From Transit-rider to Refugee
My mom and brother spent 2 days in New Orleans a week before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. They flew back to Vancouver on Monday from Houston, just as New Orleans was sinking.
We had dinner tonight for the first time since their return. My mother - who is not the most racially tolerant person in the world - couldn't stop complaining about the "rude, black people on the buses" in New Orleans.
Yet, even my mother went silent when I mentioned off-hand that most of her fellow busriders were probably amongst those left in New Orleans post-evacuation. If my time in Los Angeles taught me anything, it's that the only the tourists and the lower classes ride public transit - and that if I were relegated to riding the bus full-time in the U.S., I sure as hell couldn't afford to leave my home with 24 hours notice.
So this article on the folks left behind in the Gulf Coast cities strikes a bit of a chord.
And so does this story, which asks why the heck reporters haven't asked each other, "Can you explain to our viewers, who by now have surely noticed, why 99 percent of the New Orleans evacuees we're seeing are African-American?"
We had dinner tonight for the first time since their return. My mother - who is not the most racially tolerant person in the world - couldn't stop complaining about the "rude, black people on the buses" in New Orleans.
Yet, even my mother went silent when I mentioned off-hand that most of her fellow busriders were probably amongst those left in New Orleans post-evacuation. If my time in Los Angeles taught me anything, it's that the only the tourists and the lower classes ride public transit - and that if I were relegated to riding the bus full-time in the U.S., I sure as hell couldn't afford to leave my home with 24 hours notice.
So this article on the folks left behind in the Gulf Coast cities strikes a bit of a chord.
And so does this story, which asks why the heck reporters haven't asked each other, "Can you explain to our viewers, who by now have surely noticed, why 99 percent of the New Orleans evacuees we're seeing are African-American?"
posted by drunken monkey at 11:30 PM
2 Comments:
this whole thing makes me so angry! it's so awful how the news coverage started off showing only white people in peril and now they have no choice--they HAVE to show the black people on TV.
Makes me angry too. It's a little mindblowing when people can say nobody could have "anticipated" the levees breaking and the tens of thousands stuck in New Orleans.
It never ceases to amaze me how blind people can willingly be to the gap between the haves and the have-nots in their home countries.
(that's not just a jab at the U.S. - us Canadians could probably learn a thing or two from this disaster.)
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