Commentary by Lance Hill
April 26, 2007
There is a long overdo discussion beginning in New Orleans on how to address race and class issues and bridge the growing racial divide in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. For many months there was little recognition in the mainstream media that displaced African Americans felt locked out of their city or that there was any foundation for these feelings. Feelings of exclusion were dismissed as the product of paranoid conspiracy theories or politicians exploiting groundless fears. But the growing distrust and resentment was evident in the findings of social scientists more than a year ago. A Louisiana Recovery Authority survey of displaced citizens conducted in the first months of 2006 revealed a profound racial division over the future of the city. When asked how important was it that New Orleans “return to its pre-hurricane racial mix,” 88% of black respondents responded “extremely important,” while 67% of white respondents felt that it was “not important at all.” Last October, Tulane Professor Loretta Pyles conducted a survey in one predominantly African American neighborhood that was heavily flood damaged. The study revealed that 84% of the respondents did not trust other races, which is three times the rate of national surveys asking the same question.
More recently, the Louisiana Chapter of the Sierra Club recently honored St. Bernard Parish Council President Henry “Junior” Rodriguez with their “Legislative Leadership" award. This, despite the fact that Rodriguez has a long and un-apologetic history of publicly using racial epithets and took the lead in passing the "blood relative rental law" last October that effectively prevented blacks from renting in St. Bernard Parish. The law made it a crime for white home-owners to rent to anyone other than a “blood relative,” effectively making it impossible for blacks and Latinos to rent in the 96% white parish. That a putatively liberal organization like the Sierra Club can countenance racism by honoring a man with a long history of open bigotry is a sign of a serious problem that begs for a community-wide dialogue; and it’s a case study in how not to build racial unity and counter racism.
The Sierra Club incident is evidence that, in this racially polarized city, the tendency is to avoid an open and frank dialogue on racism in the recovery. But avoiding a dialogue on the injustices of the rescue and recovery periods simply muzzles the victims and creates a false sense of unity based on repressed grievances and a lack of accountability. People who have endured deep ethnic group trauma and injustices are forced to endure their wounds in silence, which prevents individual and group healing. The prevailing local strategy for building racial unity since Katrina has been to dodge the difficult discussion of racial injustices and disparities and, instead, unite blacks and whites to work around a common project that will magically make prejudices disappear. The problem is that not only does this strategy silence the voices of the victims, but it simply does not work.
It was this strategy of avoidance on the part of whites that allowed St. Bernard officials to pass a segregation ordinance last fall without a whimper of protest from relief groups and nonprofits working in the parish. The outcome was the collapse of joint work between St. Bernard Parish groups and adjacent black groups in the Lower Ninth Ward and soaring distrust and resentment. Moreover, the conspiracy of silence over the blood-relative law contributed to the ironic situation in which black and Jewish relief workers continued to volunteer in the parish and were put to rebuilding homes that, unbeknownst to them, they could not legally rent. That led to even more distrust and a sense of betrayal on the part of visiting relief workers. The lesson here is bigots interpret silence as consent.
There are also pitfalls in how we define racism that can lead to avoiding a forthright and useful discussion of the causes of inequality. In recent years the concept of “structural racism” has been presented as a framework for analyzing and solving poverty and inequality. “Structural racism” is a social science concept based on the distinction between conscious and unconscious racism. Conscious racism comprises those hateful ideas and deliberate actions intended to denigrate ethnic groups and produce inequality. Conscious racism is easily recognized because it is overt and what we might call “old fashioned racism.” In contrast, unconscious racism, e.g. “structural racism” is not motivated by hatred or imposed by overtly bigoted human actors, but rather comprises social and economic structures or traditions and policies that have an inadvertent discriminatory effect. It is not so easily identified and ferreted out. Within the “structural racism” framework, racial disparities and poverty are caused by economic and social forces, not hateful humans.
There is no doubt that structural racism exists in New Orleans (for example lack of public transportation to well-paying jobs in the suburbs) but the dominant problem for poor, displaced African Americans is hardly an unconscious form of structural racism: instead, these are conscious exclusionist policies, like the “blood relative” law, enacted by real humans through action or inaction that are intended to prevent poor blacks from returning to New Orleans or its environs. Those policies are motivated by very real and human ideas: the unwillingness to respect the rights of the poor and an indifference to their suffering.
Examples of conscious human agency in perpetuating inequality and exclusion are abundant. Following Katrina, the Immigration and Naturalization service granted hotel owners requests to import hundreds of temporary “guest workers” from Latin America to work in hotels, on the flimsy argument that they could not find New Orleanians in the emergency shelters willing to return to the city for jobs and live rent-free in luxury hotels. Depriving displaced blacks of their jobs was a conscious human act, not the byproduct of some faceless structure. In the first month after the storm, landlords evicted more than 6,000 renters, most of them black, without notice to make way for higher-paying out-of-state recovery workers. Shortly afterwards, white neighborhood groups blocked the placement of 30,000 FEMA trailers in the city as part of the “not in my back yard” movement. The city’s only hospital for the uninsured was shuttered, making it impossible for the majority of displaced African Americans to return since they had no health insurance.
In New Orleans virtually every key issue—education, healthcare, employment—has pitted the white community against displaced blacks. Federal funds for community rebuilding are spread thin and white neighborhoods that were untouched by flood waters are constantly competing for the same funds that might help restore flooded black neighborhoods. This reality makes it difficult for people who say they are opposed to racism to avoid challenging those people, businesses, and institutions that support exclusionist policies that discourage the return of the poor and perpetuate inequality. We need to take care that a focus on “structural racism” does not deflect us from a frank and open discussion of the racial disparities in the recovery that are the result of human actions—and the need for white people to publicly acknowledge these injustices and take a stand against them. Only by correctly identifying the ideas and systems that produce and reproduce inequality can we remedy the problems and anticipate and prevent a replay of these events in the future.
There is no "healing of the racial divide" or “countering racism” that does not involve (1) publicly acknowledging racial and class injustices and disparities and (2) taking concrete actions to remedy the problems. People and institutions must be held responsible and accountable for their actions, or complicit inaction and silence. We need to speak out against actions that exclude, harm, or treat people unfairly, be they deliberate or inadvertent. Multicultural unity is based on trust and trust is based on action–the willingness of coalition partners to acknowledge injustices and take steps to correct them. Trust is not an act of faith; it requires real support and solidarity for victims of injustice.
Finally, we need to redefine racism to encompass the kind of moral indifference that leads to discriminatory outcomes. Indifference to the suffering of others is the new form of racism in America today. White people are indifferent to the suffering of blacks because, to some degree, they regard blacks as less human and deserving of rights. Racism should not be defined exclusively as negative and derogatory ideas about people of color or overt antipathy and a sense of biological or cultural superiority. Racism has changed over the years. When biological racism became discredited by the 1960s, we recognized that the same discriminatory behavior can result from cultural racism (e.g. “we are all the same inside, but they are just raised wrong”).
As Elie Weisel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize Winner once said, “The opposite of love is not hatred but indifference.”
Lance Hill is Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University and Author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Permission is granted to reprint and reproduce this commentary. To subscribe to future commentaries, just google for “Commentaries by Lance Hill.” He can be reached at Lhill@tulane.edu
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