While Rice and the rest of the Bush administration reach for an explanation of how so many of those victimized by Katrina turned out to be Black, the reality is that racism in the U.S. is not a historical hangover from America’s past. Racism is alive and well in today’s America. Racist violence and attitudes may have been more obvious and extreme a generation ago, when local government endorsed it across the South, but institutionalized racial discrimination is as present today as it has ever been. And it is not just the reality in the racist South where the Confederate flag is still romanticized and crackers still contend for state power in the capitols of all the former slave states.

As Malcolm X pointed out when everyone’s focus was on racism in the American South:

They front-paged what I felt about Northern white and Black Freedom Riders going South to “demonstrate.” I called it ridiculous; their own North ghettos, right at home, had enough rats and roaches to kill to keep all of the Freedom Riders busy.... The North’s liberals have been so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.

Moreover, there is an avalanche of statistical evidence that can only lead one to the conclusion that institutional and systematic racism is the culprit for disproportionate Black poverty. Black unemployment is twice that of white unemployment. In some cities unemployment for Black men is three and four times higher than the national average, even though Black men make up only 6 percent of the national population. In 1999, median income for African Americans was $31,778, compared to $51,244 for white families. According to one report, in 1995, average white households had $18,000 in financial wealth, while Black households possessed a total of only $200. In 2001, 30 percent of both Black and Latino children lived in poverty.

Blacks make up 13 percent of the population but make up 50 percent of the nation’s prison population. In Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., more than 50 percent of the Black male population is under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system. Black men are more than 40 percent of those on death row. At the end of 2000, 791,600 Black men were behind bars and 603,032 were enrolled in colleges or universities. By contrast, in 1980—before the prison boom—Black men in college outnumbered Black men behind bars by a ratio of more than three to one.

Among first-time youth offenders, African Americans are six times more likely than whites to be sentenced to prison by juvenile courts. For drug offenses, Black youth are forty-eight times more likely than whites to be sent to prison. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics projects that 30 percent of Black boys who turn twelve this year will spend time in jail in their lifetime, if current incarceration rates stay constant.

Black women—only slightly more than 6 percent of the population—make up 68 percent of all new AIDS cases for women, and 63 percent of all new pediatric AIDS cases are Black children.

There should be little doubt that this is not arbitrary or anecdotal or unique. This is why 80 percent of African Americans stand by Kanye West when he says, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” And in case anyone thinks that these statistical examples are just a case of bad luck, consider what researchers at three leading American universities discovered.

The University of Chicago study found that job applicants with “Black sounding” names–such as LaKeisha or Jamal–were twice as likely not to be called back for an interview as applicants with “white sounding” names. Northwestern University found that even white applicants with prison records were called back more frequently about jobs than African Americans with no prison record at all. Lastly, the University of Pennsylvania’s study on housing discrimination found that, “compared with whites, African-Americans are less likely to get through and speak to a rental agent, less likely to be told of a unit availability, more likely to be charged an application fee and more likely to have credit worthiness mentioned as a potential problem in qualifying for a lease.”

The retreat from racism as an explanation for the uniquely dire circumstances of most African Americans did not begin with the Bush regime. It’s not just Bush that doesn’t care about Black people. The Democratic Party has spent the better part of two decades feverishly trying to distance themselves from the perception of being sympathetic to Black “special interests.”

In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s the Democrats, under the direction of Al Gore and Bill Clinton, completed the Reagan revolution. In large part this meant curtailing the role of the state in its attempts to alleviate or at least mitigate poverty. In other words, they dismantled decades-long social programs like welfare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Clinton and Gore were able to go where Republicans had only dreamed. But this wasn’t just an attack on the programs themselves. It was accompanied by an ideological assault on the notion that government had a responsibility to the poor in the first place. As Clinton was ending welfare—and at the same time helping to launch the prison boom of the 1990s—his explanations for the need to end welfare were cloaked in rhetoric aimed at placing societal failures on the shoulders of people who were victims. In the Orwellian world of the debate on welfare, we were subject to the serial adulterer, philanderer, and small town crony politician Bill Clinton lecturing Black men and women on the merits of “personal responsibility” and “playing by the rules.” As one observer noted in 2000, a few months before the “New Democratic” Clinton-Gore administration left office:

Abandoning any notion of government action to correct racial injustice has been central to New Democrat politics from the start. In fact, the conservative Democrats who launched the [Democratic Leadership Council, the faction that catapulted Clinton and Gore to the top of the Democratic Party] saw it largely as a vehicle to counter Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. At best, the Clinton-Gore administration…promoted a “race-neutral” approach to social policy that simply tried to avoid issues of racial discrimination. At worst, it pandered to racism by scapegoating Black welfare recipients or Latino immigrants. On several occasions, it took actions it knew to be discriminatory.

