(no subject)
Ethnic Studies faculty and grad students are filling up my mailbox, angry about coverage of the fire, taking apart the "natural" in natural disaster, there are so many congratulatory comparisons to Hurricane Katrina, zero coverage of reservations burning (and the lack of help they are getting opposed to middle and upper class white neighborhoods). So I am going to share some of what I am getting with you all.
The coverage has been bothering me for days, especially as the
comparisons to Katrina started almost immediately. Yesterday, there
were self-congratulatory news anchors talking about how there were
clowns walking around Qualcomm entertaining the kids and how that
"proves" that San Diego has performed so much better than New
Orleans...no matter that folks in San Diego can still access stores,
which are almost all open and not under fifteen feet of water, they
have cars, they have credit cards, the infrastructure of the city has
not been demolished, etc. Somehow the narrative is rather about how
much better these evacuees in this community are from those in that
one, especially at the important task of taking care of community
members in a crisis--no matter that the other community members
affected, the less privileges ones, the indigenous, the renters, the
migrants, the non English speakers, get marginalized and/or erased in
the already-entrenched "firestorm" narrative. The tragedy is clearly
defined: the loss of "beautiful" homes; it is a tragedy of the American
Dream itself, housed in the suburbs, explicitly white and well-off. In
Katrina, on the other hand, the tragedy was the loss of national
dignity, and the blame was places squarely on the shoulders of the
victims; had they evacuated like they were told (like we San Diegans
did, in fact), followed orders, refrained from criminal(ized) looting
activities, not revealed themselves to be so poor and racialized within
the borders of the leading democratic world power, etc., the US
government would have saved face. The comparisons to Katrina in the
coverage of the fires contain an almost desperate relief at the
evidence that "we" are not like "them", particularly dwelling on the
artifices of care that reveal "us" to be human (Qualcomm is no
Superdome, just look to the clowns for proof), orderly, civilized.
So these are the things floating around my head, I'm particularly
concerned about racializations organized around "care" and what it
means about us/them. Not to mention the alarming toxicity floating
around our air as all the excesses of modern life, quite literally, go
up in smoke--not only from resource-heavy suburban communities, but
also from the fires at San Diego's numerous militarized locales, as
well as a Superfund site located smack dab in the middle of the Witch
Fire burn zone (!). Whose bodies, communities, and environments will
bear the greatest burden of this toxic air? I'm willing to bet it will
be those who can't afford air conditioning and don't work in
well-maintained office buildings.
I think there's a lot of room for discourse, action, and teaching
points...
Thank you Yolanda, Jose, and Denise for getting the ball rolling.
Traci
The coverage has been bothering me for days, especially as the
comparisons to Katrina started almost immediately. Yesterday, there
were self-congratulatory news anchors talking about how there were
clowns walking around Qualcomm entertaining the kids and how that
"proves" that San Diego has performed so much better than New
Orleans...no matter that folks in San Diego can still access stores,
which are almost all open and not under fifteen feet of water, they
have cars, they have credit cards, the infrastructure of the city has
not been demolished, etc. Somehow the narrative is rather about how
much better these evacuees in this community are from those in that
one, especially at the important task of taking care of community
members in a crisis--no matter that the other community members
affected, the less privileges ones, the indigenous, the renters, the
migrants, the non English speakers, get marginalized and/or erased in
the already-entrenched "firestorm" narrative. The tragedy is clearly
defined: the loss of "beautiful" homes; it is a tragedy of the American
Dream itself, housed in the suburbs, explicitly white and well-off. In
Katrina, on the other hand, the tragedy was the loss of national
dignity, and the blame was places squarely on the shoulders of the
victims; had they evacuated like they were told (like we San Diegans
did, in fact), followed orders, refrained from criminal(ized) looting
activities, not revealed themselves to be so poor and racialized within
the borders of the leading democratic world power, etc., the US
government would have saved face. The comparisons to Katrina in the
coverage of the fires contain an almost desperate relief at the
evidence that "we" are not like "them", particularly dwelling on the
artifices of care that reveal "us" to be human (Qualcomm is no
Superdome, just look to the clowns for proof), orderly, civilized.
So these are the things floating around my head, I'm particularly
concerned about racializations organized around "care" and what it
means about us/them. Not to mention the alarming toxicity floating
around our air as all the excesses of modern life, quite literally, go
up in smoke--not only from resource-heavy suburban communities, but
also from the fires at San Diego's numerous militarized locales, as
well as a Superfund site located smack dab in the middle of the Witch
Fire burn zone (!). Whose bodies, communities, and environments will
bear the greatest burden of this toxic air? I'm willing to bet it will
be those who can't afford air conditioning and don't work in
well-maintained office buildings.
I think there's a lot of room for discourse, action, and teaching
points...
Thank you Yolanda, Jose, and Denise for getting the ball rolling.
Traci