Editorials

Editorial: The World Sees America Laid Bare By BECKY O'MALLEY

Tuesday September 13, 2005

The cover photo of this week’s issue of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur shows an armored vehicle labeled “state police tactical unit,” manned by grim-faced booted and helmeted figures with clenched jaws, wearing dark glasses, and carrying big guns, staring straight ahead. In the lower right-hand corner, we see two middle-aged African-American women looking up at the truck. One, wearing a red floral muu-muu, hair in curlers, raises her arm in supplication to the men, who ignore her. The headline is stark: “L’Amérique mise a nu”—America laid bare (literally, nude). The sub-head says that “The hurricane reveals the fissures in the society of everyone for himself.”  

You don’t have to read the articles inside or see the wrenching photos which accompany them to get the analysis. The cover pretty much sums it up. That’s how our American society looks these days to the rest of the world. BBC coverage painted a similar picture.  

Even conservatives, even the ones quick to condemn the shots of poor people commandeering merchandise (“looting,” if they were poor black people) are able to understand that those women on the magazine cover are not the enemy. Even Republicans agree that such people should not have been left to their fate while better-off residents evacuated themselves in their private vehicles. Everyone concedes that plans should have been made for people without cars, regardless of race.  

But what the events in New Orleans have shown the world most clearly, most graphically, is who America’s urban poor still are: the descendants of African slaves, those who haven’t managed to extricate themselves from their historic underdog status. And America’s vulnerability has been laid bare before the world. Jean Daniel’s editorial in the French magazine sums it up: “Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have known that they were not masters of all humanity. Since Aug. 29, 2005, they know that they can’t master their own society.” Daniel compares the huge New Orleans tragedy in the United States with a smaller scale but still wrenching series of fires in France, which claimed the lives of many poor black immigrants. He speculates that a rich state, a super-power, might just be a country where the poor people have gotten even farther behind than they used to be.  

In a much less dramatic way, the statistics coming out of UC Berkeley’s freshman class also reveal that we’re failing to achieve our announced social goals. According to an Associated Press story on Friday, the 4,000-student freshman class this year has just 129 black students. Chancellor Birgeneau is quoted in the story expressing distress at this poor showing, as well he should.  

The Ward Connerly why-can’t-they-pull-themselves-up-by-their-bootstraps-like-I-did school of sophistry is given the lie by the statistics in Jonathan Kozol’s invaluable new book, previously mentioned in this space, The Shame of the Nation (he’ll be in town to talk about it this month). He charts spending in six big mostly-black cities and their mostly-white suburbs. Students in the suburbs get up to twice as much money spent on their education as inner city kids—and then we wonder why there aren’t more outstanding black applicants for prestige colleges like UC Berkeley. The cliché is that people who don’t even have shoes can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. 

It’s nice, of course, to know that voluntary immigrants and their children are doing well. The AP story says that about 11 percent of the freshmen class will be Hispanic, about 47 percent Asian-American. But we owe the descendants of our involuntary immigrants, whose ancestors were brought here as slaves and kept as slaves for many generations, more than that. Their kids should be getting the best schools, and instead they’re getting the worst.  

And I don’t want to hear from whiners who will say that their immigrant ancestors came to America too late to be slaveholders. That’s not the point, never has been the point. Some of my own ancestors were slaveholders, others abolitionists, but it doesn’t matter. It has always been in the best interest of this country to give people on the bottom what they need to move up the ladder: that’s what settlement houses for immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were all about.  

Fragmentary well-meaning attempts have been made to extend a measure of economic justice to the descendants of slaves, but they’ve been too little, too late. The new UC/Bill Gates charter school in Oakland is intended to produce some college applicants in a few years, but the numbers are so small as to be meaningless. What’s really needed is a massive effort, on the scale of the post-World War II Marshall Plan, to build the institutions which serve African-American citizens so that they can take their proper place in American society.  

Some have suggested that restitution payments, like those made to Japanese-Americans who were wrongfully imprisoned during World War II, are the answer. That’s fine, but similar per-person dollar amounts won’t begin to rectify the economic damage done to African-Americans by generations of slavery. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was on the right track, but it never really got off the ground. It’s sometimes said that it was a failure, but in fact it was never really tried except in a few isolated programs. And it didn’t make a distinction between poverty caused by the residue of slavery and poverty from other causes. That’s what we have to face squarely as a nation, and soon. Don’t, however, expect the current administration to take the lead. What we have now, as Le Nouvel Observateur succinctly puts it, is the government for the society of everyone-for-himself.