Katrina: Too Much Blame, Not Enough Responsibility

...Katrina also recharged a public discussion about the shame of poverty in the United States—for a few weeks at least...

...Katrina opened a new discussion about government capacity and spending priorities that we should keep going...

...These are fine demands, worthy of widespread support...

...Perhaps Michael Brown and other high Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials should be blamed for not knowing that tens of thousands of people were sweltering and starving in the Superdome...

...But this blame game is only possible because the social processes that cause the harms are so large and integrated that in fact responsibility is widely shared—there is some truth behind most of the attributions of responsibility in the game...

...In the context of social processes and political discussion, this focus on individual agents deflects attention from the structural processes to which large numbers of individuals and organizations contribute...

...Because the capacities of government today are stretched much too thin, any serious radical program has to call for rebuilding governmental capacity— by changing spending priorities and, yes, by raising taxes...

...Many of these lost absolutely everything, and most of them still have no homes and bleak futures...

...Many more are only just above this inadequate measure...

...It is, or was, a moment when calls for restoring the estate taxes and higher income taxes for rich people might get a hearing...

...When it comes to protecting people from need and infrastructure failure, our governments at all levels have a poor record...

...If blame can stick to another agent, then I am implicitly absolved or at least found less blameworthy...

...Still, programs like these are insufficient, in at least two respects...

...The Bush administration has done nothing significant to reduce poverty or its effects on people's opportunities, and many of its policies arguably exacerbate poverty...

...We usually apply blame to a determinate event—a punch in the nose or an oil spill...

...They responded defensively and threw blame back onto federal officials...

...Thus, the hurricane evacuation plan for New Orleans failed to include provision of transportation for those residents without means of their own, most of whom were black and living in predominantly black neighborhoods...

...For a few weeks at least, it was no longer taboo to suggest that some citizens and organizations should pay more taxes in order to protect us all from the effects of disaster...

...Congress is considering a proposal to cut $35 billion of previously allocated funds in order to pay for Katrina relief...

...But the hearings begun by the U.S...

...Of course, citizens and their representatives should demand an account of the human and bureaucratic reasons for any massive failure of institutions to protect people...

...Seize the Day Katrina's aftermath was a significant moment, one when perhaps the whole nation felt regret that we as a collective have allowed people to be so vulnerable...

...For decades, it has ignored the sad state of the sewers and drainage systems and has allowed the filling of wetlands for development of luxury condominiums...

...Census, in 2004, 12.7 percent of all those counted in the United States lived at or below what the federal government defines as poverty—more than thirty-eight million people...

...How is it possible that American infrastructure has become so precarious...

...As I write, in early November, the U.S...

...I don't mean to invoke structural processes as a means of denying responsibility...

...Responsibility for this kind of racism goes not only to local, state, and federal agencies and officials, but also to private developers, landlords, business owners, educators, housing consumers, and others...

...For more than a quarter century, the dominant philosophy of public assistance has claimed that poor people are personally responsible for their fates, and officials have instituted policies designed to make them "self-sufficient...

...The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), for example, has published a fifteenpoint program that includes a right of return for evacuees...

...When rapper Kanye West said that George Bush doesn't care about black people, he attributed to Bush a willful indifference or positive dislike that led him to allow the hurricane to wreak its havoc without government protection of the black people affected...

...The hurricane was a huge natural disaster...

...At least since the days of Ronald Reagan, however, every presidential administration has refused to support tax policies that would enable government to invest in infrastructure and fight poverty at levels that would seriously address these problems...

...Full repair of the nation's roads and bridges would require $437 billion...

...My anger grew as I learned of the horrific conditions many of these people endured for days in the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center— conditions that Jesse Jackson likened to the "hull of a slave ship...

...The only alternatives are moving money from the military or raising more revenue for governments...

...Many tax cuts or refusals to raise taxes, especially at local and state levels, have been the outcome of direct referenda...

...The Bush administration's phased abolition of the estate tax and restructuring of the income tax may be some of the boldest moves at the federal level—in the wake of Katrina, even some Republicans have been saying that these measures may be delayed...

...Katrina has certainly been treated in this way...

...States that commit to that document are bound to raise their direct foreign assistance to poor people around the world to 0.7 percent of their Gross National Product...

...Massive private resources are certainly needed for the even bigger antipoverty and infrastructure program I have in mind, but there is no substitute for government as the organizer of collective action...

...Looking Outward On September 14, George W. Bush told the UN General Assembly that the United States has decided to support the Millennium Declaration of 2000...

...The events and discussion around Katrina revealed shared responsibilities that existed long before—and still exist...

