By Any Other Name
by pessimist
As if they don't have enough on their empty plates already, the Katrina Evacuees are battling with the media over what designation is to be used about them in the news coverage. 'Refugee' isn't sitting well with those personally afflicted:
Some news outlets defend use of `refugee' while others ban the word
Among a half-dozen evacuees from New Orleans interviewed in Houston Tuesday, there was near-unanimous displeasure with 'refugee'. Typical was Keith Bourne, 22, a student. He said, "It makes me feel like I'm from another country." Benjamin Smith Sr., 62, said, "I'd like to be referred to as 'an evacuee'. But 'refugee'? We're not from some foreign country."
There is some support for this position:
Refugees? Evacuees? Who are the Katrina victims?
These are Americans. They are evacuees ... Please refer to them properly. Thanks.
But as usual, the WASP elites see nothing wrong with such an appellation:
The use of word 'refugee' touches a nerve
Columnist William Safire, who writes the weekly "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine, said he did not see how the term "refugee" had any racial implications. "A refugee can be a person of any race at all," he said. "A refugee is a person who seeks refuge."
The eggheads chime in:
Defining survivors raises racial overtones
"Refugee" most strictly applies to people beyond our borders. The U.N. Refugee Convention defines it as someone who crosses international borders while fleeing from violence or persecution. Dictionaries commonly give a broader definition, much like what's found in Webster's New World Dictionary: "A person who flees from home or country to seek refuge elsewhere, as in time of war or political or religious persecution."
Not all versions of Webster's agree.
Since there is a definition for every contention, what is the real issue?
The reason the term 'refugee' has a stigma attached is not because of what the refugee is - it isn't like the label 'criminal', for example - but because of how the refugee is treated.
Someone who, in other words, is being treated as those who have been displaced by Katrina have been treated. Calling them 'refugees' is accurate: treating them that way - or treating any human being that way - is unconscionable.
And yet, it goes on. Those so designated aren't happy about it - so much so that even King George had to issue an Offishul Procli - Procle - Announssement in order to head off any of the further political troubles evident in the reaction to the usage of 'refugee':
After meeting with evacuees in shelters near Baton Rouge, La., President Bush made it clear: Hurricane survivors are 'not refugees'.
Feel The Love!
When it wants to, Bu$hCo can move both swifty and effectively:
In Houston, where tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims have sought temporary shelter, officials distributed a terse memo Wednesday dealing not with food, lodging or human connections, but with something that in its own way has become just as emotionally loaded: the word 'refugee'.The discussion might seem a mere exercise in semantics in a time of catastrophe, but language observers say it underscores the fact that seemingly benign words can take on powerfully negative connotations, depending on the circumstance. "The term is perceived negatively by many of those housed at the Astrodome, who prefer to be called evacuees," said the memo to reporters, which addressed a heated conversation that has echoed in recent days from emergency shelters through the media to the White House.
Not everyone is impressed with this display of Bu$hCo 'ability':
"I'm not a refugee; I'm an American," said Daphne Carr, 37, who fled New Orleans with her niece, Loasha, 9, and is staying at the Astrodome.
Some of these unimpressed have a national soapbox:
"These are American citizens, plus they are the sons and daughters of slaves," said Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles). "Calling them refugees coming from a foreign country does not apply to their status. This shows disdain for them. I'm almost calling this a hate crime."
It seems this is a common perception in America's black community:
‘REFUGEE,’ AMERICA’S NEW N-WORD?
Why is a term inherently absent of race suddenly so inflammatory?
Bbecause of the race and class issue inextricably tied to Katrina and its subsequent coverage by the media, The New York Times and AP shouldn’t be surprised if Kanye West goes on the BET telethon this weekend and says: “The Associated Press and The New York Times don’t care about black people!” Compounding the frustration were the infamous 'looting' vs. 'finding food' photo captions that appeared to expose an undeniable racial double standard in media coverage of the hurricane.While a number of media outlets – including the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, National Public Radio and the Tulsa (Okla.) Daily World – have decided curtail use of the word from its Hurricane Katrina coverage, the Associated Press says it will continue to use the term, as will the New York Times, whose spokeswoman Catherine Mathis told Journal-isms: “Webster's defines a refugee as a person fleeing 'home or country' in search of refuge, and it certainly does justice to the suffering legions driven from their homes by Katrina."
“They aren’t refugees like from some Third World country, these are Americans!” cried a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, a sentiment that has been echoed by Jesse Jackson, Mark Morial and other black leaders. Yet such a statement suggests that the word itself is somehow dirty and disgraceful.We hear the word most often applied to displaced citizens fleeing war-torn areas in Africa and Third World countries. No one could have imagined that the noun, in its loosest definition according to Mr. Webster, would ever apply to our own citizens, more specifically, the predominantly black and poor population of New Orleans who were told to flee their homes and take refuge inside the Superdome, the Convention Center and other locations.
