Women's Struggles

The nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., like so many cities and towns across America, still struggles with the issue of race, and most notably in the D.C. mayor’s race going on now. Here is an article by Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak that addresses the issue of race, politics, and of facing the future head-on by acknowledging the past.

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In the District, we’re still struggling to overcome the racial divide

Tuesday, August 31, 2010
 

Too many Americans believed that after the inauguration, we would have a post-racial America — a world in which white folks enjoy hip-hop, a black family lives in the White House, prosperity and equality is there for all and we just don’t have to talk about this stuff anymore.

Sorry, but that’s so not the case.

America is still deeply divided along race. Nowhere is that more apparent than in our nation’s capital. Both of our top dogs — the president and the mayor — are biracial, fit, educated Gen Xers who are not children of privilege and who work hard to keep their rhetoric colorblind. Yet, here we are, a city and, increasingly, a nation fractured.

One look at the two rallies on the Mall last weekend tells you that. A sea of white faces looking up adoringly at Glenn Beck while Al Sharpton marched with a crowd that was predominantly black.

What’s that all about? It’s not because folks only go to the Mall if the speaker looks like them. If that were the case, Lady Gaga would draw zero humans.

No, this division is more complicated.

Take the D.C. mayor’s race. We have two black men, both born and raised in the District. White residents are for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) to the tune of 64 percent, while 64 percent of black residents back Council Chairman Vincent Gray (D).

“The city is now more divided than ever before. That’s the biggest disappointment,” former D.C. police chief Isaac Fulwood Jr., who no longer supports Fenty, told the Post earlier this year when the discontent with Fenty in the black community became clear.

Why such different results? Is it because they are from two different generations? Surely not.

How would the same folks feel about someone who looks nothing like them: D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee?

The Korean American woman widens the chasm further. In a Washington Post poll taken in late January, just 28 percent of black residents approved of her; 66 percent of whites gave her a thumbs up.

Let’s think. What else could make us see things so differently? How about something more tangible: cold, hard numbers?

– The big news on everyone’s mind is the economy. The current unemployment rate nationwide is 9.5 percent. Among blacks, that number soars to 15.6 percent, according to this summer’s Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. For black men between 16 and 24, the rate is at a Great Depression level: 40 percent. And in our city’s predominantly black Ward 8, it skyrockets to 25 percent for black men and women.

– The high school graduation rate for American teens is 70 percent. For black teenage boys, it was 47 percent last year.

– According to a study this summer by the Urban Institute, 13 percent of U.S. babies are born into poverty. For black babies, make that 40 percent.

– One in 100 American adults is in jail. One in 15 black men over 18 is incarcerated, according to the Pew Charitable Trust.

It is impossible to look at these numbers and believe we live in a world where race doesn’t matter.

Similar numbers are reflected in the District. Whites who aren’t trapped in these awful statistics will vote for a man who has presided over relative calm and prosperity in the city. And the blacks who suffer in these canyons of inequity will look for someone who might help change things.

Fenty cannot wave a magic wand to change a nationwide tragedy as it rises in the District, but many folks drowning in that world think he hasn’t even tried.

I talked to some black voters who participated in our poll about their views on race in this election.

One woman said that the gap between the rich and the poor has grown dramatically in the past few years, with black residents left far behind. “For people who have been toiling in this city for years, owning their own homes, working hard and seeing something like a poor quality of food choices in their neighborhoods, that chasm has been vast,” she told me. “You’ve been marginalized by virtue of where you live in the city.”

Another voter who is rejecting Fenty and voting for Gray echoed what many other voters told me: “It is about race, but that’s just the surface. Underneath that is economics, and that’s what people are really talking about,” he said.

Indeed, 47 years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Washington to tell America that “the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,” and “the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.”

America still has work to do, and rather than go backward to restore anything, the progress must continue to move forward.

SOURCE

By Janine Mendes-Franco

Isbel Diaz Torres, writing at Havana Times, says that “at the very moment the expecting mother enters the Cuban system of pregnancy attention, she ceases to be the principal figure in the management of her own problems, priorities and interests.”

#1 R&B Song 1951:  “Don’t You Know I Love You,” the Clovers

Born:  Tommy Evans (the Drifters), 1927; Archie Bell (the Drells), 1944

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1956   The Keynotes “Now I Know” ($100) was released. Its melody turned up a year later in Dion & the Belmonts’ “I Wonder Why.”

