New Orleans
Unmasks Apartheid, American Style
By Jason Miller
12 September, 2005
Countercurrents.org
What
is the recipe for a toxic sludge potent enough to destroy a heavily
populated city and inflict infection with a mere splash? Start with
a force of nature powerful beyond belief. Mix in an ample supply of
sewage, garbage, brackish water from Lake Ponchatrain, floating corpses
of humans and animals, and various and sundry noxious chemicals. Blend
well with a system of seriously inadequate levees resulting from cuts
in federal funding. Of course this concoction would not be complete
without heaping portions of racism, spiritual emptiness, and avarice
fueling slow and inadequate federal relief efforts.
Heart of darkness
revealed
The New Orleans
debacle exposed America's "heart of darkness" to the world
as its leaders allowed their own tens of thousands of Americans to suffer
or die. Many throughout the world were aware of the damage the US government
was capable of inflicting upon people of other nations, but Hurricane
Katrina showed what Americas decision-makers were willing to do
to their own. The twin evils of raw capitalism and imperialism were
on full display as the human race watched the events unfold on the Gulf
Coast. As Mother Nature unleashed her ferocity, Americans witnessed
the destruction of a jewel of a city and the pleasant fiction of the
American Dream in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
With the eyes of
the world upon its sole remaining superpower, President Bush, who fancies
himself to be a monarch, remained on vacation, strummed his guitar,
and led a federal response to the disaster which moved with the speed
of a wounded snail. Several days into the aftermath, the "Queen
Mum" surveyed the conditions under which the survivors were living
and remarked how things were "working very well" for the "underprivileged".
As the lies unraveled and the truth was revealed, the people learned
that the Bush administration had significantly reduced funding for fortification
of the levees protecting New Orleans. They realized that FEMA, whose
purpose is to provide federal aid in the event of natural disasters,
had been absorbed by Homeland Security and the military industrial complex.
As humankind watched the nauseating events in New Orleans unfold, they
realized that George Bush cared so little about the welfare of his people
that he would appoint a grossly incompetent crony to head the federal
organization upon which people counted to save them in the event of
a disaster. American citizens have been in denial about the cruelty
of their governments foreign policy for years, but now that their
leaders have imposed that truculence upon fellow Americans, it will
be difficult to evade the painful reality of the depth of the corruption
and malevolence of the United States government.
Who do they think
they are fooling?
Even the typically
compliant mainstream media made strong note of the skin color and socio-economic
status of most of the hurricane survivors, whom the federal government
left to fend for themselves for several days. Stranded on roof-tops,
taking refuge on islands formed by broken slabs of highway, hiding in
attics, or clinging to survival inside the miserable, dangerous squalor
of the Super Dome, tens of thousands of poor black Americans
exposed a truth they have known for years. To the soulless plutocrats,
aristocrats, white patriarchs, and "captains of industry"
who rule the United States, black people are expendable, particularly
if they are poor. The power-brokers in the US federal government only
provided assistance for two reasons. One was to prevent civil unrest
amongst the Proletariat. Secondly, they needed to provide window dressing
in their desperate attempt to maintain their facade as champions of
"freedom and democracy" so they could continue to justify
their ongoing quest for global domination.
It staggers the
imagination to think that The Big Easy (the home to Mardi Gras and the
birthplace of jazz) has essentially been reduced to memories. The perverse
emphasis on property, power, and wealth over humanity by a government
of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy caused
the demise of New Orleans. Under this twisted paradigm, the city was
doomed when the hurricane struck. 68% of the population was black. Less
than half owned their homes. Almost 30% lived below the poverty line.
An estimated 134,000 residents did not have cars or other viable means
to evacuate. The demographics virtually ensured that the Bush administration
would render aid slowly and ineffectively, resulting in suffering and
death on a scale usually associated with third world nations.
Hurricane Katrina's
devastation and the US government's anemic response revealed the malevolent
and wicked face which lurks beneath the mask of freedom and liberty.
Touting Americas systems of capitalism and democracy as models
for the rest of the world, the leaders of the United States have carried
out an agenda of imperialism since our nations inception. Sorry,
Mr. Rove (and your staff of cunning Orwellian propagandists), but a
true republic would not maintain a perpetual system of apartheid (which
in Afrikaans means "separateness"). Certainly many laws have
been passed to enhance the civil rights of blacks in the United States,
but racism, bigotry, and separatism are still very much alive, both
overtly and covertly. New Orleans provides a grim reminder that "Apartheid,
American Style" is thriving in this nation.