...According to some reports, for example, the operators and employers of some nursing homes in New Orleans abandoned the residents to the flood...

...massive public works job training...

...It does mean, though, that we should not focus on a few individuals or institutions...

...Many citizens share responsibility for these massive failures of government...

...We heard little discussion of this disaster in the United States, including little discussion of our responsibility to help...

...Days later it became clear that he and his allies plan to fund such programs by cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from other social programs...

...Most of the people who act within the institutions that produce racial subordination and marginalization believe that they (we) are playing by the rules to achieve their (our) legitimate goals...

...According to the Environmental Protection Agency, every year there are seven million cases of mild to moderate illnesses related to unsafe water supplies in the United States, resulting in 1,200 deaths...

...In response to outrage at the slow response to this catastrophe, some officials said, "Don't blame me—it's the system...

...A policy of helping Katrina survivors by cutting supports for other poor people is outrageous and unacceptable...

...We should think instead in terms of responsibility and accountability, as distinct from blame or fault...

...The administration has cut funding for the Army Corps of Engineers and for FEMA...

...For a while after Katrina, public discussion acknowledged that these evils, although particularly egregious in the Gulf, also exist in many other regions of the United States...

...Anger is not an inchoate emotion, but rather directed...

...Because Pakistan is a major ally of the Bush administration in the "war on terror," and because the scale of this disaster is so huge, Condoleezza Rice dropped into Pakistan quickly to offer U.S...

...support, which as of this writing has amounted to a few million dollars and some helicopters...

...Some black organizations and writers have urged a comprehensive and radical program for Katrina survivors...

...Being angry means being angry at...

...The rest of the world will just have to fend for itself...

...I don't mean that no one should be blamed for some of the awful things that happened in the wake of Katrina...

...direct aid amounted to 0.16 percent of GNP, far below the current country average of 0.42 percent...

...There may be some truth in such claims...

...I want to explore this line of thinking here...

...Who is responsible for these long-standing, nationwide circumstances...

...The main problem is what Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in 1968 called institutional racism: the overall structure of our society and some of its most mundane habits produce racialized oppression...

...IRIS YOUNG teaches political philosophy at the University of Chicago...

...The government was slow and inept in responding to the needs of poor people...

...Families headed by black and Latino single women had poverty rates just under 40 percent in 2004...

...When I invoke "structure," however, my claim is that the disaster was more humanly devastating than it might have been if certain background conditions had not existed...

...American leftists arguing for fairer and higher taxation at all levels of government in order to eliminate poverty need, therefore, to think of poverty globally and not just locally...

...restoration and building of 44 DISSENT / Winter 2006 affordable public housing for Katrina survivors...

...The creation of the Department of Homeland Security apparently made the bureaucracy more inefficient...

...According to the Federal Highway Safety Administration, more than half of America's roads are in substandard condition...

...First, the people to whom they refer as beneficiaries and participants are the survivors of Katrina (and Rita) in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas...

...government and all relevant state governments, but these are not accompanied by demands for politicians to change spending priorities and for relatively well-off individuals and businesses to pay a great deal more to governments at all levels...

...We have also learned that poor maintenance of infrastructure is neither limited to the Gulf region nor to levees...

...The answer is that it is ideologues of small government and politicians who keep themselves in office by refusing to raise taxes or by "restructuring" the tax system and cutting taxes...

...For example, they are requiring state governments not now serving survivors with their Medicaid programs to turn over some of their funds to states that are serving survivors...

...There, as here, poor people were the most horribly affected...

...Rhetorics of blame can get in the way of taking action against structural injustices for which many of us share responsibility...

...For at least three decades, some of them have led active tax revolts that many others have joined...

...In the aftermath of Katrina, much public discussion focused on whether anyone was to blame for the suffering, and if so, who...

...On July 26, 2005, monsoon rains flooded the Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay...

...To the extent that these politicians rightly believed that it was political suicide to do otherwise, the people generally share responsibility for growing poverty and dangerous levees and bridges...

...Former FEMA head Michael Brown 42 DISSENT / Winter 2006 bore much of the blame, which he tried to project onto local mayors and state governments...

...Is racism part of the story of why so many suffered from Katrina...

...I have four reasons to be wary of a political discourse of blame in this case and in many other situations of justified public outrage...

...The poverty rate declined somewhat during the economic boom years of the 1990s...

...Many of them deplore acts of racial hatred or overt discrimination, and some have good intentions in wanting to ameliorate racial inequality...

