>Subject: FW: "Exiles from a City and from a Nation"
>Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:05:52 -0400
>
>By Cornel West
>The Observer UK
>Sunday 11 September 2005
>
> It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we
>saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus
>on race and poverty. It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.
>
> What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most
>naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor,
>where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'. Well,
>they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it
>was Darwinism in action
>- the survival of the fittest. People said: 'It looks like something
>out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World long before
>the hurricane.
>
> It's not just Katrina, it's povertina. People were quick to call
>them refugees because they looked as if they were from another country.
>They are. Exiles in America. Their humanity had been rendered invisible
>so they were never given high priority when the well-to-do got out and
>the helicopters came for the few. Almost everyone stuck on rooftops, in
>the shelters, and dying by the side of the road was poor black
>
> In the end George Bush has to take responsibility. When [the
>rapper] Kanye West said the President does not care about black people,
>he was right, although the effects of his policies are different from
>what goes on in his soul. You have to distinguish between a racist
>intent and the racist consequences of his policies. Bush is still a
>'frat boy', making jokes and trying to please everyone while the
>Neanderthals behind him push him more to the right.
>
> Poverty has increased for the last four or five years. A million
>more Americans became poor last year, even as the super-wealthy became
>much richer. So where is the trickle-down, the equality of opportunity?
>Healthcare and education and the social safety net being ripped away -
>and that flawed structure was nowhere more evident than in a place such
>as New Orleans, 68 per cent black. The average adult income in some
>parishes of the city is under $8,000 (£4,350) a year. The average
>national income is $33,000, though for African-Americans it is about
>$24,000. It has one of the
>highest city murder rates in the US. From slave ships to the Superdome was
>not that big a journey.
>
> New Orleans has always been a city that lived on the edge. The
>white blues man himself, Tennessee Williams, had it down in A Streetcar
>Named Desire - with Elysian Fields and cemeteries and the quest for
>paradise. When you live so close to death, behind the levees, you live
>more intensely, sexually, gastronomically, psychologically. Louis
>Armstrong came out of that
>unbelievable cultural breakthrough unprecedented in the history of American
>civilisation. The rural blues, the urban jazz. It is the tragi-comic
>lyricism that gives you the courage to get through the darkest storm.
>
> Charlie Parker would have killed somebody if he had not blown his
>horn.
>The history of black people in America is one of unbelievable resilience in
>the face of crushing white supremacist powers.
>
> This kind of dignity in your struggle cuts both ways, though,
>because
>it
>does not mobilise a collective uprising against the elites. That was the
>Black Panther movement. You probably need both There would have been no
>Panthers without jazz. If I had been of Martin Luther King's generation I
>would never have gone to Harvard or Princeton
>
> They shot brother Martin dead like a dog in 1968 when the
>mobilisation of the black poor was just getting started At least one of
>his surviving legacies was the quadrupling in the size of the black
>middle class. But Oprah [Winfrey] the billionaire and the black judges
>and chief executives and movie stars do not mean equality, or even
>equality of opportunity yet. Black faces in high places does not mean
>racism is over. Condoleezza Rice has sold her soul.
>
> Now the black bourgeoisie have an even heavier obligation to fight
>for the 33 per cent of black children living in poverty - and to
>alleviate the spiritual crisis of hopelessness among young black men.
>
> Bush talks about God, but he has forgotten the point of prophetic
>Christianity is compassion and justice for those who have least.
>Hip-hop has the anger that comes out of post-industrial, free-market
>America, but it lacks the progressiveness that produces organisations
>that will threaten the
>status quo. There has not been a giant since King, someone prepared to die
>and create an insurgency where many are prepared to die to upset the
>corporate elite. The Democrats are spineless.
>
> There is the danger of nihilism and in the Superdome around the
>fourth day, there it was - husbands held at gunpoint while their wives
>were raped, someone stomped to death, people throwing themselves off
>the mezzanine floor, dozens of bodies.
>
> It was a war of all against all - 'you're on your own' - in the
>centre of the American empire. But now that the aid is pouring in,
>vital as it is, do not confuse charity with justice. I'm not asking for
>a revolution, I am asking for reform. A Marshall Plan for the South
>could be the first step.
>
> --------
>
> Dr Cornel West is professor of African American studies and
>religion
>at
>Princeton University. His great grandfather was a slave. He is a rap artist
>and appeared as Counselor West in Matrix Reloaded

Posted vy Miriam V.and Matrix Revolutions.