. George Lipsitz • What is a social warrant? • A social warrant is a widely shared and generally understood definition of what is permitted and forbidden in society. It is rarely written down but draws its power from the diffuse authority of collective ideas and actions. It functions as a de facto Bill of Rights, articulating foundational principles about obligations and entitlements and about exclusion and inclusion. Social warrants author and authorize new ways of knowing and new ways of being. They are products of political mobilization… Every social warrant had to displace the social warrant that it hopes to surpass and supersede; struggles over social warrants reveal history as dialogic, as collective, continuing, and cumulative. (454-455). • What does Lipsitz mean by “the social warrant of hostile privatism and competitive consumer citizenship”?

18. Katrina as a social catastrophe • In the social catastrophe of Katrina, we can see the limitations designed into our federal system. Several values are expressed most strongly in this system, including values for economic growth, the protection of private property rights (including a right to develop private lands as owners see fit), and local control over land development. Such values do little to motivate the measurement and reduction of harms to the weakest members of society. Karen M. O'Neill, “Broken Levees, Broken Lives, and a Broken Nation after Hurricane Katrina,” Southern Cultures 14:2 (Summer 2008), 89-108

19. Why is it important to study the politics of place? • How does the study of local cultures help us to understand the impact of Katrina? • How did Hurricane Katrina affect the nation? • What role did the national news media (and other forms of electronic media) play in the shaping our understanding of Katrina?

20. What kind of a place is New Orleans? • New Orleans is home to thousands of Latinos and Asians. It is not only one of the most southern ports of the United States, but it also serves as the northernmost port of the Caribbean. The city is a place that has been in continuous contact for centuries with ships, sailors, passengers, and cargo from Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and Mexico, Pre-Lenten carnival celebrations in New Orleans display influences from Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti, and West Africa. Rara rhythms from Haiti and habanera beats from Cuba permeate the sounds made by many different kinds of musicians in the Crescent City. 459 • New Orleans is the home of incomparable artists and unparalleled artistry. 459 • Yet the pleasures of New Orleans come from a crucible of undeniable pain. 460

21. Lipsitz on Indian masking • Often misunderstood and even condemned as a frivolous escape from serious political and economic problems, Indian masking by New Orleans blacks serves important functions. Especially in the post-civil rights and post-industrial era, when disinvestment, economic restructuring, and the cooptation of black elected officials by white elites has neutralized the ability of working-class blacks in New Orleans to secure meaningful resources through the political system, the enduring utility of alternative academies like Mardis Gras Indian masking merits close attention. 462 www.skipbolenstudio.com/SkipBolenPhotoGallery/

22. For working-class African-American participants, Indian tribes serve as: • Repositories of collective memory • Sites of radical solidarity • Sources of moral and political instruction • Mutual aid societies • On the day when members of the city’s social elite flamboyantly display their European heritage, the Mardis Gras Indians emphasize the new world realities of conquest and genocide. 463

23. Race, Class, and the Politics of Place in New Orleans • Systematic segregation and discrimination prevent black people from freely acquiring assets that appreciate in value, from moving to desirable neighborhoods with better services and amenities, and from reaping the rewards of home ownership built into the tax code. • New Orleans’ working-class black population “increase the use value of their neighborhoods by turning ‘segregation into congregation,’ fashioning ferocious attachments to place as a means of producing useful mechanisms of solidarity.”463 • Displaced residents of the seventh, ninth, and 13th wards stand to lose much more from Hurricane Katrina than the owners of mansions, luxury apartments, office buildings, and hotels, because although they were resource poor, they were network rich. The reconstitution of those networks and the spaces and social relations that nurtured and sustained them should be the first priority of any rebuilding effort. 464

24. Henry Jenkins: Mapping America • The continuing importance of region in modern American culture: “...that part of the world” • New spatial and social relations of virtual-digital America

25. Changing meanings of the local • Average American moves once every five years • “ We are all increasingly victims of dislocation…” 482 • What happens when we see Katrina … not simply as the destruction of a vital local tradition but as the beginning of a new phase of borrowings and reimaginings? In what ways are people elsewhere linking their own identities and experiences to Katrina? 480

26. The Legendary K.O., George Bush Doesn’t Care about Black People • lyrics • How distributed? • Free downloads as “the black man’s CNN” –Chuck D.

27. Other Katrina protest songs • Jay-Z, “Minority Report,” Kingdom Come • lyrics • criticizes slow response to Katrina • Also criticizes media's coverage • Public Enemy, “Hell No We Ain’t Alright” • lyrics