...Responsibility has to be spread across a large number of actors, some of whom may not be aware of their contributions, and most of whom act according to rules and practices that we typically regard as normal...

...Transportation systems, dams, retaining walls, hazardous waste handling and treatment facilities, among other elements of our infrastructure, have not been properly maintained for decades and pose immediate threats to public safety...

...But the problem does not reduce to individual acts of hate or discrimination...

...The hurricane revealed how cruel are the implications of expecting self-sufficiency: DISSENT / Winter 2006 43 when disaster strikes the effects can be deadly...

...This is, or was, a moment when campaigns to counter poverty, institutional racism, and perverse spending priorities might get serious support...

...These facts were there for the looking before Katrina hit, but I can't recall any extended public discussion of the need to invest in infrastructure...

...Some commentators have tried to affix blame for a specific set of events, namely the official response to Katrina's devastating effects on people, animals, property, and the environment...

...All over the Gulf region where Katrina and Rita hit, poor black people suffered most because processes of residential segregation have concentrated them in low-lying, environmentally dangerous areas in unsafe dwellings...

...Since Katrina, some commentators have argued that private individuals and associations, such as churches, can be the main providers of services to survivors and resources for rebuilding...

...Arguably, however, more harm and injustice result from thoughtless negligence, sloppiness, indifference, miscommunication, incomplete coordination, and the cumulative effect of many actions, each of which may seem harmless or even helpful...

...But we can't adopt such an isolationist position—especially not now, when the public may be receptive to calls for fighting poverty with new programs that require new taxes...

...Their opportunism wouldn't work, however, if voters didn't clamor for less taxation...

...In our anger we rightly assume that the devastation Katrina wrought was (in part) preventable...

...During the 1980s the poverty rate rose every year, reaching a high of 15.1 percent in 1993...

...There's no time to waste...

...In 2004, U.S...

...In the aftermath of Katrina, we heard charges of racism...

...Usually they meant that government bureaucracies were not able to deliver speedy rescue and relief...

...What we seek blame for has temporal boundaries and is now over...

...Malevolent Intent...

...On Saturday, October 8, a huge earthquake took more than fifty thousand lives in northern Pakistan and western India and left several million mostly poor and rural people hungry and homeless as the snow falls...

...In his speech of September 15 on the empty stage of New Orleans's French Quarter, George W. Bush promised to fund massive programs for Katrina survivors and to create a Gulf Opportunity Zone in the region where it hit, with massive federal investment to rebuild...

...But the fact that George Bush felt it necessary to support the Millennium Declaration, at least in words, signifies a growing global agreement that the richer countries have an obligation to contribute to programs to end poverty everywhere in the world...

...The event stands out as exceptional against a background assumed as normal...

...Some of these claims may be warranted...

...Some suggested that "the blame game" is unproductive, and that we should accept that when disaster hits, no humans are to blame for the hurt that follows...

...They think that they are being singled out as particularly bad, and they believe that they are accused unfairly...

...Almost anywhere disaster hits, it hurts poor people the most...

...Without a doubt...

...I haven't noticed the moment being seized, however, by Democratic politicians or progressive civic leaders...

...But responsibility for crumbling infrastructure and unaddressed poverty, as well as the continued association of poverty with race, does not rest only with the current administration...

...There have been numerous claims that African Americans were discriminated against by white emergency responders or service providers...

...It generated more wrenching talk about race and class than we have heard in decades...

...As in mystery novels, when we find who did it, we absolve other people, who by implication didn't do it...

...Congress are too focused on separating blameworthy individuals from others, and will probably not ask whether private and public policies over a long time have rendered some Americans particularly vulnerable to harm...

...According to data from the U.S...

...Most of the officials blamed for inadequate government response to Katrina have reacted defensively, and blame-switching has been rampant...

...The agency estimates that outdated bridge design or poor road conditions are a factor in 30 percent of all fatal highway accidents...

...And certainly, there is much malevolence in this world...

...In the wake of Katrina, commentators have rightly reviewed policies of the Bush administration that help account for these problems...

...46 DISSENT / Winter 2006...

...To name structural phenomena DISSENT / Winter 2006 41 does not imply that no one has responsibility for them...

...When public discussion of suffering and injustice focuses on whom to blame, general distrust and cynicism often result, and this could be politically counterproductive when it is imperative that large numbers of private and public individuals and agencies cooperate to meet huge needs...

...about eight million of them lived in shanty towns before the flood...

...How is it possible that our institutions have deprived so many people—many of them very young, very old, or disabled—of resources and support...

...But I want to argue that, for the most part, in the aftermath of Katrina (and Rita)—as in other social processes involving many events, institutions, and actors—seeking culprits is bad politics...

