The real divide.

NEW ORLEANS IS MY HOMETOWN, and most of my family members live there. Right now, they're mainly strewn across south Louisiana and Mississippi, staying with other relatives, with no idea when they'll be able to return even to assess the damage, much less to salvage and reconstruct their lives. So we're all in a kind of limbo, or suspended animation.

By the time this article appears, something like a final death toll from the horror in New Orleans will be known, and there will be dollar figures in the incomprehensible billions assigned to the total damage. We will have been told repeatedly and in definitive tones by gushing talking heads where New Orleans and Katrina in general rank on the all-time list of American catastrophes--none of which, of course, conveys any real sense of what has occurred and its impact on the city and its people.

Everyone who reads The Progressive will know that the horror that has occurred in New Orleans was entirely preventable. For years, the New Orleans Times-Picayune annually had punctuated the hurricane season's arrival with detailed articles warning that the levee system needed shoring up and quite possibly would not survive a category 4 or strong category 3 storm. As many readers know, similar articles in major newspapers and magazines around the country at one time or another had reported on the city's precarious situation and described how much of it could be inundated in case of a storm-induced levee breach. Many will know also that in 2001 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) listed a major hurricane in New Orleans as one of the three most likely disasters in the United States.

Most readers, therefore, will also know that when George W. Bush offered as an explanation for his continuing inaction nearly three days after the city began filling with water that no one could have anticipated that the levee would break, he was a lying sack of shit.

But he was worse than that. He was an active agent in bringing this catastrophe about. Most Progressive readers will know already that the Bush Administration last year slashed funding for the levee project, in part to feed the war on Iraq. The cuts brought work on the project nearly to a standstill. The city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had all emphasized the imminent danger. Their entreaties fell on deaf ears; in fact, the Administration scuttled a Corps of Engineers study of how to protect the city. And this is not even to consider how Bush's wetlands policy made New Orleans more vulnerable by speeding erosion.

Bush finally proclaimed that he takes responsibility. Well, Mable and Salvatore Mangano, operators of St. Rita's nursing home in St. Bernard Parish, were indicted for negligent homicide because thirty-four people died in their facility after the Manganos failed to evacuate them. Bush also should be indicted.

Self-important nincompoop Michael Brown, the abominable former FEMA director and failed horse show lawyer, should be in the dock with him, as should Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary. They should spend the rest of their lives in jail.

Of course, that won't happen. That's not the way things work in the United States.

Bush, after all, was already a mass murderer in Iraq, to the tune of perhaps 100,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 1,900 American soldiers. But it's considered over the top or politically irresponsible to say so plainly.

In any official investigation of Katrina, impeachment for Bush and criminal trials for him, Brown, and Chertoff will never surface as a consideration. The investigation will no doubt focus in flamboyant meticulousness on who knew what when. There will be much back and forth about which agency or branch of government was responsible for which actions or inactions. The federal government's unconscionable delay in response will be explained as an unfortunate circumstance, a concatenation of mistakes and miscommunications, and perhaps some incompetence. Maybe Brown will become a symbolic fall guy. Not that he'll do any time, as he probably will follow his predecessor at FEMA and former college buddy Joseph Allbaugh into a lucrative lobbying/consulting career.

I seriously doubt there will be any consideration of the role that the Bush Administration's systematic hostility to government's functions played in bringing about this catastrophe in the first place. That's largely because Democratic liberals for the last twenty-five years have aided and abetted the right in shrinking and privatizing public functions. As Paul Krugman noted in The New York Times and Michael Parenti pointed out in Z, the travesty in New Orleans is the expression of the right's essential contempt for any public institutions, for the idea of the public.

Going back to Reagan, they've exhibited a thug's approach to government. Remember how Reagan opened up the Department of Housing and Urban Development to wanton and rapacious plunder by cronies? They've made a regular practice of appointing agency and department heads who were on record as enemies of the departments and their functions, with a mandate to gut them. Parking utterly unqualified hacks and cronies in five of the eight senior-most posts in FEMA shows how flagrant and unmitigated their contempt for public responsibility actually is.

