Hurricane Katrina: God is quite popular during a hurricane

We’re in this together

God is quite popular during a hurricane. First God was credited with causing hurricane Katrina and now God is being represented by fundamentalists – Muslim, Christian, even secularist – who each claim to know why God “masterminded” Katrina. Examples of this rhetoric range from al-Qaeda’s disturbing insistence that Katrina is the “wrath of God” to comments by Church leaders like “Father Bob” Masset of St. Mary Magdalene Church in Metaire who noted that “this storm was in God’s plan.” Even the normally restrained Rabbi Michael Lerner of the progressive group Tikkun invoked religious language to describe Katrina. He wrote, “This is a classic case of the law of karma, or what the Torah warns of environmental disaster unless we create a just society, or what others call watching the chickens come home to roost, or what goes around come around.”

But perhaps most damaging are the self-aggrandizing depictions, often laden with words like “Lo” and “behold,” that natural disasters are a great equalizing and even humbling force. Indeed the wind and the rain may not discriminate between people but our preparedness and our reaction reflects our imperfections, biases, and even, naivet�.

Critical Analysis

One of the unusual things about hurricane Katrina is the immediate emergence of critical discussions. Hip-hop artist Kanye West, for example, departed from NBC’s shameless self-promoting telethon last week to launch a verbal critique against Bush. In a visibly (and uncharacteristically) shaken appearance, West noted that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” prompting NBC to censor his remarks from the West coast telecast.

Too often, however, these critical discussions do not emerge. Two problems arise from the absence of this dialogue � first we seldom assess (or even acknowledge) the ethnic, racial, and economic landscape of disaster areas before we donate. After the recent Tsunami, for example, Human Rights Watch documented how aid money did not reach Dalits, or untouchables, in Tamil Nadu, India. In previous articles, I have documented how aid money given to rehabilitate the Gujarat earthquake in 2001 often ended up in the hands of Hindu nationalists, unbeknownst to donors who failed to do their due diligence.

Second, we do not critically evaluate how our reaction to various “natural” disasters differs according to our own biases. The New York Times recently reported that President Jalal Talabani angrily criticized Arab Sunni leaders for their muted response to the stampede last week in which 1,000 Shia piligrims died on the largest day of casualties since the US invasion. A critical examination of our assistance as Muslims may reveal that not only are we marginalizing certain communities in our aid but also that our aid money may be furthering racial, ethnic, and sectarian divides by unconsciously aiding one community over another.

Targeted Help

The failure (or perhaps unwillingness?) to research before donating is what leads, in part, to our self-congratulatory insistence that aid money must always be “color-blind.” While we may applaud the spirit of this approach, it ignores the unfortunate � but very real � biases that invariably creep into how aid monies and goods are allocated. In an article published in Common Dreams on September 24, 2004, writer Mike Davis describe the chilling discrepancy in how different communities in New Orleans were equipped to respond to last year’s hurricane Ivan. He observed that “affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less � mainly Black � were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.”

For Davis, this discrepancy represents both a racial bias and an ongoing effort to trample the rights of the poor. He writes, “City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population � blamed for the city’s high crime rates � across the Mississippi River. Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their children’s curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans � one big Garden District � with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.”

Targeted aid is about collecting assessments like Davis’ and then assisting the very communities that may be marginalized by relief efforts or by persistence racial and economic bias. It is not, however, an excuse to help, say, only the Muslims of Louisiana or Mississippi. Targeted aid is about helping those communities most in need � even if they are from communities that we may disagree with in other matters.

Sustainable Assistance

One thing that struck me about Katrina are the images of how parts of Mississippi and Louisiana looked before Katrina. The hurricane has exposed America’s neglected underbelly and reminded us that perhaps the words “first world” and “third world” are more relative than we think. The Houston Chronicle recently reran an editorial from its December 1, 2001 paper noting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country.” This is not to suggest some conspiracy theory that our leaders knew of imminent disaster and chose to ignore it.

Katrina should be seen as part of the daily violences occurring for generations in America’s neglected poor, largely non-White areas. This includes, but is not limited to, a poor health infrastructure, an inadequate minimum wage, and a deeply flawed legal system. Our aid assistance should seek to tackle both the immediate needs (blankets, food, clothing, money) but also seek to address the institutional and governmental failure of equipping this region with proper care.

Emotional and Moral Rehabilitation

America failed the people of Louisiana and Mississippi and it’s frightening to consider the reasons why. In an article in the Guardian, columnist Jonathan Freedland writes that in the aftermath of Katrina, “(Americans) have learned that 35% of black households in (Louisiana) did not have a car. Or that the staff and guests of the Hyatt hotel were evacuated first, while the rest, the mainly poor and black, were at the back of the queue. Or that 28% of the people of New Orleans live in poverty and that 84% of those are black. Or that some people in that city were so poor, they did not have the money even to catch a bus out of town � that race, in other words, determined who got left behind.” But Freedland remains pessimistic that America will learn from the lesson on race taught by Katrina. He notes, “Like a character in Shakespearean tragedy, race is America’s fatal flaw, the weakness which so often brings it low.”

As Muslims continue to pat themselves on the back for pledging to raise $10 million dollars, it would be a disservice that if in our efforts to “help out,” we did not engage in a brutally honest discussion of racism within our own lives and communities. The wounds created by hurricane Katrina and hurricane Bush are far too deep and far too painful for just our donations to heal.

Zahir Janmohamed admits that he too has tried, with limited success, to interject the words “Lo” and “Behold” into his sentences. For more of Zahir’s commentary, read his blog falloficarus.blogspot.com or listen to his podcast Qunoot on iTunes.