The New Confederacy: "You might have to live like a refugee."
Last Saturday, 3 September, doghousereilly linked to an article on BoingBoing which pointed out that an Army Times story published on 2 September referred to some of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans as "insurgents" because they committed violence against the troops sent to aid and relocate them. Xeni Jardin, the technology correspondent for NPR's Day to Day who posted this entry on BoingBoing (a blog which she co-edits), offers an explanation of why even people committing unambiguously criminal activity in the devastated city should not be called "insurgents."
I missed something else about this piece when I first read it, in my mingled horror and disbelief that the Army Times seemed to be perfectly willing to borrow the premise of Escape From New York when describing the situation in NOLA: her last two paragraphs.
"We are talking about fellow American citizens here -- in America. [italics in original]
"Not insurgents. Not refugees. Not enemies. Americans."
The thing that I missed was her disavowal of the word "refugee" to describe people who have fled the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
This was brought home to me when I listened to the second hour of NPR's afternoon/early evening news programme, All Things Considered, on Wednesday, 7 September. Roughly between 5:35 and 5:43, ATC aired a segment by anchor Michele Norris, who was in Baton Rouge interviewing some of the refugees; one of the refugees, Sharon White, expressed "some strong views," in Ms. Norris's phrase, about the word "refugee." Herewith Ms. White's remarks:
SHARON WHITE: And I am not a refugee; I wasn't shipped here. I don't care if we were brought from that, that, that River Center or that Superdome, or wherever we're being shipped. We are not refugees, you hold your head up, we are United States citizens, and you be proud of that. A lot of us are tax-payin', honest, hard-workin' people. I'm like, 'When did I come from another country?' That's what they used to call people that was in the boats, and that was sneakin' over here. I am a survivor. They need to say 'the survivors of Katrina.'"
Michele Norris concludes her report by saying, "And Sharon White says there is no shame in that."
**EDITED ON Tuesday, 25 October 2005 / 0137 EDT**: because I omitted a "we" in my transcript of Sharon White's remarks.
Now then. I can't imagine living through a storm the likes of Katrina, or its after-effects which were so devastating to New Orleans. The area in which I live was affected by the 2003 Blackout; due to the fact that my wife had just left hospital after having major abdominal surgery less than a week before the blackout happened, and due to my fears of her developing an infection due to the lack of water and the wilting heat, we were forced to take refuge with her brother for nearly a day and a night. Growing up, the septic tank at my family's house backed up twice, forcing us to resort to using a single camp potty and, eventually, fleeing to a motel for a couple of days until the septic tank could be pumped out and the house cleaned up. (If I concentrate for a minute or so, I can still smell the sludge that seeped into our house from the toilet on the main level, and I become almost as nauseated as the actual stuff made me.) Take these two events, add in a Category 4 hurricane, the loss of most or all of my possessions and/or pets and/or relatives, liberally sprinkle with assorted carcasses and corpses and industrial chemical spills and, oh, between 12 and 20 feet of water, add hundreds of thousands of people and multiply the time factor involved by a year or two, and you've got what Katrina did to a large swath of the U.S.'s Gulf Coast. I am by no means confident that I could bear up under that; I may like watching George Romero or John Carpenter movies, but I sure as hell don't want to live them, you know what I'm saying?
I have some idea, imperfect as it may be, as to the stress, anguish, despair, and raw, seething, even irrational fury that anyone enduring this must feel. And Ms. White is certainly no politico, no broadcaster, no polished member of the punditocracy. But I was offended by her describing refugees as being people "that was sneakin' over here."
What, pray tell, would she tell the Vietnamese, Laotians, or Cambodians who fled their war-ravaged (or Khmer Rouge-ravaged) homes; suck it up and stick it out? What would she tell the Liberians or Sierra Leonians who fled the murderous hell of their countries? That they should fight back? What would she have told the comparative handful of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany and were allowed into the U.S.? Go home?
While the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "refugee" as "one that flees; especially : a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution," and Wikipedia dodges the political bullet by having its article on "refugee" devoted to "the group of people as defined by international law," directing its readers to their entry for "displaced person" regarding the use of "refugee" "for any person who has been forced to leave their home," I think the fact that Merriam-Webster offers as its first definition "one that flees" is evidence enough that, in the States, at least, "refugee" is used "casually" (as Wikipedia puts it), and without rancor, to indicate anybody who runs away from a disagreeable situation.