In an address to
Howard University in June 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stated:
"You cannot
take a man who has been in chains for 300 years, remove the chains,
take him to the starting line and tell him to run the race, and think
that you are being fair."
Three months later,
he signed an Executive Order requiring affirmative action by federal
government contractors. Johnson understood that the journey toward equality
for blacks in the United States had been a long and tortuous one, and
even two hundred years after the Civil War, their struggle was far from
over.
Americas wealthy,
predominately white power-brokers dominate the US government by utilizing
their money to win elections, buying elected officials through campaign
finance, applying expensive lobbying efforts to sway votes and decisions,
and exerting influence through powerful corporations. When will they
take responsibility for the plight of black citizens in the United States
and rectify the gross injustices of US Apartheid?
Shameful history
exposes the true nature of the beast
In 1619, the first
slaves arrived at the British colony of Jamestown, thus starting the
future United States of America down a path of moral repugnance and
turpitude. By 1850, there were 2.5 million enslaved Africans in the
United States. The agrarian economy in many southern states was so dependent
upon slavery that they were willing to secede from the Union and to
initiate the Civil War to ensure the perpetuation of an evil institution
which had enabled them to build a thriving economy with the blood, sweat
and tears human beings. White slave owners, a small minority of the
population in whose hands rested most of the Confederacys wealth,
were able to convince poor, ignorant Southern whites that preserving
slavery was critical for them as well. So compelling was the slave-owners
argument that poor white Southerners died by the tens of thousands defending
the "great institution" of slavery.
In 1865, the Union
triumphed and the Thirteenth Amendment made chattel slavery unconstitutional.
Despite these events, the lot of black Americans, particularly in the
South, improved little. "Mr. Jim Crow" saw to their continued
suffering. In 1830, a white minstrel show performer named Thomas "Daddy"
Rice blackened his face and danced an absurd jig to the song "Jump
Jim Crow" as he mimicked a crippled, elderly black man singing
and dancing. Jim Crow became a popular character in American culture
and grew to represent "black inferiority". Faced with the
Constitutional mandate to abolish slavery, vanquished states in the
post-bellum South began to pass laws to ensure government-mandated suppression
of the civil rights of black Americans. Jim Crow laws became common
in most southern states starting in 1890.
Ironically, the
US Supreme Court opened the door for Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1883
it ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional. The
gist of the ruling was that the Fourteenth Amendment did not prevent
individuals or private businesses from discriminating against black
people. In 1896 the highest court of the Bastion of Freedom
upheld a lower court ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson, which affirmed Louisiana's
law mandating that blacks ride in separate railroad cars. The ultimate
arbiters in the "Land of the Free" made a ruling in Cummings
vs. Richmond County Board of Education in 1899 which enabled local governments
to maintain "whites only" schools and close schools for blacks
based on claims of financial hardship.
Throughout the Jim
Crow era, blacks faced many hardships. They were denied access to public
areas and accommodations, like hotels and restaurants. Public restrooms
and water fountains were designated for "Whites Only" and
"Coloreds". White and black workers were separated. Schools
were segregated. Gerrymandering, voter intimidation, fraud, manipulation
by white landlords, literacy tests and poll taxes prevented many blacks
from exercising their right to vote. Crop lien laws, which allowed creditors
to charge outrageous interest, and the system of sharecropping reduced
black farmers to little more than indentured servants as their debt
perpetually exceeded their income. Debts were enforced by local police,
creating a system of debt peonage. Stiff penalties for minor crimes
often committed by itinerant blacks (i.e. five year prison sentences
for stealing a pig) stocked the penal system in the South with slave
labor. Prison farms and chain gangs became the order of the day, with
black convicts returned to enslavement under unimaginable living conditions.
Vigilante groups
like the Ku Klux Klan did their part to suppress the black race and
guarantee they suffered. Nearly 5,000 blacks were lynched between 1890
and 1968. Virtually all of these atrocities occurred in former Confederate
states. Many more than just the perpetrators were complicit in these
murders. Railroads sold tickets for the express purpose of attending
these executions committed by mobs. Many of the killings involved brutal
torture prior to actual death. White families brought their children
to watch lynchings. After the murders, participants and onlookers bought
and sold body parts of the victims as "souvenirs".
