Verbal Responsability

I just received a serious reminder of why it is important to be politically correct.

I finally saw When the Levees Broke. A lot of what I learned was new information to me but not surprising. I’m black. Most black folks in America are taught to distrust the government. We’re taught by our parents and our peers. We’re taught by the police that harass and target us. We’re taught by the lawmakers who don’t consider us unless they really need the black vote to win. We’re taught by the imbalances in the allocation of government resources. We learn from an early age to expect the worst from our government and the lesson is re-taught time and time again until “trust” and “government” can only fit in the same sentence if they are accompanied by some kind of negation such as “mis-”, “not”, or “never” for example.

One of the things that I learned by watching When the Levees Broke is that there’s a bottom limit to ‘the worst’ that I expect from people. The fact that for several days, parts of the government and many of the surrounding communities didn’t lift a finger to help the Katrina victims was not a huge surprise to me when it happened or when I learned the specifics watching the documentary. The fact that the government didn’t build the “levees” (which weren’t even levees for real) properly didn’t come as a shock. The fact that prior to the storm, they’d had many warnings that something like this might happen but had still not put any serious contingency plan into effect merely reaffirmed that the government is inefficient, disorganized, and negligent.

Then I got to the part of the documentary when several people talked about trying to walk out of New Orleans on I-10. I try hard to be a realist – not to expect the best or worst necessarily, but to expect the probable. Based on the way the world tends to respond to large-scale disasters, I thought that Katrina’s effects would bring out the best in people. I expected that even if the government was slow to respond, citizens and good Samaritans would be on the scene doing what they could. I knew every citizen wouldn’t be involved – some wouldn’t be able to help and some still wouldn’t care enough. What caught me off guard was that there were American citizens whose sympathy for the plight of fellow humans was so absolutely absent that instead of just apathetically standing by and letting survivors fend for themselves, they formed a barrier. I couldn’t believe it – armed with guns, they formed a human wall across the highway and forbade the starving, elderly, sickly, and the unfortunate from leaving the disaster site.

In a conversation after the movie I brought that part up and expressed my shock. The person I was talking to told me she understood why they did that. It wasn’t something I could understand. I thought they would forget for the moment that they were scared of New Orleans residents, that they normally believed that N.O. residents were criminals and temporarily just act on the fact that they were humans in need. That’s what tends to happen during disasters. “They treated them like roaches, like pests they needed to keep out!” I said to her. “That’s just it,” was her response. To the people close to New Orleans, to the people close to Baltimore, MD, to the people close to Camden, NJ, to the people close to countless other areas with “bad reputations” the people living in those areas aren’t people, they are animals. They are a plight, pests, who at all costs should be kept out of civilized areas of the country. As soon as she said it, I realized she was right. Its not that these people didn’t care about the plight of fellow humans, its that they did not see any fellow humans.

Thinking on that, I feel guilty. I tend to be a silly person at times and I do my best to laugh off the hardest parts of life. Thinking back, I don’t know how many times I teased friends from Baltimore or folks living in Camden about the reputations of their cities. It was acceptable because it was known both by myself and the victims of my jokes that I didn’t believe the things I was saying. I’ve been to Camden and Baltimore. I know that the people are the same as you’ll find just about anywhere else. I know that there are “bad apples” who cause problems. I know that the “bad apples” in these areas simply make more noise than in other places. I know that the situations in these and similar areas are very much influenced by economic, educational, and social injustices which cultivate bad apples. I know a fellow human when I see one. I never would have poked fun if I suspected that my words might fall on the ears of people who couldn’t understand these things to some degree. Because of the people I try to surround myself with, chances are small that my words did reach such people, but still . . . I have never been blind to the effects and evidence of racism and classism in this country. I know the “isms” are still very strong in our society. But, I did think we had made some progress. I knew significant chunks of the population saw some groups as inferior, less intelligent, and more violent. I did not know that there are still substantial sets of people around who can still look at a human and see an animal.

Doubtless, there are people in this country who go way too far with political correctness, but knowing that there are people ignorant enough to do and support what those police officers did on I-10 after Katrina, can you blame them. I’ve always tried not to needlessly offend people, but now I realize that not breaking those eggshells is even more important than I thought. I don’t want to help cause opinions that can lead to instances of cruelty similar to what happened on I-10. I don’t want to be part of the problem.