Remarks on Hurricane Katrina

Ted Everett

Geneseo panel discussion 10/20/05

One of the most interesting facts about the recent hurricane in New Orleans is what turns out to have been the severe exaggeration of the problems that the storm left behind, especially the alleged wild criminality of the city's residents, both within the Superdome and on the streets. It now appears that despite many reports to the contrary, there was no widespread violence (though there was plenty of looting), no shots being fired at rescue helicopters, and very few murders for what is ordinarily a very violent city. Why were these allegations so widely broadcast with so little evidence, so much hyped by politicians, esp. black politicians, and so much celebrated by critics of America both at home and abroad? I think I know something of the answer, which begins with a little bit of background literature.

John Stuart Mill was the greatest philosopher of Victorian England, and also an officer of the British East India Company, which ruled much of the Third World throughout the Nineteenth Century. In his famous essay On Liberty, he argues forcefully for a society founded on the principles of maximum personal freedom and maximum personal responsibility. People should be free do as they like, says Mill, as long as they are not actively harming other people, and then be required to take the consequences of their chosen actions. This is the only way to be fully oneself, and the only way to reach the highest forms of happiness. But he makes some exceptions to this rule, and here is the most important one:

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.

The British writer Rudyard Kipling made something of the same point much more vividly in his poem The White Man's Burden:

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

This is the model of British Imperialism: that the Third World is a savage place, full of violent but childish people, who are therefore not fully responsible for their actions. It is the responsibility of us, the white people of advanced societies like Great Britain, to take care of these less developed people, until such time as they have achieved the kind of moral maturity that we identify with true civilization. This is our thankless duty as the grownups of the world.

Now, here is what a modern British newspaper, the Daily Mail, has said about Katrina, under the headline "Katrina lays bare America's failings":

The scenes are reminiscent of a drought-stricken African state where starving refugees piteously cry for help - yet this is a great city in the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Bodies lie where they drop and crosses are painted on doors to mark places of death... marauding armed gangs loot, rape and kill... relief workers are shot at... people die for want of drinking water. The awesome natural force of Hurricane Katrina laid New Orleans low. The horrors that followed are largely man-made. Within hours of the storm the flimsy facade of civilised behaviour crumbled and anarchy took hold.

Many other foreign papers have piled on in the same way. But it is not just foreigners who seem to so eager to view America this way. It is also many in the American media like Newsweek magazine, which stated frankly that "it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole." And many political figures have said similar things – on both sides, but particularly black and leftist sources. Four days after the storm, Randall Robinson of TransAfrica was spreading the rumor that "black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive.” The black mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, described the people in the Superdome as "almost animalistic", while the black police superintendent Eddie Compass (now removed) was claiming that "little babies" in the Superdome were getting raped by grown black men.

So, if this is what black people are supposed to be like under stress, who are we supposed to hold responsible for their circumstances and for their behavior? Who is basically to blame for all this mess? Given a choice between the freaked-out local black authorities, the weeping, paralyzed, obstructive woman Governor Blanco, and the more distant federal administration – given this choice of targets, who do we seek to blame? It is the middle-aged, Republican, white men in suits, and George Bush most of all. This automatic, almost instinctive attribution of responsibility to white Republicans whenever black people suffer, fail, or lose their self-control is part of an increasingly familiar, but I think disastrous, dysfunctional-family pattern into which this country has fallen over the past few decades: grumpy but stoical Republican daddies, caring but often hysterical Democratic mommies, and helpless, incessantly demanding minority children. And I don't see how this pattern can correct itself as long as women and minorities, particularly black public officials, keep insisting on their need to be taken care of, to the extent of flaunting and exaggerating their own supposed immaturities for the temporary satisfaction of receiving groveling apologies and big piles of treats. Because – and here I am telling you a secret – middle-aged Republican white men do not really mind being shrieked at by the self-defined dependent wives and savage children of America, any more than the British Imperialists really minded being hated by the foreign nations who they saw as their historical dependents. White male Republicans enjoy being held to high standards, higher than anybody else. They enjoy taking responsibility, even for things that aren't their fault. They enjoy being the grownups.