Thus, my family and I were refugees, for not quite a day (and night), from the Blackout of 2003. We took refuge with one of my wife's relatives.
Frustrating, sure; somewhat humiliating -- to me, at least -- you betcha. An imposition upon my brother-in-law's hospitality, mais oui. But I didn't bristle at the word "refugee," because I didn't dispute that that was exactly what we were.
Nor did I scorn any refugees who fled situations far, far more dire than ours, even if they came to the United States; last I checked, any way, the current administration had yet to get around to effacing Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" from the Statue of Liberty's base, even if the spirit which inspired the poem seems to have largely vanished from our mainstream political culture.
I note that the public editor of the Chicago Tribune, Don Wycliff, wrote in a column published on Thursday, 8 September that he was nonplussed at the National Association of Black Journalists' directive against using the word "refugee" to describe survivors of Hurricane Katrina, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson's declaring, "during a visit to the Houston Astrodome, 'It is racist to call American citizens refugees.'" Wycliff offers some useful commentary:
"Precisely how he arrived at that conclusion Jackson didn't say. But if the implication is that Americans cannot be sent fleeing from fires, floods, famine and other disasters, natural or manmade, or from political oppression, then it is plainly untrue.
"Happily, it doesn't happen often nowadays, but check your history books under 'Dust Bowl' and 'Great Migration.' The Dust Bowl phenomenon during the 1930s sent hundreds of thousands of refugees -- mainly whites -- to the American West from the economically wrung-out plains of Oklahoma, north Texas, Kansas and adjacent states. The Great Migration of blacks from south to north that began during World War I also was a refugee phenomenon--people seeking refuge from social, political and economic oppression.
"It is particularly surprising to hear Jackson making the argument against 'refugees' in terms of American exceptionalism, because part of what has made him such an effective participant in this country's political debates of the last few decades has been his ability to puncture notions of American exceptionalism. He flummoxes opponents by demonstrating that Americans are subject to the same temptations and moral failings as others, no matter how hard we try to paper them over with euphemisms and alternative language."
On the other hand, in a short piece in the Chicago Tribune published the same day, reporter Lolly Bowean offers this bit of "she said/she said" from the local punditocracy:
"The word is offensive because it implies that U.S. citizens made homeless by the storm are not recognized by their home country, said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.
"'The reason the language is so inaccurate and racist is for the victims of this tragedy, it suggests they are asking something from a government that is not their own,' she said.
"The definition of 'refugee' is someone who has fled his home, seeking help from another government, so it's appropriate in this case, said Marissa Graciosa, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
"She said the word typically isn't considered an insult.
"'The spirit of the word reflects on all of us,' she said. 'It tells us that we are obligated to take care of these people.'"
James Dao, in today's New York Times ("No Fixed Address"), revisits the furore over the word, echoing the points made by Don Wycliff in the Chicago Tribune, as well as raising another concerning how the federal government dealt with a couple of prior disasters:
"But Hurricane Katrina delivered America its own refugee crisis, arguably the worst since Sherman's army burned its way across the South. And though the word 'refugee' is offensive to some, and not accurate according to international law, it conveys a fundamental truth: these are people who will be unable to return home for months, possibly years. Many almost certainly will make new homes in new places.
"It is not the first time the United States has faced a mass internal migration: think of the 'Okies' who fled the drought-ravaged Dust Bowl for fertile California in the 1930's, or Southern blacks who took the Delta blues to Chicago in the first half of the last century.
"But the wreckage wrought by Katrina across the Gulf Coast is probably unprecedented in American history. No storm has matched the depth and breadth of its devastation. And the two disasters that demolished major cities -- the Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 -- occurred when the federal government lacked the resources and agencies to help the displaced. They offer few clues about how to aid and comfort Katrina's victims."
