01-12-06,9:18am

Hurricane Katrina’s violent winds and killing waters swept into the mainstream a stark realization: The poor had been abandoned by society and its institutions, and sometimes by their well-off brothers and sisters, long before the storm. We are immediately confronted with another unsavory truth: it is the exposure of the extremes, not their existence, that stumps our national sense of decency. We can abide the ugly presence of poverty so long as it doesn’t interrupt the natural flow of things, doesn’t rudely impinge on our daily lives or awareness. As long as poverty is a latent reality, a solemn social fact suppressed from prominence on our moral compass, we can find our bearings without fretting too much about its awkward persistence.

There are 37 million people in poverty in our nation, 1.1 million of whom fell below the poverty line in 2004. Some of the poorest folk in the nation, people in the Delta, have been largely ignored, rendered invisible, officially forgotten. FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] left them dangling precipitously on rooftops and in attics because of bureaucratic bumbling. Homeland Security failed miserably in mobilizing resources to rescue Katrina survivors without food, water or shelter. President Bush lighted on New Orleans only after Mayor Ray Nagin’s profanity-laced radio-show diatribe blasting the federal government for its lethal inertia. Because the government took its time getting into New Orleans, Katrina took many lives. Hundreds of folk, especially the elderly, died while waiting for help. But the government and society had been failing to pay attention to the poor since long before one of the worst natural disasters in the nation’s history swallowed the poor and spit them back up. The world saw just how much we hadn’t seen; it witnessed our negligence up close in frightfully full color. It’s not as if it was news to most folk that poverty exists in the United States. Still, there was no shortage of eureka moments glistening with discovery and surprise in the aftermath of Katrina. Poverty’s grinding malevolence is fed in part by social choices and public policy decisions that directly impact how many people are poor and how long they remain that way. To acknowledge that is to own up to our role in the misery of the poor—be it politicians we vote for who cut programs aimed at helping the economically vulnerable; the narrative of bootstrap individualism we invoke to deflect relevance of the considerable benefits we’ve received while bitterly complaining of the few breaks the poor might get; the religious myths we circulate that bring shame on the poor by chiding them for lacking the appropriate hunger to be prosperous; and the resentment of the alleged pathology of poor blacks—fueled more by stereotypes than by empirical support—that gives us license to dismiss or demonize them.

If President Bush is serious about what he said in his first speech on national television in Katrina’s aftermath, that the “deep, persistent poverty” of the Gulf Coast “has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which has cut off generations from the opportunity of America,” and that we must “rise above the legacy of inequality,” then he must foster public policy and legislation that help the poor to escape their plight. But can a self-proclaimed antigovernment president develop policy that actually improves people’s lives? Bush would have to change his mind about slashing $35 billion from Medicaid, food stamps and other social programs that help the poor combat such a vile legacy.

But it was not merely that we forgot to see or know the poor that forged the searing image of our national neglect and American amnesia. And neither was it the fact that Katrina exposed, to our horror and amazement, the bitter outlines of concentrated poverty that we have reason to be ashamed. It is not all about what we saw.…It is also about what they, the poor, saw in us, or didn’t see there, especially the government that didn’t find or feed them until it was late—too late for thousands of them. It is their surprise, not ours, that should most concern and inform us. Perhaps it is their anger, too, that is inspiring, since the outrage of the black survivors proved their tenacious loyalty to a country that hasn’t often earned it.

Excerpted with permission from Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, Chapter 1: “Unnatural Disasters,” by Michael Eric Dyson, Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania. Dyson, keynote speaker at the 2006 AFL-CIO Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration in Baton Rogue, La., Jan. 12–16, also has written many other books, including I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.

Read more from Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, which will be available Jan. 16 in hard back from Basic Civitas Books.Basic Civitas Books