The N-word – whether our more conservative kinfolk want to admit it or not – changes connotations depending on the race of the person spewing it; the R-word seems to change its connotation depending on the race of the person receiving it.Where the N-word is rooted in racism and has somehow splintered off into a black-on-black term of endearment, 'refugee' only sprouted a racist undertone when used to describe the predominantly black and poor evacuees, as race has never been a part of the word’s definition nor a source of African American outrage when applied to the millions of displaced black and brown people throughout the world.
Bottom line, the word 'refugee' is not inherently racist, and it is the most powerful term in our English language ... to describe the cataclysmic criminal activity perpetrated by our own federal government in its failure to mobilize rescue efforts for six days following the tragedy. Yes, our own black people, thousands of tax-paying American citizens whose homes were destroyed, indeed became refugees in our own back yard, and it is a disgrace.
So what is a beleagured pRedzident to do? Call on the only high-visibility black member remaining in Bu$hCo - Condi - to save his sorry candy ass:
Rice says race had nothing to do with Katrina aid
"I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African-Americans. I just don't believe it for a minute," said Rice, while visiting a hurricane relief center outside of Mobile, Alabama. En route to her home state, Rice personally defended the president. "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race."
Maureen Dowd disagrees, asking Who are we if we can't take care of our own?
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.
As we should be. But that isn't the whole story. Of all people, the New York Daily News may just have their finger on the Southern Pulse that beats within the black (hue, not race) heart of Bu$hCo:
The ugly truth
Why we couldn’t save the people of New Orleans
The world sees New Orleans burning and dying today, but the televised anarchy - the shooting and looting, needless deaths, helpless rage and maddening governmental incompetence - was centuries in the making. Bubbling up from the flood that destroyed New Orleans are images, beamed around the world, of America's original and continuing sin: the shabby, contemptuous treatment this country metes out, decade after decade, to poor people in general and the descendants of African slaves in particular.To the casual viewer, the situation is an incomprehensible mess that raises questions about the intelligence, sanity and moral worth of those trapped in the city. Why didn't those people evacuate before the hurricane? Why don't they just walk out of town now? And why should anyone care about people who are stealing and fighting the police?
In far too many cities, including New Orleans, the marching orders on the front lines of American race relations are to control and contain the very poor in ghettos as cheaply as possible; ignore them completely if possible; and call in the troops if the brutes get out of line.The decision to subject an entire population to poverty, ignorance, injustice and government corruption as a way of life has its ugly moments, as the world is now seeing. New Orleans officials issued an almost cynical evacuation order in a city where they know full well that thousands have no car, no money for airfare or an interstate bus, no credit cards for hotels, and therefore no way to leave town before the deadly storm and flood arrived. The authorities provided no transportation out of the danger zone, apparently figuring the neglected thousands would somehow weather the storm in their uninsured, low-lying shacks and public housing projects.
But the flood confounded the plan, and the world began to see a tide of human misery rising from the water - ragged, sick, desperate and disorderly. Some foraged for food, some took advantage of the chaos to commit crimes. All in all, they acted exactly the way you could predict people would act who have been locked up in a ghetto for generations.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert takes his best shot:
The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world. The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see.The president didn't seem to notice. He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible.
Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration. And when the president is so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep, deep trouble.
Even conservative Bu$hCovite David Brooks couldn't hide his disdain:
The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield.
The world came. The world saw. The world was appalled:
New Orleans crisis shames Americans
At the end of an unforgettable week, one broadcaster on Friday bitterly encapsulated the sense of burning shame and anger that many American citizens are feeling. The only difference between the chaos of New Orleans and a Third World disaster operation, he said, was that a foreign dictator would have responded better.The Bush administration, together with Congress, cut the budgets for flood protection and army engineers, while local politicians failed to generate any enthusiasm for local tax increases. The famous levees that were breached could have been strengthened and raised at what now seems like a trifling cost of a few billion dollars.
I [Matt Wells, BBC News] have been to New Orleans on assignment three times in as many years, and I was smitten by the Big Easy, with its unique charms and temperament. But behind the elegant intoxicants of the French Quarter, it was clearly a city grotesquely divided on several levels. It has twice the national average poverty rate.
Remember that line above about 'the brutes getting out of line'?