1956   Johnny Ray’s “Just Walkin’ In the Rain” debuted, eventually reaching #2. The original version was done three years earlier by the Prisonaires, an R&B quintet who were all inmates of the Tennessee State Penitentiary.

1958   Two doo-wop classics, “I’m So Young” by the students (#26 R&B) and he Moonglows’ “Ten Commandments Of Love” (#22 pop, #9 R&B), were issued.

1958   The Clara Ward Singers broke up, forming two gospel groups, the Gay Charmers and the Stars of Faith.

1961   The Marcels (formerly a mixed-race group) had their first session as an all-Black group recording “Heartaches” (#7 pop, #19 &B).

I first heard the Marcels’ singing talents when I saw the movie “An American Werewolf In London.” Here is the Marcels’ version of “Blue Moon”, a song originally sung by Bobby Vinton.

1980   Smokey Robinson charted with his lucky thirteenth solo outing as “Cruisin’ ” became his first Top 5 hit sans the Miracles (#4 pop and R&B).

1984   Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It” reached #1 pop (#2 R&B) on the same day she was offered a part in the third of the Mad Max film series.

It has been five years since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is still rebuilding from the desolation left behind by this Category 3 hurricane.

Hurricane Katrina near peak strength on August 28, 2005. (Formed August 23, 2005, dissipated August 30, 2005)

Many people concentrate on the buildings and homes destroyed by Katrina.

But, the loss of human life was more tragic.

“Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States.  Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall. At least 1,836 people lost their lives in the actual hurricane and in the subsequent floods, making it the deadliest U.S. hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane; total property damage was estimated at $81 billion (2005 USD),  nearly triple the damage wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005 and crossed southern Florida as a moderate Category 1 hurricane, causing some deaths and flooding there before strengthening rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico. The storm weakened before making its second landfall as a Category 3 storm on the morning of Monday, August 29 in southeast Louisiana. It caused severe destruction along the Gulf coast from central Florida to Texas, much of it due to the storm surge. The most severe loss of life occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana, which flooded as the levee system catastrophically failed, in many cases hours after the storm had moved inland.  Eventually 80% of the city and large tracts of neighboring parishes became flooded, and the floodwaters lingered for weeks.  However, the worst property damage occurred in coastal areas, such as all Mississippi beachfront towns, which were flooded over 90% in hours, as boats and casino barges rammed buildings, pushing cars and houses inland, with waters reaching 6–12 miles (10–19 km) from the beach.

The hurricane protection failures in New Orleans prompted a lawsuit against the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) the builders of the levee system as mandated in the Flood Control Act of 1965. Responsibility for the failures and flooding was laid squarely on the Army Corps in January 2008, but the federal agency could not be held financially liable due to sovereign immunity in the Flood Control Act of 1928. There was also an investigation of the responses from federal, state and local governments, resulting in the resignation of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown, and of New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) Superintendent Eddie Compass. Conversely, the United States Coast Guard (USCG), National Hurricane Center (NHC) and National Weather Service (NWS) were widely commended for their actions, accurate forecasts and abundant lead time.

Five years later, thousands of displaced residents in Mississippi and Louisiana are still living in temporary accommodation. Reconstruction of each section of the southern portion of Louisiana has been addressed in the Army Corps LACPR Final Technical Report which identifies areas not to be rebuilt and areas and buildings that need to be elevated. “

SOURCE

The loss of life was incalculable, and the displaced survivors numbered in the hundreds of thousands (at the time, 300,000 survivors). Even five years after Hurricane Katrina, the names of the hundreds of deceased remain a mystery and the death toll remains bogged down in recriminations and accusations.

The city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the federal government under the direction of FEMA, all drastically and abandoned the mission to find and catalogue the bodies of dead and missing victims.  The state of Louisiana’s efforts to track down and compile lists of dozens of related cases of missing persons and unidentified bodies ran out of money in 2006 and has never been revived.  One wonders if the government’s efforts fell flat due to lack of funds (or better yet, due to the stinginess to allocate funds) to find and identify the remains of so many dead, or, because of a lack of compassion for the humanity of the deceased, not to mention a lack of interest in acknowledging the massive magnitude of the casualties.

Hundreds of victims of  America’s most horrific modern natural disaster remain anonymous. Many came from New Orleans Parish. The dead were racially diverse: 56 percent black; 40 percent white; 4 percent Asian; 4 percent Native American and 2 percent Hispanic. Many were elderly and poor. About 64 percent of the storm victims were older than 65, based on a study by Louisiana State University pathologists who oversaw a massive temporary morgue in Baton Rouge that processed more than 900 cases from 2005-06.