And the Sunday Herald (UK) from 4 September 2005 offers this excerpt from a New Orleans blog on the subject:
"'I’ve heard the word refugee since I was a very young boy but it never had any real meaning to me. Now, it certainly does. I don’t like phrases like ‘displaced’ because it lacks the bite that the situation has. I’m not displaced; I’m a refugee because that word just fits better.
“'So many people lost so much more than me that I actually have waves of guilt and sadness that sweep over me every few hours.
“'I would imagine, like me, most refugees that got out and are all right don’t really have the means to help. The only thing we can do is try not to be a burden to the relief effort and remain self-sufficient as much as possible for as long as possible.
“'There’s something terribly sad when the best thing you can do is stay out of the way while all that’s going on just happens.
“'I hope I never forget this feeling. I won’t always be a refugee, but I’ll always understand what the word means.'
"Jack Ware, www.neworleans.metblogs.com"
There's no escaping the fact that many, many thousands of people in the Gulf Coast region are refugees: not only from the effects (and after-effects) of Katrina, but from the ineptitude, incompetence, and political skullduggery of their local, state, and federal governments. And while local and state authorities are not blameless, it was not in their power to diminish the status of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to append it to a larger Department of Homeland Security and sideline its primary mission of assisting and facilitating disaster recovery and amelioration; nor was it in their power to ship half of the Louisiana National Guard (and the LA Guard's equipment) to Iraq to support the "tighter, leaner" regular military that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was so hell-bent on creating, a military that was and is singularly unprepared for this administration's pursuit of historical greatness through military adventurism. That was the bailiwick of the United States federal government, currently helmed by a so-called "C.E.O. president" whose career was notable for its lack of success in the world of business; consequently, much of the opprobrium over the collapse of disaster preparedness should be largely hurled at the collective heads of "Dubya" and his administration.
When the history of Hurricane Katrina is written (and the first hour of NPR's All Things Considered on Friday, 9 September, had a nearly half-hour long report by Laura Sullivan and Daniel Zwerdling outlining the timeline of the response to Hurricane Katrina that plays like a Stanley Kubrick movie: a clinical study of how plans, vaguely-formed ideas, conflicting motives, and an "x" factor or two can collide into a fractal map of clusterfuckery), it will be able to give yet another shade of meaning to the title of perhaps the definitive novel about New Orleans: nothing sums up the missteps, ill-advised budget cuts, department reorganizations and spin doctoring of the federal government better than "A Confederacy of Dunces."
I missed something else about this piece when I first read it, in my mingled horror and disbelief that the Army Times seemed to be perfectly willing to borrow the premise of Escape From New York when describing the situation in NOLA: her last two paragraphs.
"We are talking about fellow American citizens here -- in America. [italics in original]
"Not insurgents. Not refugees. Not enemies. Americans."
The thing that I missed was her disavowal of the word "refugee" to describe people who have fled the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
This was brought home to me when I listened to the second hour of NPR's afternoon/early evening news programme, All Things Considered, on Wednesday, 7 September. Roughly between 5:35 and 5:43, ATC aired a segment by anchor Michele Norris, who was in Baton Rouge interviewing some of the refugees; one of the refugees, Sharon White, expressed "some strong views," in Ms. Norris's phrase, about the word "refugee." Herewith Ms. White's remarks:
SHARON WHITE: And I am not a refugee; I wasn't shipped here. I don't care if we were brought from that, that, that River Center or that Superdome, or wherever we're being shipped. We are not refugees, you hold your head up, we are United States citizens, and you be proud of that. A lot of us are tax-payin', honest, hard-workin' people. I'm like, 'When did I come from another country?' That's what they used to call people that was in the boats, and that was sneakin' over here. I am a survivor. They need to say 'the survivors of Katrina.'"
Michele Norris concludes her report by saying, "And Sharon White says there is no shame in that."
