Silent Storm: Why All the Ado About Hurricane Katrina Says Nothing About Race in America

by Saen Amaen

I sat through as many newscasts as anyone else in the days and weeks following Hurricane Katrina. I became outraged as I saw the trauma and drama of racial politics in American society daily broadcasted across the screen. I got involved in several heated debates with my colleagues over everything from the tactics of the evacuation, to the delay of Bush's reaction, to the police/military brutality, to the looters versus the finders, to abuses in the Superdome, to remarks of Barbara Bush, then to remarks of Kanye West, to the politics of Reconstruction, and finally to the issue of police and military brutality---again.

After all this discussion over these issues that literally "stormed" into our lives for a one-month period during this disaster of dramatic proportions, I have come to believe that hurricane Katrina is nothing more than a silent storm. For all that we have discussed about the issues of race and their centrality in American society as evidenced by the storm, we really have left the "realest" issues of the matter unresolved. To talk intelligently and realistically about race in America, we must abandon all the post-political gossip of emotional reactionism.

By the time events flicker across your flat planel television screen, the politics of the matter have long been decided. When the political buzz begins to blur across the channels, from Fox News to CNN to ABC to NBC to BBC, the issues have already been framed and the major decisions have already been made. While it's true that enough buzz around an issue can alter the political atmosphere, we know that in this age more than ever before, the political buzz is initiated by political institutions who have already formulated responses to these issues.The reason that I think all the fuss over Katrina says nothing about race is because the media dialogue contributed nothing to the discussion of white privilege in American society.

Until we can talk bluntly and candidly about the issue of white privilege, we are not truly talking about race in American society. On the contrary, we are discussing what white people think about race in American society. Likewise, until Africans in diaspora (a la black people everywhere) begin to frame their own issues, we are mere footnotes in a white commentary of race in America. From the issues that were framed immediately following Katrina, we see that the dialogue did not center on agency-focused African Americans desiring to initiate change. Nor did the news focus on the privilege and power concentrated in the hands of a few that prevents change. Neither did media seek to address the historical issues that inform a need for change. The post-Katrina dialogue centered on cute stories about kids sending care packages, political leaders blaming Republicans and Democrats, and whose fault it was that the damn levies (no pun intended) gave way.

When we can talk candidly about the issue of racial privilege in American society, we will allow those who have been most affected by it to frame their own perspectives and responses. We will be engaged in more than a monologue with ourselves on the virtues of goodwill Americanism. With much ado about nothing, engaging in a silent storm, we are delaying a necessary dialogue with possibly far more damaging potential than any hurricane could ever muster.