Progress toward
equality at last
Slowly and steadily
through the course of the Twentieth Century, black Americans made progress
toward equality and civil rights. In a significant blow to the "separate
but equal" doctrine, in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs.
the Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was
unconstitutional. Tireless, courageous efforts by people such as Rosa
Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medger Evers applied
tremendous pressure on the federal government to protect the civil rights
of black Americans. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed Jim Crow laws,
prohibited employment discrimination, and enhanced the voting rights
of blacks. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 went further in protecting
the rights of blacks to vote by abolishing literacy tests. To this day,
the right to vote remains state-granted, but the Voting Rights Act and
three Constitutional amendments prevent states from discriminating in
granting the right. The push for a Constitutional amendment granting
the right to vote to all Americans continues.
Renaissance of
inhumanity
Sadly, despite these
strides, black Americans still lag far behind their white counter-parts.
Under the brutal "trickle down" economic policies which started
in the Reagan era, the rich have enjoyed a succession of generous tax
cuts and businesses are operating in an increasingly deregulated environment.
Black Americans have simultaneously experienced a serious decline in
their situation. Chanting the mantra that less government is better,
US policy-makers have diligently worked to diminish domestic spending
and decrease taxes on the wealthy (progressive taxes). Despite the subterfuge,
their true objective has been to line the pockets of the wealthy by
diverting federal money previously spent toward humanitarian ends (like
education and health) to military and defense, which benefits the many
affluent who have heavy stakes invested in the military industrial complex.
The end result has been an increase in regressive taxes to make up for
revenue lost on tax cuts for the rich, obscene federal deficits, and
a serious decline in funds available for education, health care, assistance
to the poor, and emergency preparedness.
Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. once said:
There is nothing
new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and
the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we
have the will.
Since Reagan, the
US government has consistently employed policies demonstrating a lack
of will to eliminate poverty. Who has born the brunt of the obsession
with greed and power which has been such a detriment of humanity?
For a concrete example,
look no further than the disaster in New Orleans (bear in mind that
68% of the population was black), the 360 deaths verified as of 9/10,
the government's emphasis on containing looters over rescuing victims,
and the countless people who have been rendered homeless and jobless.
Appropriate funding to strengthen the levees and a quick and appropriate
federal response to the hurricane could have alleviated much of this
suffering.
For statistical
evidence, consider the 2004 US Census figures. While the overall poverty
rate in the United States stood at 12.7%, the poverty rate for blacks
was 24.7% compared with 10.8% for whites. Only 11.3% of white Americans
did not have health insurance while 19.7% of blacks lacked coverage.
At $30,134, the black median household income came in at the bottom
of the ladder compared to other race groups.
As of August 2005,
white unemployment came in at 4.2% while blacks were jobless at a rate
of 9.6%. Black infants are more than 2.5 times as likely to die before
age one as white infants. In 2001, the average net worth of a white
household was $468,200.00, while blacks rang in at a mere $75,700.00.
The disparities are indeed staggering.
Separate and
unequal
A "separate
and unequal" educational system continues to exist in the US. How
can this be, you ask, after the federal government ordered school desegregation?
"White flight" to the suburbs and inequitable distribution
of education dollars are the principal reasons. Using their higher economic
means, many whites have fled deteriorating urban cores for the haven
of the suburbs. A 2004 report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project found
that in the Midwest, 46% of black children attend schools in urban areas
which are 90 to 100% black. Of these children, 88% are from poor families.
The HCRP report found that nationwide, Americas schools spend
an average of $1500.00 less per black student than they do on white
students. Poor black students attending under-funded schools face decrepit
buildings, archaic classroom materials, under-qualified teachers, over-crowding,
and simplistic curriculum which emphasizes rote memory over the development
of critical thinking skills. The end result statistically? While 91.8%
of white students graduate from high school, blacks graduate at a rate
of 83.7%. Of those black males who do drop out of high school, over
half do prison time. Perhaps even more damning is the fact that only
17% of blacks have college degrees versus 30% of whites.