**EDITED ON Tuesday, 25 October 2005 / 0137 EDT**: because I omitted a "we" in my transcript of Sharon White's remarks.
Now then. I can't imagine living through a storm the likes of Katrina, or its after-effects which were so devastating to New Orleans. The area in which I live was affected by the 2003 Blackout; due to the fact that my wife had just left hospital after having major abdominal surgery less than a week before the blackout happened, and due to my fears of her developing an infection due to the lack of water and the wilting heat, we were forced to take refuge with her brother for nearly a day and a night. Growing up, the septic tank at my family's house backed up twice, forcing us to resort to using a single camp potty and, eventually, fleeing to a motel for a couple of days until the septic tank could be pumped out and the house cleaned up. (If I concentrate for a minute or so, I can still smell the sludge that seeped into our house from the toilet on the main level, and I become almost as nauseated as the actual stuff made me.) Take these two events, add in a Category 4 hurricane, the loss of most or all of my possessions and/or pets and/or relatives, liberally sprinkle with assorted carcasses and corpses and industrial chemical spills and, oh, between 12 and 20 feet of water, add hundreds of thousands of people and multiply the time factor involved by a year or two, and you've got what Katrina did to a large swath of the U.S.'s Gulf Coast. I am by no means confident that I could bear up under that; I may like watching George Romero or John Carpenter movies, but I sure as hell don't want to live them, you know what I'm saying?
I have some idea, imperfect as it may be, as to the stress, anguish, despair, and raw, seething, even irrational fury that anyone enduring this must feel. And Ms. White is certainly no politico, no broadcaster, no polished member of the punditocracy. But I was offended by her describing refugees as being people "that was sneakin' over here."
What, pray tell, would she tell the Vietnamese, Laotians, or Cambodians who fled their war-ravaged (or Khmer Rouge-ravaged) homes; suck it up and stick it out? What would she tell the Liberians or Sierra Leonians who fled the murderous hell of their countries? That they should fight back? What would she have told the comparative handful of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany and were allowed into the U.S.? Go home?
While the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "refugee" as "one that flees; especially : a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution," and Wikipedia dodges the political bullet by having its article on "refugee" devoted to "the group of people as defined by international law," directing its readers to their entry for "displaced person" regarding the use of "refugee" "for any person who has been forced to leave their home," I think the fact that Merriam-Webster offers as its first definition "one that flees" is evidence enough that, in the States, at least, "refugee" is used "casually" (as Wikipedia puts it), and without rancor, to indicate anybody who runs away from a disagreeable situation.
Thus, my family and I were refugees, for not quite a day (and night), from the Blackout of 2003. We took refuge with one of my wife's relatives.
Frustrating, sure; somewhat humiliating -- to me, at least -- you betcha. An imposition upon my brother-in-law's hospitality, mais oui. But I didn't bristle at the word "refugee," because I didn't dispute that that was exactly what we were.
Nor did I scorn any refugees who fled situations far, far more dire than ours, even if they came to the United States; last I checked, any way, the current administration had yet to get around to effacing Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" from the Statue of Liberty's base, even if the spirit which inspired the poem seems to have largely vanished from our mainstream political culture.
I note that the public editor of the Chicago Tribune, Don Wycliff, wrote in a column published on Thursday, 8 September that he was nonplussed at the National Association of Black Journalists' directive against using the word "refugee" to describe survivors of Hurricane Katrina, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson's declaring, "during a visit to the Houston Astrodome, 'It is racist to call American citizens refugees.'" Wycliff offers some useful commentary:
"Precisely how he arrived at that conclusion Jackson didn't say. But if the implication is that Americans cannot be sent fleeing from fires, floods, famine and other disasters, natural or manmade, or from political oppression, then it is plainly untrue.
"Happily, it doesn't happen often nowadays, but check your history books under 'Dust Bowl' and 'Great Migration.' The Dust Bowl phenomenon during the 1930s sent hundreds of thousands of refugees -- mainly whites -- to the American West from the economically wrung-out plains of Oklahoma, north Texas, Kansas and adjacent states. The Great Migration of blacks from south to north that began during World War I also was a refugee phenomenon--people seeking refuge from social, political and economic oppression.
"It is particularly surprising to hear Jackson making the argument against 'refugees' in terms of American exceptionalism, because part of what has made him such an effective participant in this country's political debates of the last few decades has been his ability to puncture notions of American exceptionalism. He flummoxes opponents by demonstrating that Americans are subject to the same temptations and moral failings as others, no matter how hard we try to paper them over with euphemisms and alternative language."
