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Katrina Produces Questions, Not Answers
November 2005
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Why does the United States provide such a small safety net for its poor and needy citizens relative to almost all other industrialized nations?
Why didn't anyone learn the lessons of so many past floods and curb development in marshlands and flood plains before Hurricane Katrina hit?
Should Americans expect their government to take care of them in times of disaster, or are they better off depending on the charity of individuals? Is there even such a thing as genuine charity, or are all acts of altruism inspired by more selfish motives?
And finally, does President Bush care about black people?
Clearly, a recent discussion series on Hurricane Katrina sponsored by Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity produced more questions than answers.
Yet the series of discussions titled "Confronting Katrina: Race, Class, and Disaster in American Society," offered an honest, no-holds-barred look beyond the news headlines at the complex causes of the disaster in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast and its likely effects on public attitudes and policies. The series, which featured speakers from various humanities departments as well as the graduate schools of law and business, examined Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath from a perspective of land development, race relations, philosophy, and government.
Central to all the talks was a consideration of the significant role the media played in shaping the public's understanding of the event. As Professor Hazel Markus of the Department of Psychology stressed, "Most of us did not experience the fear of 150 mile-per-hour winds, the terror of climbing onto a rooftop to stay dry, or the panic of not being able to reach family. We viewed it from the comfort of our own homes."
Markus argued that the gap between representation and reality, inevitable in news coverage, was particularly blatant in the aftermath of Katrina. Black people caught on camera taking goods out of stores were routinely said to be "looting," she noted, while white people doing the exact same thing were said in captions to be looking for food or supplies.
For Markus and other faculty discussants, this sort of distortion of fact by the media was nothing new. What was different about the coverage of Katrina was that many people watching the story unfold from the comfort of their own homes took notice of the bias and voiced their outrage, which fueled a different portrayal of events in the alternative media, Web logs, and even popular hip-hop music.
"Katrina was not simply a wake-up call, it brought people out of their state of complacency," explained Associate Professor Marcyliena Morgan of the Department of Communication. "The hip-hop generation, with its long memory, will not forget about what happened."
Morgan referenced surveys conducted over the past several weeks to illustrate how dramatically race influenced perceptions of the hurricane disaster. Asked whether the government had responded to the storm swiftly enough, far more blacks than whites expressed dissatisfaction. And when the question was whether President Bush cared about black people, opinions were even more racially divided. The overwhelming majority of whites responded "yes," while most of the blacks surveyed said "no."
Remarkably, this intense discussion of race had its moments of levity, most notably when one speaker showcased a newspaper article on some prominent African Americans who voiced their outrage. The report mistakenly identified hip-hop artist Kanye West as Cornel West, the Princeton University professor well known for his studies of race and religion. Audiences also were amused to recall President Bush's speech days after the hurricane when, instead of addressing the suffering of the masses, he focused on the damage endured by one particular senator, Trent Lott, the Republican from Mississippi. Bush talked of his sadness upon learning of the destruction of Lott's home, and spoke lightly of how a new, improved house would rise from the rubble.
As that gaffe showed, class has become as important an issue as race, both in the response to Katrina and the media coverage of it. Professor David Palumbo-Liu of the Department of Comparative Literature offered a number of statistics to suggest how U.S. policies had failed to protect the country's poorest citizens. He cited the relatively small amount devoted to social programs in the United States, as well as falling tax rates, particularly for the wealthiest citizens, which have left fewer resources available for emergency response.
Associate Professor Debra Satz of the Department of Philosophy concurred, saying Hurricane Katrina may have been improperly labeled a natural disaster since its most disastrous consequences seemed to be the result of poor planning and grossly insufficient response. "Hurricane Katrina was unusual not so much for its strength but for the way it endured and festered," she noted. "A week after the disaster there were still bodies floating around the city."
Satz said that while massive storms are not necessarily preventable, they are predictable. Failure to respond to repeated warnings about aging levees surrounding New Orleans or to implement an evacuation plan for a population largely dependent on public transportation, she said, begged for a distinction to be drawn between simple misfortune and serious injustice. "The government's inaction in the face of the disaster was an act of passive injustice," she said. She asked the audience to consider whether the country had relied too much on voluntary charity to handle a disaster created largely by a negligent government.
While everyone might hope that the massive loss of lives and homes and the strong public outcry following Hurricane Katrina would lead to significant change in government policies, some panelists were skeptical. Offering a historical view of disasters in the United States, Professor David Brady of the Graduate School of Business noted that when it comes to respecting the sheer force of nature, many Americans seem to have a short memory.
Brady recalled the massive flooding along the Mississippi River in 1993, which produced widespread death and devastation and seemed at the time to leave a lasting lesson about the hazards of building on flood plains. Indeed, more federal funds were allocated for flood prevention and disaster assistance after the 1993 floods. But the reality, Brady said, is that much of that money ultimately ended up in local pork barrel legislation used to fund even more development in flood-prone areas.
"Today on the Mississippi, there is a higher probability than there was 12 years ago that rain will generate flooding," he said.
—Andrea Orr