Monthly Archive for September, 2005

Slavery Is Too Strong A Word

Published on September 12, 2005 in Current Affairs. 0 Comments

Yesterday, I sat with three of my colleague at lunch. We were discussing the situation in New Orleans and the subject came around to the blame game. One of my colleagues commented that the behavior of the Mayor of New Orleans was just as culpable for the suffering of the Descendents of Slaves.

This colleague of mine made the point that the Federal Government should not be blamed. He said that it was well known that FEMA would not respond in less than seven days to any disaster. Therefore, it was the lack of preparedness on the part of the mayor of New Orleans that was responsible.

That same evening, I sat in my living room and watched “Katrina aftermath: What went wrong” a special Dateline report. I listened to the voices of the meteorologists and scientists as they complained of how their information was not taken seriously by government agencies from the local to the federal level. These scientists had been warning of the potential for disaster. They had participated in the Hurricane Pam simulation. When Katrina strengthened in the Gulf after passing over Florida, they had made every effort to warn the government.

Tom Brokaw’s report showed school busses in New Orleans that could have been used to evacuate citizens. He sat with the Mayor and asked him, “What would you have done differently?” The mayor said, “I would have screamed louder.” At that moment, I was filled with shame. How could this man sit there and talk about crying for help when he could have actually taken action?

My mind returned to the conversation at lunch.

“Seven days” he said. According to Tom Brokaw’s report, it was supposed to be 48 to 70 hours. This was the expectation of those who had consulted with FEMA during the planning phases for just this kind of disaster. Even so, I had argued that the true cause of the disaster in New Orleans was the deteriorating state of the Levees.

Brokaw’s report addressed this issue. A segment was shown that had been shot just prior to the flooding. It was about how New Orleans had dodged the bullet yet again. The following day, another reporter stood on that same street in the French Quarter in two feet of water. The levees had failed and the flooding had begun. Dark and deadly waters had stolen into the homes of the disenfranchised like a thief in the night.

I had told my colleague at lunch that the catastrophe of New Orleans could have been avoided because the storm surge should not have been a challenge for the levees, even though those levees could not have withstood even a category-3 storm. He commented, “Well, that’s not the federal government’s fault!” Another of my colleagues contradicted him saying, “Yes, it was. I once dated the daughter of a high-ranking member of the Army Corps of Engineers. It has always been the duty of the corps to maintain the levees up and down the Mississippi river, including the New Orleans Levees.” I then pointed out that funding for levee improvements had been cut by the Republican congress.

“We have to make a choice in this country as to what we will spend our money on. We have priorities.” He said. “Yes, and should we be wasting our money on a war in Iraq that should never have been fought? How many of the billions of those dollars could have been spent to prepare for disasters that we knew with a certainty would come?”

“I think the Iraqis who were having their feet flayed would disagree. How are these people so different from the poor people in Louisiana? At least the poor in New Orleans are free.”

I felt a flash of anger at this. How could he be so ignorant? “There is a difference.” I said. “The people of Iraq are living in the land of their birth. They are living in their ancestral home where their people have lived for thousands of years. The people of Louisiana are the Descendents of Slaves who were taken from their homeland without their consent and stripped of their cultural identity.”

Another of my colleagues finally spoke up. He is from Eastern Europe. He looked me in the eye and said, “Why always this talk of slaves?” Before I could answer (being a descendent of slaves myself) my other college began a scholarly sounding treatise on how things are so different in the South. He spoke of how the poor Black folks are mistreated by the ignorant and evil. I finally could not take it any more and interrupted.

“As someone who should have some authority on the subject, I must disagree with you about this. My Father and Mother raised me to be a Free Man. Those of us who still keep the memories of our Ancestors know that slavery was never about whips and chains. Slavery is a mind game. How else could five people control the behavior of one hundred on a plantation? We still see this mind game being played out today. When we do, we speak up about it. This game is not just played on us; it is played on you as well. You are just as much a slave as anyone. The difference between us is that we know that we are being treated as slaves, and you do not.”

Another colleague of mine attempted to interject, “Slavery seems too strong a word…” My other colleague turned to me with a smirk, “Hey, if they want to be free, all they have to do is get a Harley.” I did not dignify this with a comment. I turned to my friend and said, “Perhaps you are right but being a man who makes my living with language (the language of logic) I always choose my words carefully. I used slavery because it is what I mean. Everyone here at this table is treated as a slave. I am the only one who sees it. The disaster in New Orleans has washed away our illusions about our status in this country.”

Lunch was over and we got up and returned to our indentured servitude. We returned to the illusion, yet in my heart I know what it means to be free. I will not be a slave to any man. I will proclaim my freedom every day, in the halls of Corporate America and in the streets of the cities and towns of this nation and the world. I will continue to write about the teachings of my Father and Mother, and their Fathers and Mothers before them. I will continue to shout the teachings of my Ancestors who fought with their bodies and their hearts and their minds.

It is my Ancestors who could have chosen the ultimate freedom of death. It is they who chose to live in bondage and hope. Hope that some day, their children would walk this world free.

For their sake, I claim, Slavery is NOT too strong a word.

Who will iron their shirts?

Published on September 5, 2005 in Current Affairs. 2 Comments

I was listening to a program on National Public Radio recently entitled “Motherhood in the Margins.” This program, a segment of the daily program Odyssey, spoke about the relationship between the archetypical maternal image and the reality of Motherhood in the USA. Two classes of women were discussed, those who chose motherhood on the margins and those who found themselves on the margins by virtue of their ethnicity or economic status. Here, I am referring to Mothers who are the descendents of slaves.