The fact that Bush, Brown, and Chertoff sat on their hands for three days after word that the levee had burst was probably not the result of active malice. Their basic view of the world prevents them from recognizing the people who were imperiled on the Gulf Coast as forms of life equivalent to their own.

Bush said as much when he could notice only Trent Lott's fine old house as a casualty of the storm and reassured us all that he'd be sitting on Lott's great porch again soon, when the only image of New Orleans he could muster was a nostalgic, loutish frat boy's.

And they genuinely do not believe that government can or should play an active role in protecting the general public in any way, other than by funding the police or invading another country.

The Democrats' critique of the Bush Administration will be wonkish and abstruse. They will cast as a problem of inadequate management what is fundamentally the product of a combined commitment to vicious, reactionary ideologies and plunder. They will give us at best a replay of their lame attempt at health care reform, which from the outset defined single-payer--the only adequate option, and the only one with any support--as "off the table," primarily because of their commitments to the insurance industry and fear of seeming too different from the Republicans.

Or it'll be another version of welfare reform, which sacrificed federal income support for the indigent to show the right that they want to reward only those who "play by the rules."

Or another version of opposing the war by pledging to send more troops and claiming to be more competent at fighting it.

Worse, the major civil rights, women's, environmental, and other progressive advocacy groups tail along behind and seem incapable of pushing beyond the limits of the Democrats' "me too, but not so much" relation to the right.

And neither wing of the labor movement--original recipe or extra crispy--has come near probing at the roots of the catastrophe in New Orleans in the last two decades of bipartisan neoliberal policy. While both admirably mobilized humanitarian aid, the AFL-CIO's initial statement was pro forma and tepid in its criticism of the Bush administration. Change to Win's was small-minded and opportunistic; it called on everyone to contribute to the Red Cross and Salvation Army and demanded that the rebuilding effort not suspend worker protections. This is especially sad because the labor movement is the one vehicle we have for reaching and crafting the broad base of working people who must be the foundation of any political movement that can hope to turn this tide. And it's failing miserably.

Race in this context becomes a cheap and safely predictable alternative to pressing a substantive critique of the sources of this horror in New Orleans and its likely outcomes. Granted, the images projected from the Superdome, the convention center, overpasses, and rooftops seemed to cry out a stark statement of racial inequality. But that's partly because in the contemporary U.S., race is the most familiar language of inequality or injustice. It's what we see partly because it's what we're accustomed to seeing, what we look for. As I argued in The Nation, class--as income, wealth, and access to material resources, including a safety net of social connections--was certainly a better predictor than race of who evacuated the city before the hurricane, who was able to survive the storm itself, who was warehoused in the Superdome or convention center or stuck without food and water on the parched overpasses, who is marooned in shelters in Houston or elsewhere, and whose interests will be factored into the reconstruction of the city, who will be able to return.

New Orleans is a predominantly black city, and it is a largely poor city. The black population is disproportionately poor, and the poor population is disproportionately black. It is not surprising that those who were stranded and forgotten, probably those who died, were conspicuously black and poor. None of that, however, means that race--or even racism--is adequate as an explanation of those patterns of inequality. And race is especially useless as a basis on which to craft a politics that can effectively pursue social justice.

Before the "yes, buts" begin, I am not claiming that systemic inequalities in the United States are not significantly racialized. The evidence of racial disparities is far too great for any sane or honest person to deny, and they largely emerge from a history of discrimination and racial injustice. Nor am I saying that we should overlook that fact in the interest of some idealized nonracial or post-racial politics.

Let me be blunter than I've ever been in print about what I am saying: As a political strategy, exposing racism is wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time. It is the political equivalent of an appendix: a useless vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment that's usually innocuous but can flare up and become harmful.

There are two reasons for this judgment.