On the other hand, in a short piece in the Chicago Tribune published the same day, reporter Lolly Bowean offers this bit of "she said/she said" from the local punditocracy:
"The word is offensive because it implies that U.S. citizens made homeless by the storm are not recognized by their home country, said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.
"'The reason the language is so inaccurate and racist is for the victims of this tragedy, it suggests they are asking something from a government that is not their own,' she said.
"The definition of 'refugee' is someone who has fled his home, seeking help from another government, so it's appropriate in this case, said Marissa Graciosa, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
"She said the word typically isn't considered an insult.
"'The spirit of the word reflects on all of us,' she said. 'It tells us that we are obligated to take care of these people.'"
James Dao, in today's New York Times ("No Fixed Address"), revisits the furore over the word, echoing the points made by Don Wycliff in the Chicago Tribune, as well as raising another concerning how the federal government dealt with a couple of prior disasters:
"But Hurricane Katrina delivered America its own refugee crisis, arguably the worst since Sherman's army burned its way across the South. And though the word 'refugee' is offensive to some, and not accurate according to international law, it conveys a fundamental truth: these are people who will be unable to return home for months, possibly years. Many almost certainly will make new homes in new places.
"It is not the first time the United States has faced a mass internal migration: think of the 'Okies' who fled the drought-ravaged Dust Bowl for fertile California in the 1930's, or Southern blacks who took the Delta blues to Chicago in the first half of the last century.
"But the wreckage wrought by Katrina across the Gulf Coast is probably unprecedented in American history. No storm has matched the depth and breadth of its devastation. And the two disasters that demolished major cities -- the Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 -- occurred when the federal government lacked the resources and agencies to help the displaced. They offer few clues about how to aid and comfort Katrina's victims."
And the Sunday Herald (UK) from 4 September 2005 offers this excerpt from a New Orleans blog on the subject:
"'I’ve heard the word refugee since I was a very young boy but it never had any real meaning to me. Now, it certainly does. I don’t like phrases like ‘displaced’ because it lacks the bite that the situation has. I’m not displaced; I’m a refugee because that word just fits better.
“'So many people lost so much more than me that I actually have waves of guilt and sadness that sweep over me every few hours.
“'I would imagine, like me, most refugees that got out and are all right don’t really have the means to help. The only thing we can do is try not to be a burden to the relief effort and remain self-sufficient as much as possible for as long as possible.
“'There’s something terribly sad when the best thing you can do is stay out of the way while all that’s going on just happens.
“'I hope I never forget this feeling. I won’t always be a refugee, but I’ll always understand what the word means.'
"Jack Ware, www.neworleans.metblogs.com"
There's no escaping the fact that many, many thousands of people in the Gulf Coast region are refugees: not only from the effects (and after-effects) of Katrina, but from the ineptitude, incompetence, and political skullduggery of their local, state, and federal governments. And while local and state authorities are not blameless, it was not in their power to diminish the status of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to append it to a larger Department of Homeland Security and sideline its primary mission of assisting and facilitating disaster recovery and amelioration; nor was it in their power to ship half of the Louisiana National Guard (and the LA Guard's equipment) to Iraq to support the "tighter, leaner" regular military that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was so hell-bent on creating, a military that was and is singularly unprepared for this administration's pursuit of historical greatness through military adventurism. That was the bailiwick of the United States federal government, currently helmed by a so-called "C.E.O. president" whose career was notable for its lack of success in the world of business; consequently, much of the opprobrium over the collapse of disaster preparedness should be largely hurled at the collective heads of "Dubya" and his administration.
When the history of Hurricane Katrina is written (and the first hour of NPR's All Things Considered on Friday, 9 September, had a nearly half-hour long report by Laura Sullivan and Daniel Zwerdling outlining the timeline of the response to Hurricane Katrina that plays like a Stanley Kubrick movie: a clinical study of how plans, vaguely-formed ideas, conflicting motives, and an "x" factor or two can collide into a fractal map of clusterfuckery), it will be able to give yet another shade of meaning to the title of perhaps the definitive novel about New Orleans: nothing sums up the missteps, ill-advised budget cuts, department reorganizations and spin doctoring of the federal government better than "A Confederacy of Dunces."