It is astonishing to me that so many Americans seem shocked by the existence of such concentrated poverty and social neglect in their own country.In the workout room of the condo where I am currently staying in the affluent LA neighbourhood of Santa Monica, an executive and his personal trainer ignored the anguished television reports blaring above their heads on Friday evening. Either they did not care, or it was somehow too painful to discuss.
Trust me - they didn't care. How do I know? They are accurately described by our author:
The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week.
Sure has! The world isn't taking sick jokesters - such as this Australian wacko and his amazingly sorry suicide joke - as being funny in the slightest. In fact, even the American media - I've seen this personally - is covering suicides among New Orleans police and firefighters and reporting on Bodies Are Strewn 'Like Roadkill'
Meanwhile, too many of the wrong-wing carry on like the first and second Bu$hCo inauguration parties are still going on. It isn't playing well in Peoria - or in Blogistan:
Hurricane Katrina: George Bush And The Party Of "I DON?T CARE!"
The right-wing is claiming to be putting politics aside and to want to help out all Americans. They are begging for the American people not to assess blame and to get with the cause. Are they sincere?Not for a second.
The right-wing is incapable of putting politics aside. Their plea for mercy and unity is right out of their 9-11 playbook, and they are already spinning to blame liberal Mayors, Governors, and townspeople for this disaster.
This is another disaster by this administration, which could have been mitigated.
The reason the right-wing is begging for unity and to not question why this happened is simple --their misguided priorities led to the gravity of this disaster and the amount of death we see. Just like 9-11 this administration is in over its head and it is largely due to their neglect that this tragedy is as bad as it is. Every time they fail because of their misguided priorities, their blind-followers make incessant calls for unity even though these are the very same people whose modus operandi to gain power is to divide this country, (gay and anti-gay, immigrant and anti-immigrant, pro-life and pro-choice, atheist and Christian, even, pro-American and anti-American).
These types of people go on to warn other Americans that to question them would be unpatriotic. Will Americans fall for that guise again?
It remains to be seen.
And yet, the need to expose this sort of unfeeling selfishness and blind bigotry IS getting coverage, and on the corporate-owned Bu$hCo-friendly broadcast media. Uncomfortable questions are being asked:
After meeting with Louisiana officials last week, Rev. Jesse Jackson said: "Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response." He continued: "I'm not saying that myself."Then I'll [CBS News Sunday Morning Contributor Nancy Giles] say it.
If the majority of the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were white people, they would not have gone for days without food and water, forcing many to steal for mere survival.
Their bodies would not have been left to float in putrid water.
They would have been rescued and relocated a hell of a lot faster than this.
Period.
Hard-core conservatives see the damage Bu$hCo has done to itself. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said that Bush's handling of the crisis could, if it is seen to improve, re-energize his plans. Otherwise, "it swamps the rest of his agenda."
The Times of London has this to add:
In the past, American disasters have led to political changes — the Johnstown flood in 1889 and the Galveston hurricane in 1900 led to fury at class privilege and a government that seemed not to care for the poor. The 1927 flood in New Orleans — and the inequalities it exposed — propelled the rise of the populist demagogue Huey Long. There seems to me a strong chance that this calamity could be the beginning of something profound in American politics: a sense that government is broken and that someone needs to fix it.The resonance was not lost on many Americans.
Conservative Bu$hCovite David Brooks is certainly resonating:
We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore.
[Howard Beale: [shouting] You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, [shouting] 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: [screaming at the top of his lungs] "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"]
Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:
You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as important in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years ago.The administration has always tried to treat 9/11 purely as a lesson about good versus evil. But disasters must be coped with, even if they aren't caused by evildoers. Now we have another deadly lesson in why we need an effective government, and why dedicated public servants deserve our respect. Will we listen?
Let's hope. The case for such a change in perception is quite clear, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert points out:
Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize the political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But this is not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep, deep trouble.
I'll give long-time New Orleans resident and popular author Ann Rice the last word to explain just how deep this Bu$hCo trouble is:
Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?
WHAT do people really know about New Orleans? Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?Almost as soon as the cameras began panning over the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free those trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. "Why didn't they leave?" people asked both on and off camera. "Why did they stay there when they knew a storm was coming?" One reporter even asked me, "Why do people live in such a place?"
I share this history for a reason - and to answer questions that have arisen these last few days.
The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled laborers in all fields.
The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city "the Big Easy" because it was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.
New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to this day.
The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy. Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north.
They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries; they didn't want to leave families whose rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city where tolerance had always been able to outweigh prejudice, where patience had always been able to outweigh rage.
I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance.They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.
You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it.
We are Americans.
We are you.
No way to delay that trouble comin' ev'ry day
- Frank Zappa
It's time for all Americans to face up to the trouble that is Bu$hCo - while we still have something left to save.
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