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Racial Bias on Hurricane Katrina

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit in the United States of America (USA). The area of New Orleans was significantly impacted, where more than 1,700 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of others displaced. The medias presentation of this group showed the underlying tone of racial and class issues. Many organizations, groups, and people have put the blame on the federal government for responding in a racist manner.

Background
Even before the hurricane struck in 2005, there were evidences of racism and classism in Louisiana. Many years of neglect, effects of global warming and racism worsened the destructiveness of the hurricane in the coastal cities of Mississippi. Even before the hurricane landed, there were no mechanisms put in place to evacuate residents to safer grounds. Most of this people were African Americans from poor neighborhoods. The government failed to provide the resources for evacuation and most African Americans were forced to seek refuge in a football stadium for lack of transportation or money to flee from the impending catastrophe. The hurricane was an expected catastrophe; therefore, the government and authorities should have been prepared, but due to classicism, these preparations were neglected because the well off, who are mainly American whites could evacuate on their own.

African Americans and the poor generally were severely affected due to the lack of resources to evacuate and the government failed them. In 2004, the government reduced funding for hurricane and flood control for New Orleans despite knowing that the region is prone to storms and hurricanes. The failure to upgrade the levee system to withstand a major storm is another sign of racism and classism.

Hurricane Katrina led to claims that racial bias was part of how the government responded and how the media covered the story. Askia Muhammad, an editor of the ‘Black Journalism Review’, stated that it was not possible to look at the happenings of hurricane Katrina in terms of recovery and disaster through any other angle but the racial one. According to a poll carried out by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in 2005, 71% of African Americans and 32% of White Americans believed that the hurricane showed that racial bias is still a major problem in America.

Governments Response
The U.S. government was accused of racial biasness due to the slow pace at which it reacted to the disaster. The racist nature of the government’s response was evident after major evacuation efforts because those who remained in the city were mainly African Americans. Those who remained faced appalling conditions because they lacked clean water, electricity and the faced the prospect of contamination and disease due to the presence of floating and decomposing bodies in the water. Other survivors claimed that military personnel deployed to aid in evacuation aimed their laser guns at them and hurled racial insults. The conditions of shelters provided to the victims have been equated to concentration camp conditions by some survivors. This shows that the government response was racist because the United States government has significant resources to respond to such disasters effectively.

The government knew that almost sixty-seven percent of New Orleans residents are black and live below the government poverty index and yet failed to provide basic provisions even for those who sheltered at the New Orleans superdome. By failing to come to the rescue of this people, the government showed that it does not care for the black people and the poor. The whites, who are affluent, left the city in their sport utility vehicles, while the poor, elderly, and blacks were left at the mercy of the hurricane in their shacks and old houses. Musician Kanye West even accused President Bush that he does not care about the blacks.

Examples of the Government being Racist
Minister Louis Farrakhan, speaking to Reuters, had the opinion that if the people on the rooftops had been White and not Black, then the rescue efforts would have happened at a much faster and effective pace. There were reports of authorities using excessive force on Black citizens of New Orleans. . B. Herbert of the New York Times reported that Black residents were treated with excessive force, warning shots were fired at them, and they received humiliating treatment as compared to the Whites. M. Brown of the Times-Picayune illustrated the role racism played in the decision to prevent fleeing Black residents from crossing a bridge and finding refuge in a White neighborhood. He further asserted that the act of preventing the Blacks spoke volumes of how they were viewed as criminals who would disturb the quiet White neighborhood. Another example of racial bias as explained by a columnist of the Washington Post was the allegation that levees on White neighborhood were broken to rescue the White residents. This was however not done in areas considered Black neighborhoods. The government fueled the racist angle when, upon receiving racially biased media reports, decided to suspend rescue missions and instead send in security personnel to maintain law and order. Guns were pointed at Black victims instead of boats being availed to help them. The Gretna Sheriff’s Department placed its officers on the Highway 90 Bridge and shot over the heads of onrushing flood victims who were mainly Black.

Media Portrayal
The media outlets played a significant role in perpetuating the notion that the response to the catastrophe was racism and classicist. When the survivors lacked basic supplies, they resorted to breaking stores to get food, but the media termed these acts of survival under reasonable conditions looting and scavenging. CBSNews argues that these terms shows how the upper class in America is indifferent to the suffering of the poor, and especially if they come from a racial minority groups such as the African Americans. The fact that a majority of the main media outlets are owned by white Americans contributed to the accusation that all responses to the hurricane were racist in nature. In the three main newspapers in the United States: the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, the survivors of the hurricane were framed as villains, fiscally irresponsible and lawless. Critics argue that the media further highlighted that the survivors vandalized, were wild and needed strong policing in order to manage their behaviors. Considering that the hurricane affected the poor and African Americans than any other group, using terms such as villains, wild and irresponsible show aspects of racism and classism in the media portrayal.

Examples of Media Racism
A good example of racist reporting was given by the chair of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Julian Bond, who illustrated how two similar photographs of a similar action were given completely different captions by an Associated Press. One photo showed a Black man swimming in high-level water with groceries, described as a person looting a store, while the other showed two White people with similar groceries in high-level waters, described as having found food from a local store. There was hint of racism in the way the media used the word “refugee” to describe Katrina survivors. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton argued that the word was used to describe mostly the Black citizens in order to classify them as citizens of a second class.

=See Also=
 * Hurricane Katrina