Barack Obama Xavier Commencement Speech

Katrina. It is an event that seems to have been buried, so we have only a vague memory of what it was and why it had such an impact on us. Do you realize we went through all those debate without anyone mentioning Katrina? Wasilla, Alaska received more press coverage than New Orleans during the election. On election night not one pundit from either party mentioned Katrina. When I typed “Obama Katrina” into the Newsweek web site search engine this is what it spilled out:

Did you mean Osama Katrina?

Yet we forget Katrina was the beginning of the end for George W. Bush and saddled the Republican nominee with an impossible load to bear. Before Katrina, many Americans were willing to give the Administration the benefit of the doubt, but after Katrina, the voices questioning the administration became louder and more insistent. The themes of our current economic mess resonate with those from Katrina: lack of a coherent strategy, administrative incompetence, lack of adequate resources, and, most of all, an apparent lack of empathy for people who are suffering.

Images from the Past

At the mention of Katrina, I am again flooded with images.

Faces stare back from the corner of my mind where they had been indelibly imprinted. A crowd of African American women huddles around a slumped figure with a white sheet draped over her shoulder. A woman in a head scarf and striped t-shirt extends a hand in comfort, trying to assure the exhausted and overheated victim all will be OK. Behind her another woman holds her hands to her mouth in a mixture of shock and grief while a man near tears watches with two boys whose faces betray their anxiety and confusion.

A second photograph: a large man holding a tiny baby over the shoulder of his football jersey pulls back a blanket to reveal the corpse of an old man as thin as a concentration camp victim slumped in a chaise lounge. Behind him lies the Superdome crowd that became a symbol for this disaster. To the side of the picture a woman walks towards the camera as she shouts at the photographer in frustration. There are no white faces anywhere.

A third picture: an African American woman with her dress draped over her shoulder swims through water colored like a stained glass window by oil, dragging an overnight bag and bottles of water.

A fourth: a young man with his foot in bandages lies on a cot clutching a bottle of water as vehicles drive by without even acknowledging him.

Crowds huddle on bridges and overpasses that remain above the water, waiting for the rescue that is not coming.

Those driven from their homes lie in makeshift camps that eerily resemble the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression.

George Bush announces he will do something to end the endemic poverty in the areas hit by Katrina.

Two Years After

As of August 6, 2007, only 22 percent of total applicants to the Road Home program had gone to closing, and the average benefit per applicant has fallen by more than $12,000 to about $68,700.

Basic services-including schools, libraries, public transportation, and childcare-remained at less than half of the original capacity in New Orleans, and only two thirds of all licensed hospitals were open in the region. Further, lack of repairs to public facilities was undermining police effectiveness.

Just 45 percent of the city’s schools were open.

Some 25 new charter schools opened in Orleans Parish, making Orleans Parish the only city in the country with a majority of chartered public schools.

Katrina and the Election

Although no one mentioned Katrina during the debates or even after the election, I cannot help but feel it played a large role in the defeat of John McCain.  It was all but forgotten by November that McCain went back to the Ninth Ward last April.  He said:

There must be no forgotten places in America.

Yet McCain and his campaign quickly forgot and in that forgetting they only tied themselves closer to the President. Perhaps one reason why McCain did not want to bring up Katrina was his miserable voting record of opposing relief for the victims of Katrina. Just after that April visit the Democratic Party web site noted:

McCain Voted Against Emergency Funding Bill, Including $28 Billion for Hurricane Relief.
McCain Voted Against Five Months of Medicaid For Hurricane Katrina Victims For Up To Five Months.
McCain Voted Twice Against Establishing A Commission To Study The Response To Hurricane Katrina.
McCain Opposed Granting Financial Relief To Those Affected By Hurricane Katrina.

This from the man who on the day the levees broke was celebrating his birthday with George Bush.

People of color had to have remembered Katrina on Election Day even though no exit polls asked about it, for Katrina demonstrated more than anything the underlying racial attitudes of George Bush, John McCain and the Republican Party.

Barack Obama was not silent on Katrina, nor did he pull any punches. In an interview In September 2005 on National Public Radio he said Katrina:

Revealed there is a gap between the ideals we have as a country and the realities of the people who are living every day.

Then there was his speech on the floor of the Senate.

I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren’t just abandoned during the hurricane. They were abandoned long ago—to murder and mayhem in the streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing, to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness.

