Refugee, Victim or Survivor

Boy, was the discussion today difficult! What have we learned from Hurricane Katrina and the race issue in America? As I was searching for this answer, I couldn't find a clear cut one, except that racism is still prevalent, just in different forms, as professor Chavez said. I came across a package called "Katrina: Racial Lesson Lost" where it talks about if race played a role in the situation. To answer the question of why some people chose to stay, a question I asked my cousin who lived in the lower ninth ward, he responded "Where am I going to go? If I go for help, who are they going to help first, me or them people not from around here?" This is why I was so quiet in class. It's almost unexplainable, the reasons some of the people stayed. Some of the factors include the warning time, transportation, living options, etc. In my cousin's case, he felt like whatever he does, he is going to get the short stick. A feeling that was relived every day just because he couldn't afford to get out of the lower ninth ward. Going down there afterward was so hard. My family decided not to go until the city was somewhat better. Before going, I watched the Spike Lee documentary called When The Levees Broke. It can, or should, be able to answer most of the questions you have.

In the case of the media coverage, I had some personal thoughts. I am inclined to think that the reason the word refugee was used was because when the reporters went to New Orleans and saw the people in the Superdome, the majority of them black, they immediately related all the colored faces with the colored people we see when we see refugees. As if all the dark faces triggered the thought of refugees from Africa or something. I asked myself if the same thought would occur if the Superdome would have been filled with majority white people. My take is that while the word refugee was a correct, according to definition, yet sensationalized for the situation, someone should have brought up that there could be a possibility that people, especially the majority that was discussed, would interpret the word refugee negatively; being that when you normally here the word refugee, it's a person from another country. And to take it a step further, some people in the black community felt that Bush was against them, in a way helping to keep them inferior to the majority. So, when the response wasn't reasonable, and the word came out, some felt like it was another way for society to continue to degrade the black race. I'm not speaking for all black people, just the ones I talked to.

The two pictures, looting and surviving... after looking at this Web site http://www.snopes.com/katrina/photos/looters.asp, I found it interesting that the photographer not from our country wanted to be careful of how he wanted to portray the image he had taken. Meanwhile, our fellow citizen photographer, although making the claim that he actually witnessed the young man breaking in and taking the food out, came up with looting, instead of being worried about how to portray these victims. Not that what I would do is absolutely right, but I would have, in both cases, spoke with my editor and pitch that we should talk about the survival tactics, such as 'finding' food in abandoned stores, among other techniques that people did to stay alive. That would have been the angle of my story. I met a man who told me how, after having to reject helping a woman out of the water because when he and some of the people he ended up floating with pulled her up, poisonous snakes, yes plural, were attached to her legs, he thought of many different ways to stay out of the water. I'd rather read that than about someone getting food, but said to be stealing. It comes down to everybody did something in order to survive. I mean, was the young man supposed to anchor himself in front of the store and wait for the food and drink to float out to him? Pray that somebody else doesn't float by and grab it before he does? It makes sense for him to wait starving, staring at food that may not float out. NO!