Many were left behind due to their inability to leave the city:  lack of transportation or any other physical means to leave; fear of leaving their homes–the only home many ever knew; no financial means to leave the city.

When the levees broke, life for so many in New Orleans changed forever.

DNA, X-rays and other technological forms of identifying remains are years off into the future, if additional remains get found or family members of the missing submit evidence that gets linked to the nameless.

Some individuals have been doing what they can to give names to the faceless bodies, images that are burned into millions of Americans minds:

** EDS NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT ** The remains of an unidentified woman, victim of Hurricane Katrina, is seen decomposing in a wheelchair Sept. 10, 2005, in St. Bernard Parish, La. The hurricane hit the region on August 29 causing numerous deaths and severe property damage. (AP Photo/Mandatory Credit:Ron Haviv/VII). Creation Date 09/10/2005 03:10:30. Submit Date 09/19/2005 13:59:36. (SOURCE)

** EDS, NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT ** A corpse is tied to a tree in floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Thursday, Sept. 15, 2005. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)  (SOURCE)

A makeshift tomb at a New Orleans street corner conceals a body that had been lying on the sidewalk for days in the wake of Hurricane Katrina on Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005. (AP Photo/Dave Martin) (SOURCE) 

One such man who has attempted to find out who the many deceased are is John Mutter.

A Columbia University professor, Mr. Mutter has been gathering personal testimonials and accessing public records of those who died during Katrina for a project he started called  Katrinalist. Mr. Mutter estimates the true death toll may exceed 3,500 if those killed by the storm and by its many after-effects are accurately compiled.

We have to ask ourselves why did such a massive loss of life occur on 2005? As Mr. Mutter opines:

“This is a mass fatality event — one that is more common in the Third World,” Mutter said. “To find another one as large in the U.S. in terms of the people who died – you have to go back to 1900 to the Galveston flood when there was no (National Weather Service), there was no Internet … and there were no automobiles.

“Why on earth did so many people die in 2005? The injustice of it is just amazing.”

Another person attempting to put names to the deceased is Wayne Filmore.

Mr. Filmore is a storm survivor who hails from Metairie, LA.  He runs the website Katrina Connection. His attempts to gather, update, and post information on Katrina-related missing-persons cases — he believes the true number is closer to 500 — often get no response. His conclusion is that city/county/state/federal government are not concerned and do not care to do anything more concerning the aftermath of Katrina five years later.

The disregard shown towards the deceased of New Orleans still resonates years later.

The massive crowds of the New Orleans Superdome.

The bloated bodies floating in water.

One image to this day still remains with me.

A news reporter, I forget which station walks around filming the great city of New Orleans laid low by the wrath of Katrina. He comes upon the body of a woman who had drowned from Katrina’s flooding. So overcome with emotion, he remarks:  “This should not be. This should not happen. This woman is a human being, and should not be left like so much trash by the side of the road. She had a life. She was a person who lived.”

With tears in his eyes, he covered her remains.

New Orleans, Louisiana. Gulfport, Mississippi.

Katrina hit them, and hit them hard.

If any lesson can be learned from this castosrophe, it should be that this nation had better learn to be more prepared and caring when—not if—another Katrina strikes.

This nation, in the form of its so-called government, showed its contempt for the citizens of the Gulf when Katrina stuck, and continued to show that contempt days, weeks, months—-and years later.

To the survivors of Katrina:

You are still in our hearts, our minds, our prayers.

You will prevail.

Five years later, no one is sure of the full tally.

• Direct storm casualties reported by Louisiana in 2007: 1,464 dead and 135 missing

• Deaths reported to the ongoing Katrinalist project: More than 3,500 killed or missing

• Nameless victims: About 500 of the 1,464 official victims’ names have not been made public

• Unidentified bodies: 31 bodies remain unidentified in New Orleans.

Katrinalist includes those who died from after-storm conditions. www.katrinalist.columbia.edu

RELATED LINKS:

KATRINA: ONE YEAR LATER

EYEBALLING KATRINA DEAD 01

HURRICANE KATRINA ONE YEAR LATER: THERE IS STILL NO SUBSTITUTE FOR COMPETENCE

5 YEARS AFTER KATRINA, STORM’S DEATH TOLL REMAINS A MYSTERY