One is that the language of race and racism is too imprecise to describe effectively even how patterns of injustice and inequality are racialized in a post-Jim Crow world. "Racism" can cover everything from individual prejudice and bigotry, unself-conscious perception of racial stereotypes, concerted group action to exclude or subordinate, or the results of ostensibly neutral market forces.

It can be a one-word description and explanation of patterns of unequal distribution of income and wealth, services and opportunities, police brutality, a stockbroker's inability to get a cab, neighborhood dislocation and gentrification, poverty, unfair criticism of black or Latino athletes, or being denied admission to a boutique.

Because the category is so porous, it doesn't really explain anything. Indeed, it is an alternative to explanation.

Exposing racism apparently makes those who do it feel good about themselves. Doing so is cathartic, though safely so, in the same way that proclaiming one's patriotism is in other circles.

It is a summary, concluding judgment rather than a preliminary to a concrete argument. It doesn't allow for politically significant distinctions; in fact, as a strategy, exposing racism requires subordinating the discrete features of a political situation to the overarching goal of asserting the persistence and power of racism as an abstraction.

This leads to the second reason for my harsh judgment. Many liberals gravitate to the language of racism not simply because it makes them feel righteous but also because it doesn't carry any political warrant beyond exhorting people not to be racist. In fact, it often is exactly the opposite of a call to action. Such formulations as "racism is our national disease" or similar pieties imply that racism is a natural condition. Further, it implies that most whites inevitably and immutably oppose blacks and therefore can't be expected to align with them around common political goals.

This view dovetails nicely with Democrats' contention that the only way to win elections is to reject a social justice agenda that is stigmatized by association with blacks and appeal to an upper-income white constituency concerned exclusively with issues like abortion rights and the deficit.

Upper-status liberals are more likely to have relatively secure, rewarding jobs, access to health care, adequate housing, and prospects for providing for the kids' education, and are much less likely to be in danger of seeing their nineteen-year-old go off to Iraq. They tend, therefore, to have a higher threshold of tolerance for political compromises in the name of electing this year's sorry pro-corporate Democrat. Acknowledging racism--and, of course, being pro-choice--is one of the few ways many of them can distinguish themselves from their Republican co-workers and relatives.

As the appendix analogy suggests, insistence on understanding inequality in racial terms is a vestige of an earlier political style. The race line persists partly out of habit and partly because it connects with the material interests of those who would be race relations technicians. In this sense, race is not an alternative to class. The tendency to insist on the primacy of race itself stems from a class perspective.

For roughly a generation it seemed reasonable to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would provoke some, albeit inadequate, remedial response from the federal government. But that's no longer the case; nor has it been for quite some time. That approach presumed a federal government that was concerned at least not to appear racially unjust. Such a government no longer exists.

A key marker of the right's victory in national politics is that the discussion of race now largely serves as a way to reinforce a message to whites that the public sector is there merely to help some combination of black, poor, and loser. Liberals have legitimized this perspective through their own racial bad faith. For many whites, the discussion of race also reinforces the idea that cutting public spending is justifiably aimed at weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole or--in the supposedly benign, liberal Democratic version--teaching them "personal responsibility."

New Orleans is instructive. The right has a built-in counter to the racism charge by mobilizing all the scurrilous racial stereotypes that it has propagated to justify attacks on social protection and government responsibility all along. Only those who already are inclined to believe that racism is the source of inequality accept that charge. For others, nasty victim-blaming narratives abound to explain away obvious racial disparities.

What we must do, to pursue justice for displaced, impoverished New Orleanians as well as for the society as a whole, is to emphasize that their plight is a more extreme, condensed version of the precarious position of millions of Americans today, as more and more lose health care, bankruptcy protection, secure employment, affordable housing, civil liberties, and access to education. And their plight will be the future of many, many more people in this country once the bipartisan neoliberal consensus reduces government to a tool of corporations and the investor class alone.

Illustration by Peter Kuper

Adolph L. Reed Jr. is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the interim national council of the Labor Party.