The attacks on African Americans, however, have not been a Black problem alone. While the media and their political masters have turned scapegoating into an art form, African Americans are not exclusively victimized by the policy changes and budget cuts. Blacks are a minority in the United States, fewer than 13 percent of the population. The vast majority of people affected by the anti-poor policy changes and redistribution of federal spending toward war are white workers. Contrary to the racist myths, most of those on welfare are white. Most poor people in this country are white. Most people without health insurance are white. Most people who are homeless are white.

Indeed, many of the poor in small towns across Mississippi and Louisiana, whose lives have been hit hardest by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, are white. The New York Times ran an article in mid-October about poor white families in Pearlington, Mississippi, who are still living in tent cities.

Racism has been used to divide poor and working-class whites from those who should be their natural allie s—poor and working-class Blacks. Over the last twenty-five years, attacks on wages and living standards have fallen not only on white workers, but all workers, as part of an employers’ offensive that aimed to shift the balance of class forces in favor of the wealthy, at the expense of the entire working class. The 1980s became known as “the looting decade,” during which all workers—Black, Latino, and white—lost ground economically, while the rich grew much richer. As political commentator Kevin Phillips described the 1980s, “no parallel upsurges of riches had been seen since the late nineteenth century, the era of the Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers.” And yet even Phillips asserted that the 1990s produced an even greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands: “By 2000, the United States could be said to have a plutocracy, when back in 1990 the resemblance to the previous plutocracy of the Gilded Age had not yet fully matured.” It is no coincidence that attacks on workers’ living standards during this period coincided with a concerted attack on the gains of the anti-racist struggles of the 1960s.
It really should come as no shock then that a decade that could produce this kind of wealth disparity would also produce some of the most hateful racist invective from a presidential administration.

It was Ronald Reagan who kicked off his presidential campaign in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were murdered, to declare that the South “would rise again” against a sea of waving Confederate flags. It was the Reagan administration that concocted an absolute lie about Black women on welfare driving Cadillacs and wearing mink coats. These women would become known as welfare queens. The only problem with the story is that they did not exist. This was a total fabrication of Reagan and his racist staff.
Reagan and Bush delivered to us the “war on drugs,” only after they allowed the importation and selling of cocaine to fund their dirty little wars in Central America. The cumulative effect of the scapegoating led people away from the politics of the 1960s, which loudly asserted racial injustice as the explanation for Black poverty and lack of opportunity.

But we can’t get away at only looking at what the political parties were doing. After all, politicians and bosses have always relied on scapegoating and racism to push through a repressive agenda. In the 1960s, the three parties in power—the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Dixiecrats—were met with resistance every step of the way. From the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements to the women’s liberation movement there was an alternative to status-quo lies. From 1964 through 1968 there were Black rebellions in most cities across the United States. These violent explosions against racism, poverty, and police brutality forced the government to name oppression and exploitation as the main problems in America’s cities. Lyndon Johnson was forced to wage a war on poverty in response to the Black Power movement.

You cannot really discuss race and class without talking about class within race. Katrina also blew the lid off of the crisis brewing in Black politics as a result of the widening gap between the Black haves and the Black have-nots. Not everyone who was Black in New Orleans was stuck in New Orleans. In fact, New Orleans is a lot like the so-called New South. New Orleans has a Black mayor, a mostly Black city council, a growing Black business class, and a mostly Black police force with a Black police chief.
It was megalomaniac police chief Eddie Compass— who cried on Oprah and got testy with Ted Koppel on Nightline—who began the unsubstantiated rumors of Black men “raping babies” at the Superdome. Moreover, it was the brothers in blue that declared martial law in New Orleans in order to save the city from the dastardly looters.

Today there are more Black elected officials in the affected areas of Hurricane Katrina—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama—than anywhere else in the United States. That is to say, the racism and poverty of the people who could not leave New Orleans, seen on television screens coast to coast, has not affected everyone in the same way. In fact, Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans has recently come under fire for holding closed meetings with mostly white businessmen to plot the rebuilding of New Orleans. Needless to say, none of the hundreds of thousands of displaced evacuees were invited to discuss their vision of the new New Orleans.

This is only one of the examples of the widening class—and political—divide that exists among African Americans. By the mid-1990s, before the full extent of the economic expansion had been realized, one-seventh of Black families made more than $50,000 a year, more than at any other period in U.S. history. The percentage of Blacks occupying managerial and professional positions went from 13 percent in the early 1980s to 22 percent by 1999. The divide, however, is most pronounced in the political field.

