[A-List] Mike Davis on Kerry and African Americans

["Stan Goff" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Davis

POOR, BLACK AND LEFT BEHIND

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan
looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture.
Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old
and car-less - mainly Black - were left behind in their below-sea-
level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery
wrath.

New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable
submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane.  Civil
defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on
hand to deal with the worst-case scenario.  But no one seemed to
have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city's poorest or
most infirm residents.

The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's
daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the "large
group...mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who
wanted to evacuate but couldn't.

 Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain,
did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome
and a few schools to desperate residents.   He was reportedly
worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the
Superdome.

In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official
callousness toward poor Black folk endures.

Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful
developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest
segment of the population - blamed for the city's high crime rates
- across the Mississippi river.

Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make
room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart.  In other
housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as
trivial as their children's curfew violations.

The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans
- one big Garden District - with chronic poverty hidden away in
bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.

But New Orleans isn't the only the case-study in what Nixonians
once called the politics of 'benign neglect.'   In Los Angeles,
county supervisors have just announced the closure of the
emergency room and trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr.
Hospital near Watts.

The hospital, located in the epicenter of LA's gang wars, is one of
the nation's busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot wounds.
The loss of its ER, according to paramedics, could "add as much
as 30 minutes in transport time to other facilities."

The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths.
But then again the victims will be Black or Brown and poor.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 Civil Rights Act approaches,
the United States seems to have returned to degree zero of moral
concern for the majority of descendants of slavery and
segregation.   Whether the Black poor live or die seems to merit
only haughty disinterest and indifference.

Indeed, in terms of the life-and-death issues that matter most to
African-Americans - structural unemployment, race-based
superincarceration,  police brutality, disappearing affirmative
action, and failing schools - the present presidential election
might be taking place in the 1920s.

But not all the blame can be assigned to the current occupant of
the former slaveowners' mansion at the end of Pennsylvania
Avenue.  The mayor of New Orleans, for example, is a Black
Democrat, and Los Angeles County is a famously Democratic
bastion.

No, the political invisibility of people of color is a strictly
bipartisan
endeavor.   On the Democratic side, it is the culmination of the
long crusade waged by the Democratic Leadership Council to
exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow Coalition.

The DLC, of course, has long yearned to bring white guys and fat
cats back to a Nixonized Democratic Party.   Arguing that race had
fatally divided Democrats, the DLC has tried to bleach the Party by
marginalizing civil rights agendas and Black leadership.

African-Americans, it is cynically assumed, will remain loyal to the
Democrats regardless of the treasons committed against them.
They are, in effect, hostages.

Thus the sordid spectacle - portrayed in Fahrenheit 9/11 - of
white Democratic senators refusing to raise a single hand in
support of the Black Congressional Caucus's courageous
challenge to the stolen election of November 2000.

The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, steers a straight DLC course
toward oblivion.   No Democratic presidential candidate since
Eugene McCarthy has shown such patrician disdain toward the
Democrats' most loyal and fundamental social base.

While Connie Rice hovers tight-lipped and constant at Dubya's
side, the highest ranking, self-proclaimed 'African American' in the
Kerry camp is Teresa Heinz.

This crude joke has been compounded by Kerry's semi-suicidal
reluctance to mobilize Black voters.   As Rainbow Coalition
veterans like Ron Waters have bitterly pointed out, Kerry has been
absolutely churlish about financing voter registration drives in
African-American communities.

Ralph Nader - I fear - was cruelly accurate when he warned
recently that "the Democrats do not win when they do not have
Jesse Jackson and African Americans in the core of the
campaign."

In truth, Kerry, the erstwhile war hero, is running away as hard as
he can from the sound of the cannons, whether in Iraq or in
America's equally ravaged inner cities.

The urgent domestic issue, of course, is unspeakable socio-
economic inequality, newly deepened by fiscal plunder and
catastrophic plant closures.  But inequality still has a predominant
color, or, rather, colors: black and brown.

Kerry's apathetic and uncharismatic attitude toward people of
color will not repaired by last-minute speeches or campaign staff
appointments.  Nor will it be compensated by his super-ardent
efforts to woo Reagan Democrats and white males with war
stories from the ancient Mekong.

A party that in every real and figurative sense refuses to shelter the
poor in a hurricane will not mobilize the moral passion necessary
to overthrow George Bush, the most hated man on earth.