...Defensiveness and Blame-switching When public anger targets particular individuals, they naturally react defensively...

...participation of local community people in planning and rebuilding areas destroyed by Katrina in a manner that protects the cultural integrity of black residents and other people of color...

...Since Katrina we have learned that the levees in New Orleans were poorly maintained for decades, and that a number of experts predicted several years ago that they were liable to breach with a bad hurricane...

...Since the year 2000, however, it has, once again, risen every year...

...The agency estimates that more than $76 billion must be invested immediately to protect public health...

...Too Small a Time Frame This brings me to the biggest problem with a rhetoric of blame...

...No doubt there are many reasons for this, but one of them is clear: most government agencies charged with these tasks have insufficient resources to do the job...

...A story circulated, for example, that culprits intentionally blasted open the levee that flooded New Orleans's Ninth Ward in order to divert water from white neighborhoods...

...Focus on Individuals Practices of blaming look for "whodunit...

...There is no question that Katrina survivors who have lost homes, jobs, and in some cases family members deserve immediate and long-term help to rebuild their lives and communities...

...But the disaster ripped bandages from wounds of race and class festering all over the country, and so this moment cries out for a movement that can make similar demands for nationwide programs of affordable housing, public works jobs (not just "training"), better wages, and community control of development processes in low income neighborhoods...

...It was about time for the richest country in the world to make this commitment—but Bush pledged no money...

...Certainly, many well-off people in other countries show the same indifference to the poor as do better-off people in the United States, and they too should be more willing to pay for antipoverty programs...

...The public discussion in India in the wake of that flood was very much like what we heard here after Katrina...

...In order to support that understanding, though, we have to look at governmental, economic, and social processes for decades before Katrina—processes that were part of the background, assumed to be normal and acceptable...

...Many Americans might say that the problems of deteriorating infrastructure, festering poverty, racism, and government incapacity DISSENT / Winter 2006 45 that Katrina has thrown in our faces are so severe that we should devote all available resources to addressing them...

...And who is responsible for that...

...Second, N'COBRA phrases its program as a set of demands on the U.S...

...That is a crime...

...A few, such as a senator from my state, Barack Obama, argued that blame is indeed unproductive, but that all of us should think about the responsibilities our government and citizens have to people vulnerable in the face of natural disaster...

...Although we know that infrastructure has suffered from inadequate maintenance and construction for decades, current policies continue to cut back...

...The larger issue is, however, structural...

...People suffer deep injustices not primarily because other specific individuals despise them, but because of the way many institutions ignore and divide them and tend to promote the interests of people powerful enough to influence the design of those institutions and the decisions made in them...

...Primary among these conditions is the longterm crumbling of infrastructure needed to protect people from harm and the social processes that have made so many Americans poor or close to poor...

...In the practice of blaming, we tend to see those blamed as guilty of willful harm...

...Conditions that have been accepted as normal moved for a while from background to foreground, where government and industry must bear responsibility for them along with ordinary citizens...

...In order to pay for rebuilding in the Gulf region, for example, the administration has delayed indefinitely a $20 billion plan to improve the dangerously failing infrastructure of the Great Lakes, the largest fresh water system in the world...

...giving priority to antiterrorist activity diverted attention from measures to protect people from natural disaster...

...There, as here, it is wrong for our societies to allow people to be so vulnerable...

...Trying to identify the cabal of bigots whose intended goal is to keep blacks down is easier than coming to terms with the paradox that normal practices within which people act with good intentions continue to produce significant evil...

...She thanks Maggie Coleman and Michael Dawson for their help on this essay...

...Focus on assigning blame for a timebound set of recent events and actions deflects from this longer structural view...

...The Bush administration also proposes direct redistribution of funds from other parts of the country to the Gulf...

...Investment in infrastructure has been inadequate for decades, involving both Republicans and Democrats in local and state, as well as federal, governments...

...A policy of rebuilding in Alabama at the expense of Michigan is just as unacceptable...

...Justified anger usually seeks culprits—the individuals and organizations who should be blamed for the wrongs people suffer...

...We take it for granted that an advanced industrial society should have a functioning infrastructure, and we rarely think about it...

...Military spending and the use of personnel and equipment for open-ended wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have diverted resources from investment in the physical, environmental, and economic security of people inside the United States...

...Most of us share responsibility...

...They then look around for other blameworthy people, who in turn look for still others, in the process known as "blame-switching...

...That limitation reinforces the idea that the disaster is a time-bound event that warrants special programs...