For a period of time coming out of the 1960s, when the revolution that many thought would happen didn’t, most in the movement looked to take over the Democratic Party for their own purposes. In many ways these political campaigns, especially across the South, could take on a progressive character by breaking the cracker machines that were the foundation of white supremacy throughout the South since the end of Reconstruction. The political machines in the North—in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York—were the same way. African Americans had been locked out of power either because of not having the right to vote or by virtue of not having the connections with the machines that controlled city halls. Yet once in power, Black political leaders had little power or clout to effectively change the conditions of the African American voters who put them into office in the first place.

Today, the situation is different. In the vast majority of campaigns there is little if any progressive character to them. The number of Black elected officials has increased from fewer than 200 in 1964 to over 8,000 today. There are more than forty-seven Black mayors in cities of 50,000 or more—including Houston, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Not only have the Black elected officials been ineffective in representing the demands of their Black constituents, they have completely adapted to the right-wing shift in key debates over entitlement programs, affirmative action, and other anti-discrimination policies. They often provide the liberal front or gloss for the attacks on the poor and help to shape the debate about poverty around issues of personal responsibility—again removing race and class from the equation.

The newest darling of the liberals, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, took the opportunity of Father’s Day in Chicago to chastise Black men, for acting more like “children and not men.” He went on to implore Black men to take responsibility for their own children. Obama didn’t decry the fifty percent unemployment for Black men on Chicago’s south side. He didn’t decry the infamous criminal behavior of the racial profilers in the Chicago Police Department. Obama and a host of other Black political figures are more than willing to parrot racist stereotypes that look more to pathology than to the concrete facts that point to the persistence of racial discrimination and oppression in American society.

It’s not just the Black elected officials that are the problem either. The experience of Hurricane Katrina has exposed the gaping hole in Black left-wing politics. The NAACP, church networks, and individuals have done excellent work in raising the funds and supplies the government was ineffective at doing. But there is also a desperate need for a left-wing political response to this crisis. There is a need for a political response that goes beyond op-ed pieces and condemnation of the Bush regime. If there was ever a need for a revival of mass-based protest and a political attack on both ruling parties, the time is now. Yet those who are in the greatest position to organize and mobilize that response have been too quiet.

One can only imagine the kind of political excitement that could have been generated if Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan—the three co-sponsors of the Millions More Movement March that took place in mid-October—had called town hall meetings across the South and in key northern cities aimed at getting folks out to Washington, D.C., to demand more federal aid. It should go without saying that the people to make up such a movement exist; the problem is a lack of organization. If those three actually would collaborate and devote their full resources and efforts on this type of action, hundreds of thousands would show up.

Unfortunately, it seems like the perennial Democratic Party candidates Jackson and Sharpton and the conservative Farrakhan are averse to launching any political effort that could potentially get beyond their control.
The key to fighting the poverty that disproportionately impacts African Americans is collective action. One of the prerequisites for a new civil rights movement is political independence from the Democratic Party—and the idea that the only “acceptable” demands have to be cloaked in the language of “personal responsibility.”

Tens of thousands of working class and poor Blacks have been airlifted and dumped in cities all over this country. Many have been evacuated to cities that already have high unemployment rates and whose own welfare systems have been taxed because of state and federal budget cuts. Tensions have flared in cities like Dallas, Texas, where 25,000—almost all Black—evacuees have been relocated. There is currently 10 percent Black unemployment in the city of Dallas. Moreover, the mayor recently said that she will not sign off on thousands of leases on apartments for evacuees because the city could not afford it. She also added that she won’t “saddle” the taxpayers of Dallas with the costs of the leases. This means thousands of displaced people are living in hotels and hoping the limited money does not run out.

Moreover, as local and federal officials tighten the grip on federal aid, they will pit different groups of poor people against each other for what they will call “limited resources.” They will resort to the demonization of evacuees who don’t find permanent housing and jobs, relying again on arguments about personal responsibility. We need a movement that demands resources for all poor and working people regardless of whether or not their lives have been destroyed by natural disasters or by the man-made disasters of unemployment and homelessness. The strength of our new movement will be based on the strength of our politics.

So was race a factor in the government’s response to Katrina? Race and class were both factors. Wealthy and middle-class whites—and Blacks—were able to flee. Poor Blacks—and whites—were left to fend for themselves, and hundreds have died as a result. But racism and poverty created the conditions for Katrina to happen in the first place. Why were wooden shotgun shacks allowed below sea level? Why were buses not commandeered to rescue the 100,000-plus poor, mostly Black people, without cars? Why did the media try to make looting as big a story as the storm that nearly washed New Orleans away? We know why. And it’s about time we get back on the streets and do something about it.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a member of the International Socialist Organization in Chicago. She is the author of “Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs: Racism in America Today” (ISR 32, November–December 2003) and “Racism and the Criminal Injustice System” (ISR 8, Summer 1999).