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We Are No Longer the Refugees & Immigrants
Blacks in Need of Katrina Refugee Housing & Other People of Color
By Charles Chea
For the last three days, I have been
sending out e-mails and making phone calls to give information
about ways in which people can contribute to Hurricane Katrina
relief efforts. I spent time talking with individuals, with
family, and with organizations suggesting the best direction
they could take in this effort. I contacted people, regardless
of race or class, because natural disasters do not see race or
class either. However, it is unfortunate that race and class are
pervasive issues in the prevention and remedy of natural
disasters.
Therefore, as an Asian American, I make it
a pertinent effort to outreach to my fellow Asian Americans and
emphasize what their contributions could mean in the long-run.
The efforts of Asian Americans to collectively contribute to
affected areas like New Orleans and Biloxi will not only help
with immediate problems, but the gesture will have its place in
the history of diplomatic cross-cultural relations. The majority
of the Asian Americans that I have contacted are making
financial contributions, as well as material contributions of
clothing and food. Some are donating humble amounts, while
others are getting together with their community organizations
and the companies for whom they work. This is a safe distance
most of us keep because we have other “priorities.” But
since this tragedy strikes at the heart of a major black
community in the United States, the contributions of non-black
people of color must be larger than usual, and for good reason.
Donations can only go so far in the
complexity that is Hurricane Katrina. It is not just a natural
disaster, but an American Pandora’s Box exposing decades of
racial inequalities for the world to see. We are seeing images
that could be mistaken as photos from Haiti during its crises.
In New Orleans, a majority population of black people are being
barricaded from entering Algiers, the least affected and most
livable area in the city currently. They have faced the
subconscious of a racist nation in full blast, most notably with
the now notorious pictures depicting “Blacks as looters and
whites as finders.” Even worse, there have been reports of
relief workers discriminating, such as first rescuing
“vulnerable [white] tourists in the midst of chaos.” There
is race-based selectivity happening which is determining whether
or not black people will live or die.
The United States is based upon a
subconscious caste system that has been most oppressive against
blacks and has long existed before this current catastrophe.
Non-black people of color have long benefited from their
struggle with numerous black heroes and movements that made the
global Third World a major agenda. We can talk about the black
Buffalo soldiers in the Philippines who abandoned the U.S. Army
to fight on behalf of the Filipino struggle against colonialism.
We can talk about the petitioning and outspokenness of the black
community when Japanese-Americans were being interned. We can
talk about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Assata Shakur,
the Black Panthers, and other major black figures who opened
their arms to the struggles of Asians, Latino/as, and Native
Americans. They sat on major platforms and could have simply
ignored us for the sole benefit of the black community, but they
praised us and spoke on our behalf – especially Asians and
Asian Americans.
The solidarity of the past, unfortunately,
is fading quickly. I have witnessed it being bleached away for
sometime because of the growing opportunities afforded to
non-black people of color. Frustration from both black and
non-black people of color have further irritated solidarity and
the alienation continues. Many activists across the racial
spectrum have been working on trying to solve these issues, but
it has been a long and slow failure because of the inability to
find an agreeable and stable platform.
Some have completely abandoned the
possibility of ever seeing true solidarity and have adopted a
pessimistic way of reasoning. Others have been taking moderate
steps, hoping to salvage and rebuild upon its original
foundation. The rest can only see revolution as the way of
breaking down this oppression, shifting things to a completely
new platform and rebuilding from there. I agree with the
revolutionists, believing that the original plans of solidarity
can not be salvaged, but rather reinvented and rebuilt. With
this, Hurricane Katrina can be the entry to new ways of change,
but only if Asian Americans, Latino/as, and other non-black
people of color take the opportunity to do so.
In the following weeks, months, and perhaps
years, refugee housing will be needed for many of those who have
faced the devastation. The majority of these people are black,
and while people of all races will need help, it will be blacks
who will find it most difficult in their search for housing. For
those of us who are not black and honest with ourselves, we
understand that a lot of our families and friends have a wanton
stigma against blacks even prior to Hurricane Katrina.
Undoubtedly it will continue after all are evacuated, and
without intervention, it will continue in the selection of
housing. I have spoken to some Asian Americans already, a few
who were refugees themselves at one time, and they have already
been vocal about their preference to host Asians… and if not
Asian, then whites. The request is not only racially
disproportionate to the number of people in need of help, but it
is also a racist notion that can further break us apart.
This delicate situation also means that we
can push it the other way, if we take steps to promote fair
refugee housing among all communities, but especially the ones
with whom we are most familiar. Asian American activists must
make a consistent effort to diminish the anti-black stigma in
our community, while it should be expected other communities do
the same. This time is most dire, and as we have seen with the
failure of the government, racial prioritization hinders a true
humanitarian effort – a platform where race should be of least
concern and the expression of a united humanity takes physical
form. We must push our community, no matter how resistant they
are, to understand the grave affects of anti-blackness in the
United States. This means being vocal with our colleagues,
friends, family, and strangers. If the larger population of
non-black people of color were to take black people within their
homes (perhaps the most private physical domain there is), it
would be immensely powerful in bringing the community together.
Of course, this is easier said than done.
As I have stated earlier, personally, it has been very difficult
to outreach on this premise so far. But I need to keep trying.
The acknowledgment of black oppression and their contributions
to the struggle of others is the original American gospel. It is
now, in this time especially, that they need our help.
I am pleading to activists, organizers, and
educators to prioritize education about anti-blackness in our
communities and to collaborate this with the promotion of
refugee housing. If we are to be true to the fight for racial
justice, we must fight this stigma.
I am asking people who do not fit in those
categories to consider the words in this letter and to become
everyday educators. Educate yourself about the history, educate
others, and open doors for refugee housing.
If you do not feel moved by the history I
have presented, please consider the value of selflessness.
Forget race, forget class, and just consider the fact that these
people's lives were destroyed in the hands of nature.
Nothing, be it race, class, or a lack of
transportation, should get in the way of black folks and a warm
home.
chea@asiavists.org
posted 11 September 2005
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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update
17 January 2012 |