Challenge us
and see what happens to you
The Civil Rights
Movement represented a serious threat to the dominance of the wealthy,
white patriarchy dominating the federal government. Naturally, they
responded by imprisoning those challenging their stranglehold on power.
In doing so, they employed the typical guile of the US government. In
1971, the US prison population was 200,000. Today it is 2.1 million.
Half of the US prison population is black. While having only 5% of the
world's overall population, the United States now harbors 25% of the
incarcerated population of the world. 13% of prisoners worldwide are
black Americans. 30% of black American men experience incarceration
during their lifetime. The most rapid growth in prison populations began
during the Reagan era, with blacks leading the way. Federal sentencing
laws passed in the 1980's virtually guaranteed that black Americans
would swell the ranks of the incarcerated. These laws enacted federal
sentencing guidelines for the distribution of crack cocaine (used predominately
in poor black neighborhoods) 100 times more harsh than those for distributing
white cocaine powder (often the "drug of choice" for more
affluent whites). Contrary to the hysteria often created by the mainstream
media (i.e. the over-blown reports of rampant looting, raping and shooting
in New Orleans), a majority of the nation's prison population is serving
time for non-violent crimes.
Legacies were
meant to be continued, werent they?
Building upon the
Reagan legacy, Bush II has continued to chip away at the federal disbursements
to the poor, elderly and disabled, shrinking a safety net which the
worlds wealthiest nation has a moral obligation to provide for
its less fortunate citizens. While bankrupting the United States to
fund a grossly bloated military budget (the US accounts for 50% of world
military spending to "protect" 5% of the world's population),
Bush continues to chop domestic spending (i.e. funds to strengthen the
levees in New Orleans). If you doubt that Bush's axe-swinging is disproportionately
affecting the black population, consider that the poverty rate for blacks
is 25% while the black population of New Orleans used to be 68%.
One way the merciless
decision-makers in the United States justify their push to significantly
diminish the social welfare system, including Medicaid, AFDC, and Social
Security, in favor of private charity is to utilize the mainstream media,
their instrument of propaganda, to re-enforce common myths about welfare.
Contrary to the lies, poor women on AFDC (federal financial aid to single
mothers) generally do not bear more children to garner more benefits.
The average family receiving AFDC has 2 children. Many media pundits
claim that the US has spent $5 trillion on welfare since the 1960's
and it has "not worked". To put this into perspective, consider
that spending on AFDC from 1964 to 1994 was $500 billion, less than
5% of defense spending during the same period. Most of the $5 trillion
of which the media puppets speak went to the disabled, the elderly,
and the uninsured (via Medicaid). Another common misconception perpetuated
by the mainstream media is that of the "black welfare queen".
The truth is that a majority of those receiving benefits from federal
entitlement programs are white, and many are elderly or are children.
Velvet
revolution unfolding
If perverse individuals
like George Bush, who is devoid of empathy and compassion, continue
to impose their sick will upon America by diminishing domestic spending
and increasing defense spending to seek global dominance, black Americans
will continue to suffer. They will see significant declines in federal
programs which aid them in their quest to reach a level playing field.
The quality of their education will further deteriorate. Aid available
to the 25% of black Americans living in poverty will continue to vanish.
More will find themselves in prisons. Many black mothers will find themselves
grieving for the loss of sons lured by slick recruiters (and a dearth
of opportunities) to fight in America's latest imperial conquest. Urban
cores will further decay, encouraging more "white flight".
Despite the promises of Reagan and his successors, the money is not
"trickling down" to black America. How many more travesties
have to occur, and how many more cities must America lose before spiritually
evolved Americans demand an end to "Apartheid, American Style"?
The illegal occupation
in Iraq and the American Apartheid revealed by events in New Orleans
provide ample evidence that it is time that We the People
oust the scoundrels who are leading our nation. It is incumbent
upon the poor and the working class, the true majority in the United
States, to exercise our social consciences and wrest the power from
the unworthy hands of the wealthy minority who now hold that power.
They have proven their moral bankruptcy and ineptitude as leaders. A
non-violent, velvet revolution is evolving and gaining momentum.
If you have not done so already, I hope you join.
Jason Miller
is a 38 year old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. He works
in the transportation industry, and is a husband and a father to three
boys. His affiliations include Amnesty International, the ACLU and the
Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He welcomes responses
at [email protected]
or comments on his blog at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.