While most people had forgotten those words by this November, my guess is that for many the feelings behind them remained strong, especially in this economy. Maybe even a few remembered Obama’s record on Katrina was a sharp contrast with McCain’s.

He introduced Katrina oversight legislation.

He announced a plan to fast track tax refunds for Katrina victims.

He called on FEMA to rescind all no bid contracts.

He proposed aid to children who had experienced Katrina.

Katrina Today

The most extensive report on the state of New Orleans three years after Katrina was released by the Brookings Institution last August. It began:

Greater New Orleans approaches the end of its third year of recovery from a position of strength, with the vast majority of its pre-storm population and jobs. But many recovery trends have slowed or stagnated in the past year as tens of thousands of blighted properties, lack of affordable housing for essential service and construction workers, and thin public services continue to plague the city and region.

The findings of the report came before the economic crash hit this fall, but despite the fact that New Orleans had recovered 72 percent of its pre-Katrina households and nearly 90 percent of its sales tax revenues, many findings still make for sobering reading.

The city may be confronting fully 65,000 blighted properties or empty lots. Rising rents, now 46 percent higher than before the storm, threaten the ability of many essential service workers to afford housing, as wages are not keeping pace. The labor market remains tight as the service and construction industries seek workers. The public service infrastructure in the city remains thin, especially public transit.

According to new analyses of 2007 wage data, workers in occupations with labor shortages, such as child care and maintenance and repair workers, would have to use more than 30 percent of their monthly income to rent an apartment in the region.

Even more alarming is that what hit New Orleans has still not been fixed over three years after the disaster, even though we have money for banks to buy up other banks.

The latest maps from the Army Corps of Engineers suggest that a number of neighborhoods in the city remain at risk of six to eight feet of flooding from a “1 percent” storm.

What fascinates me is that the entire executive summary of the Brooking Report does not mention the elephant in the room–race. You have to delve into the longer complete report to find these data. The Public schools today are 90% African American, roughly the same percentage as in 2004, but the number of students has fallen from 66,000 to 32,000, an indication of the status of the African American population. At the same time whites now make up 60% of the private school population, up from 51% in 2004, while the percentage of African American students in private schools has fallen from 45% to 34%.

What Brookings apparently does not want to talk about can be found elsewhere: New Orleans has become whiter. According to Census Bureau figures released this summer, the African American population had fallen from 68% before Katrina to 60%, while the white population grew from 30% to 36%.  TV station WWL caught the implications Brookings missed:

That shift could have political implications in what has been a heavily Democratic area, as could the overall drop in population, which could cost the area legislative seats, said local demographer Greg Rigamer, who has closely tracked trends since the storm.

The overall picture of New Orleans three years after Katrina is hardly the economic renaissance promised by President Bush. What is especially telling is that all the above data and reports were issued before the full force of another hurricane hit New Orleans–the current economic crisis. This now puts a city that still has not recovered from Katrina facing a blow that could be even more damaging given its weakened state. It’s like someone recovering from a serious illness again waking up in the ICU.

The Relevance of Katrina

Although today Katrina appears to be a dim memory, it is as relevant as it ever was–perhaps even more so–for the response of the Bush Administration to the current economic crisis eerily resembles its response to Katrina: too little, too late, to the wrong people.  What New Orleans required after Katrina–and what it was promised–it never received, massive aid to rebuild people’s lives, their homes and their community and to protect them against a similar disaster in the future.

This is exactly what America requires today. Luckily we have only a little less than two months left of the Bush Administration, which seems to be marking time as it packs up for its move from the White House. That our new President is one who immediately recognized the devastation Katrina had wrought and its larger social implications, then backed up his words with actions should have us guardedly optimistic that the New Year will bring meaningful change.

In 2006 Barack Obama gave the commencement address at New Orleans’ Xavier University. Those words echo today:

And so what this all means is that today and every day, you have a responsibility to remember what happened here in New Orleans. To make it a part of who you are. To let its lessons guide you as face your own challenges.

Tagged with: 2008 Presidential election • African Americans • Barack Obama • Brookings_Institution • Bush-Administration • Census Bureau • Democratic Party • economic crisis • George Bush • Great Depression • Hoovervilles • John Mcain • Katrina • New Orleans • Presidential debates • race • republican party