Glenda Simms/ColumnistThe September 7, 2005 edition of the New York Times carried an article entitled From Margins of Society to Centre of the Tragedy by writer David Gonzalez.
Like others who have critiqued the ramifications of America's most horrifying natural disaster, Gonzalez points to the historical racial inequities that predisposed black Americans in the city of New Orleans to be, overwhelmingly, the folks who were trapped by the flood waters. These black people will also be the majority of dead bodies that might or might not be found.
To make his point, David Gonzalez quoted Martin Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts, who argues that in all such situations of crisis in the big cities of America, it is always poor peoples who are in danger, "It's dangerous to be poor. It's dangerous to be black. It's dangerous to be Latino".
In the entire myriad of views on 'Katrina's' impact and the responses to this First World catastrophe, everyone is acknowledging the poor treatment and marginalisation of generations of black people in the famous 'City of Jazz'. It is therefore logical to draw the 'race card' and pose some embarrassing questions to the white power structures and also to the black power brokers who administer sections of the 'plantation that is America.'.
ENGENDERING 'KATRINA'
This writer has noted that all the analysis of the effects of 'Katrina' in both the print media and on the numerous television stations within the context of a CNN-ised world, are done within a gender-neutral framework. I am of the opinion that the impact of a feminised hurricane (Katrina was her name) should by now be analysed from a gender as well as from race and class perspectives.
A gender analysis of the very nature of the New Orleans society is, at minimum, essential to an understanding of the link between the past and the present in the context of this tragedy. Indeed 'Katrina' highlighted the divide between the haves (white and the black middle class) and the have-nots (mostly blacks); the rich and the poor; the blacks and the whites; the young and the old and the men and the women.
History informs us that some women were consciously recruited to ensure that the needs of the men who built New Orleans were well provided for. To this end, the first female settlers in New Orleans were prostitutes released from French prisons. This fact is important in understanding the underbelly of a city that has grown over time to symbolise French glamour, Anglo-intrigue, sultry and exotic mixed-race women classified as mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons, and the pulsating soul of black folks in the corridors of 'all that jazz'.
This complexity of New Orleans is well researched and articulated by author Alecia P. Long in her 2005 book The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race and Respectability in New Orleans 1865 1920.
POOR, BLACK, WOMAN
Alecia Long guides her readers to an understanding of the contradictions of a society founded on prostitution and on the stratification of black women through miscegenation. Like many other historians and social scientists, she confronted the racial divide and forced us to recognise that "New Orleans has always presented a special case in American racial matters".
Against this background, I fully anticipated that some critical minds would at least acknowledge that the face of New Orleans, destroyed and water-logged by 'Katrina' (the mother of all hurricanes) is the face of a poor black woman. As the media houses focused the lenses of their cameras on the old, the indigent, the poor, the obese, the motherless, the fatherless, the single parent, the overburdened grandmothers and the scary young men who terrorised and raped the frightened little girls, the face of the black woman emerged as the symbol of all that has gone wrong with peoples of African origins in cities such as New Orleans.
gender-neutral
comfort zones
The face of such a woman was captured in a local newspaper on September 3, 2005. She was Cheryl Carter who was photographed holding her four-week old grandson, England Wilson who slept peacefully on her right shoulder. The contented face of the sleeping child was in stark contrast with the image of sheer agony and despair captured on the face of yet another black woman who can only ask: "Why me Lord, Why me?"
Of course the pundits will continue to pontificate in their 'gender-neutral comfort zones', the water will be pumped out of New Orleans and the roads, bridges, casinos, hotels and suburban dwellings will be rebuilt. Many of the so-called refugees will return to a more upscale and reinforced infrastructure designed to withstand other natural disasters.
Sadly, in all of this black, women will still be expected to earn minimum wage when they clean the casinos and tidy-up the whorehouses. Perhaps a post-'Katrina' New Orleans will force poor black women to take a stance and say "Hell! No! Not again! I have had enough! I no longer know how to sing the blues and all that jazz!"
And when the black 'straw bosses' ask where she found the courage to take a stance against them and their white overseers (men and women) she will reply: "From one crazy woman named Katrina."
Dr. Glenda P. Simms is a gender expert and consultant. You can send your comments to infocus@gleanerjm.com.
