Arranging Lawn Chairs on Deck

Our Opinion/Disasters don’t discriminate

By Cindy Gomez-Schempp
Editor

You may have heard that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to relive it, but you may not understand its true meaning. The quote wasn’t just about learning from our mistakes; it’s also about planning to learn.

Although frequently attributed to Winston Churchill, the quote is from Harvard philosopher George Santayana’s book “The Life of Reason.” Santayana better explains the course we must plan to take in order to evolve from savages to mature thinking beings.

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – From ‘The Life of Reason’ (1905-1906) by George Santayana

Remembering what makes us human, or better yet “humane,” may be the only way for us to retain our humanity. This is especially important when considering the astonishing amounts of disasters unfolding world-wide. Washington had an earthquake, then a hurricane. Now New York has, too.

How we take care of each other shows a lot about the character of our humanity, especially the most vulnerable in society. One of the most embarrassing moments for the U.S. recently was is Hurricane Katrina. A vast majority of black and poor people were left to die. Many did die, and their dead bodies floated in streets which were flooded with dead dog bodies, trash, and human waste.

The ACLU analyzed and reported on the horrific and shameful treatment of people of color during Katrina and found that some of the most shocking testimonies came from prisoners at the Orleans Parish Prison. Guards and prison staff abandoned their posts and left prisoners without food or water for days, chest high in water bubbling with trash, raw sewage, and dead bodies. Some who tried to swim out were shot in the back while fleeing to safety. And it’s not just because Kanye said it, but because people everywhere saw it and thought it: the treatment received by black and brown people during Hurricane Katrina was racist, inhumane, and disgusting. See ACLU report at: http://tiny.cc/KatrinaGate

So, what did we learn? If you were gauging by Mayor Bloomberg’s response, not a damned thing. Over the weekend, as the Mighty Mayor Mike flew around New York spouting off about all the brilliant planning, extensive resources, and superb responsibility city authorities utilized to protect the public, he forgot about the feeble effort he made for tens of thousands of New Yorkers: prisoners housed on Rikers Island. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had the audacity to act annoyed by a reporter’s question on whether Riker’s Island would be evacuated. While no one in NY gave a rats a$$ about the 12,000 or so people left on Rikers, the NYSE was stockpiling food, fuel, and back-up generators so they could remain fully operational. The Hampton’s were probably given top priority as well.

Rikers actually has a maximum capacity of 17,000, and since pretty much every prison in America is overcrowded, it’s reasonable to assume that as many as 17,000 to 20,000 people were left to face a death sentence. Fortunately for them, the hurricane devastation was not as bad as expected. Unfortunately for prisoners and people of color, no one in the media cares about you anymore than they did before the hurricane.

You might not have seen this story in the mainstream media, because very few media outlets had the cojones to report on it or check on the condition for prisoners during or after the ordeal. Instead, the plight of the prisoners played out on Twitter where heavy hitters in the music, human rights, and the political world heaped outrage on Bloomberg and the prison system. Now human rights advocates are demanding a future evacuation plan for the Rikers prisoners, asking city leaders how they plan to mend their ways in the future, and doing their best impressions of outrage for what “might have been.” But they’re all missing the boat on this one.

There was a powerful lesson for people of color everywhere taught—during both Katrina and now Irene. People of color can die; no one cares. When the world goes into survival mode, we’re not on the evacuation plan or part of the rescue mission.

Remember when the Titanic was sinking and the immigrants and poor in third class on the bottom decks were locked in and left to drown? People of color are like the people on the bottom decks of the Titanic. In Katrina, the Mayor let people drown rather than use school buses readily available to evacuate them. During the Titanic, half-full boats were sent out to sea while most of the people in steerage drown. Almost all those who were saved were rich white women and their rich white children.

This country has been telling people of color that we are expendable. If we don’t graduate, if we don’t go to college, if we can’t find jobs or housing, if the justice system is disproportionately unfair to us, if we become marginalized or disenfranchised, if our rights are taken away—that’s just fine.

People of color are being told loudly and often that many of them will be branded as criminals.  Once branded by law enforcement as a felon, or even landing in a jail or prison for any reason, makes your life expendable, especially if you are brown or black.

America is the most imprisoned country in the world, housing 25% of all the world’s prisoners, with 7,225,800 people (one out of every 32 adults) in jail, on probation, or on parole at year end 2009. Jails and prisons are disproportionately populated by poor black, Mexican, and Native Americans. Before too long, the numbers of us who will be expendable will out-number the rest! It’s not a far-fetched notion for people of color to be written off through incarceration either.

It’s a topic that has been studied extensively and racialized by professor and author Michelle Alexander, former director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU. In her bestselling book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Alexander explains what happened a generation ago. Jim Crow allowed legal discrimination and disenfranchisement of blacks; today it’s mass incarceration. Nearly half of all black men in America are under control of corrections, either in prison, jail, parole, or probation. Today, mass incarceration is the new legal way to ignore the civil rights of a black or brown person or even to kill them.

So the real lesson is this: people of color realize they are the chaff, the trash. Whatever happens when a ginormous sector of the populace begins to realize that they are slated first for the slaughter when the $HiT hits the fan, is about to happen to this country. There are no do-overs or extra lives either, at least not for people of color., and the next natural disaster is just around the corner. Tropical storm Katia is brewing off the coast as we speak.

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