They say a picture paints a thousand words.
The two pictures from New Orleans told everything about race in America. They were published on Yahoo's news service last week. One showed a young black man swimming chest-deep in water, holding a six-pack in one hand and a trash bag filled with groceries in the other. He was described as having "looted" a store. The other picture was of a white couple, also with groceries. They "found" their goods, according to the caption.
A couple days later, Yahoo issued an apology for the captions. It was far too late. The point had been made.
Hurricane Katrina has uncovered what we already know too well about America: race and class make all the difference between life and death. Had New Orleans been a city that was 67 percent white (instead of black) and not 34 percent poor, had it been Malibu or Laguna Beach, helicopters would have arrived by the thousands with caviar on board, supplies would have been airlifted and sent by every means possible within the first couple of hours, and millions of National Guard troops would have been on those streets in the blink of an eye. Dead bodies would not have been seen on televisions throughout the world floating down the streets of Beverly Hills 90210.
Even more to the point, a plan would have been hatched long before to evacuate the city in case of an emergency. Levees would never have been allowed to rot and sink in a city that was way below sea level and surrounded by water.
This is not news to anyone who has been following the media in the past several days. National and international criticism of the federal government's slow response in getting relief to New Orleans is by now an old story. So, too, is the staged (15 miles from downtown New Orleans) hugging of two black women by a president more concerned about his oil war in Iraq. It took the president four days to step foot in a ravaged Big Easy. He remained on vacation for two days after the flooding began. Other top officials behaved similarly: Condi Rice was shopping for shoes in New York, Donald Rumsfeld was vacationing in Wyoming. It was not a pretty picture.
September 11 evoked international sorrow, New Orleans international shame.
When all is said and done, more people will probably have died and more lives destroyed from the aftermath of Katrina and the neglect of the federal government than at the twin towers. An overwhelming number of those people are black and poor. Some of those folks are queer. We know from accounts already published in the press that the French Quarter, where the city's visible gay community is, wasn't as badly flooded as other areas. Will we hear about the poor queers who lived in the badly flooded areas? What about people with AIDS who found themselves without their medication? Or seniors and disabled folks? What about those who have children? How many of us were among the thousands crowded into the Superdome or the convention center or perhaps living on roof tops or bridges desperately waiting for a helicopter? Not many seniors or people with AIDS could survive four days without medication, water, food, and shelter from the sweltering sun.
According to the Advocate, the Montrose Counseling Center in Houston is welcoming displaced queers from Mississippi and Louisiana. Other groups are setting up funds for queer survivors. LGBT fundraisers will no doubt be held throughout the country. One is planned for San Francisco on Friday. Beyond that, the queer community must get back on track with a national and local political agenda that addresses the racism and classism that exacerbated the tragedy in New Orleans. We must once again see the struggle for affordable housing, for national healthcare, for living wage salaries, for an end to hunger and poverty, as our own.
When Martin Luther King declared the need for a war on poverty in his Nobel lecture in December 1964, this nation could've taken up arms and defeated homelessness, hunger, lack of healthcare and joblessness. We sent a man to the moon in the late 1960s, we could've ended poverty if we chose.
New Orleans, in the aftermath of Katrina, shows what comes of not heeding King's call for "an all-out world war on poverty." The only way we can restore ourselves as a nation right now is to reinstate King's dream and work tirelessly to eliminate poverty, homelessness, hunger, joblessness and lack of national healthcare.
Anything less dishonors the memory of all who died in America's worst natural disaster and its most recent shame.
Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a southern Italian queer social justice activist, writer and performer whose work can be read in the http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com, occasionally in the op-ed pages of the SF Bay Guardian and on his Web site http://www.avicollimecca.com. An LGBT community benefit for Katrina survivors will be held this Friday, September 9 at 9 p.m. at El Rio, 3158 Mission Street. Suggested donation is $10-$100.