Annelise Orleck, an historian and the author of an upcoming book on the fight of poor women to assert their rights, quoted the former senator of the Louisiana, Russell Long, a Southern Democrat. She claimed that he actually said that funding welfare would make it more difficult for people such as himself to find domestic help since these poor Black Women would have no incentive to go out and get a job.

This quote was given as an example of the double standard that is applied to poor Black Women. They are not valued for that most important duty of raising their own children. When they do take the initiative to find work or education to better themselves, they do not have the support of our society. This is help that they need in raising their children so that these children will be neglected and left to the vagaries of ghetto life.

My own sister was a welfare mother. Had she not had the support of our family, she could never have continued her education, raised her son and developed a successful career in Information Technology. Even though she was a welfare mother, she came from a family of privilege. My Father is a successful retired Methodist Minister and my Mother is a retired registered nurse. They both fought the good fight to raise our people out of the shadow of poverty and prejudice. Sometimes the price they paid was dear. Sometimes that price included the loss of a business. Sometimes that price was disrespect from the systems and people that they supported and served. Sometimes that price was the suffering of their children at the hands of white society.

Though Russell Long served in the congress between 1965 and 1987, it would seem that his sentiments still exist today. Even now, the congress is debating provisions in the latest version of welfare reform that would require poor women to work at least 40 hours a week before they can receive support from the state.

Given my statements here, one might think that I am advocating the expansion of welfare for the poor. This is not true. I am thinking about the working poor of New Orleans. Many of these poor Black families sustained themselves on minimum wages performing the vary work that Russell Long complained would no longer be done. These were hard working families that paid their taxes and owned their homes. Now those modest homes, some of which were in families for generations are no more.

I too have felt hunger. Though I did not choose hunger so that my own child could be satisfied. I have done without clothing or shoes, but not so that my child would have clean warm cloths to wear to school. I have known poverty because of my determination to fulfill my dreams. This is a privilege that many of the Descendents of Slaves in New Orleans did not have.

At the time that I was listening to Odyssey, hurricane Katrina was of no consequence to me. Later, as the tragedy unfolded, I was so self-absorbed in my career and personal life that I was not aware of what was happening. I was not aware that those same mothers who are denigrated for either sponging off of the good graces of this fine government of ours or disgracefully neglecting their children, were making life and death choices that should never have been made.

These mothers, who had the audacity to affirm life beyond the despair of urban poverty, who would have been condemned by faith based organizations had they aborted their children, who were forgotten by the faith based organizations in the affluent parts of our nation, were watching their children starve and their elders die. These same organizations, such as the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that the government was touting as the salvation of the poor in times of hardship, were nowhere to be found as the waters were rising and the elders were dying and sons and daughters were giving in to anger and despair.

Were it not for the goodness of the people of our nation, many more might have died.

Where was R. Albert Mohler and his Southern Baptist Theological Seminary when his good friends in Washington were cutting the funding for the levees? Where was he when FEMA was turning back the truckloads of water and food? Where were he and his colleagues when the only job a poor black man could find in New Orleans was shining some white man’s shoes? Surely, he and his pseudo-religious cadre of political activists and self-proclaimed king makers could have advised our deeply religious and committed president of his responsibilities to the people of this nation.

Who will iron the shirts of the affluent businessmen who come to New Orleans to watch the buxom young college girls bearing their breasts on Bourbon Street? How can we as a Nation trust the promise of an American Dream that has become a nightmare?

The invisible people are visible now. We see them dying on television and crying for help outside of their refuge of last resort, a refuge that became the closest approximation to Hell on Earth.

These people who are the strongest of the strong, bearing the power and glory of our Nation on their beautiful black backs, have been dehumanized, denigrated and had the vary foundation of their culture destroyed. This destruction did not come with the storm surge of Katrina, it came with the missionaries and Imams like a scourge through the cradle of humanity. It came by torture and slavery and the demonization of that which we held most sacred.

It is so ironic that these same people run to the Great Religious Edifice of Protestantism.

Having seen these so-called religious organizations from the inside, I find them a place of such great hypocrisy that surely they must leave Martin Luther spinning in his grave. These same religious organizations are supported by the spiritual power and faith that is the legacy of the culture that Catholicism and Islam have sought to destroy. Yet the religious establishment in our Nation continues to carry on with the intolerance and ignorance that was perpetrated in the past by the same religions over which they claim such moral superiority.

Who is the champion of the righteous in our nation? Why George W. Bush, of course.

Even so, the Descendents of Slaves continue to go to church and be filled with the glorious power of the Holy Spirit that the self same religious establishment thinks of as little more than allegory and myth.

The Descendents of Slaves truly must love this so-called great nation of ours. If they did not, surely their children would have done much more than steal sustenance from the abandoned shops and storefronts of those who had left them behind to die in the filth and squalor. They would have strapped bombs to their bodies and marched into the halls of power and said in their last breaths, I exist! I have meaning! I have purpose, if that purpose is only to affirm that I exist.

Do not think that I am speaking of those who sought to take advantage of the lawlessness in the aftermath of the storm and flood. Nor am I speaking of those of murderous intent who had completely given up hope. This is not about those that lashed out at their own people or fired upon those seeking to save them like some injured animal seeking to protect itself from the scavengers that were sure to come.

No, I am speaking of the children who were raised by their Grandmothers, Grandmothers now dead because they could not get food or insulin. I am speaking of the babies that may never see their Mothers and Fathers again.

Yes, the children of slaves love this great nation of ours, and yet the question still remains, when New Orleans is re-built and the affluent have returned to claim the land once owned by the disenfranchised, who will iron their shirts?