Sometimes a journalist's job is simply to state the obvious. That's why, for example, TV weather jockeys start their reports confirming that yes, your eyes didn't deceive you, it really was a very nice day outside.
That's sort of what the AP's Frank Bass does with this piece, "Poor suffered brunt of Katrina's wrath." Bass restates the obvious and backs it up with census data and on-the-scene detail, thus helping to make the obvious official:
People living in the path of Hurricane Katrina's worst devastation were twice as likely as most Americans to be poor and without a car — factors that may help explain why so many failed to evacuate as the storm approached.
An Associated Press analysis of Census data shows that the residents in the three dozen hardest-hit neighborhoods in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama also were disproportionately minority and had incomes $10,000 below the national average.
"Let them know we're not bums. We have houses. Our houses were destroyed. We have jobs. It's not our fault that we didn't have cars to leave," Shatonia Thomas, 27, said as she walked near New Orleans' convention center five days after the storm, still trapped in the destruction with her children, ages 6 and 9.
Money and transportation — two keys to surviving a natural disaster — were inaccessible for many who got left behind in the Gulf region's worst squalor.
"It's a different equation for poor people," explained Dan Carter, a University of South Carolina historian. "There's a certain ease of transportation and funds that the middle class in this country takes for granted."
Catina Miller, a 32-year-old grocery deli worker who lived in the Ninth Ward, a poverty-stricken New Orleans enclave created in the 1870s by immigrants who were too poor to find higher ground, said she certainly would have liked to have left the city before the hurricane hit.
"But where can you go if you don't have a car?" she asked. "Not everyone can just pick up and take off."
The fact that New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast were heavily populated with people who could not afford to evacuate was hardly a secret or a surprise:
Jack Harrald, director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University in Washington, said emergency planners have known for years that the poverty and lack of transportation in New Orleans would be a significant problem, but the government spent more time and money preparing itself — rather than communities — for disaster. …
"There's not a lot of interest in this issue, except when there's something dramatic," said Carter, the South Carolina historian. "By and large, the poor are simply out of sight, out of mind."
The poor were out of sight and out of mind. And they were left to die.
This was lethally negligent, but not unusual, or even surprising. This is how it works. The poor in America eventually receive a begrudging, belated assistance that proves far costlier, far less effective and far less efficient than a timelier response. A lot of them usually die before this belated assistance is provided, but this is seen as a helpful reminder that they ought not to become "dependent" upon handouts such as medical care for their children or a rescue from a rooftop. See also HEALTH CARE, AMERICAN STYLE.
John Scalzi discusses what "Being Poor" means in America. Such as, "Being poor is $6 short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap." And especially, "Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so." Read the whole thing. Then print it out, make fliers and pass them around. (Link via Patrick Nielsen Hayden.)
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