GEORGE BUSH DOESN’T CARE ABOUT “BLACK PEOPLE.” When Kanye West ripped into the US government’s response to Hurricane Katrina at the 2005 NBC Concert for Hurricane Relief, only half the country got to hear his comments in full. NBC censored the rapper’s off-script statement before broadcasting the fundraiser on the West Coast. Any hope West had that his words might bring lasting change was soon eroded as he was derided online and in the media: TIME’s “Top 10 Outrageous Kanye West Moments” lumped the incident with his upstaging of Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards. But, says Channon Miller, a PhD candidate and an instructor in CAS’ American & New England Studies Program, West was making an important point about the nation’s response to the disaster and the media’s portrayal of the African American survivors.
“Disasters highlight how much our identities are rooted in conflict.”
The impact of the hurricane that ravaged New Orleans and left more than a million people homeless “varied across racial lines,” says Miller (GRS’18). The city’s black community had always occupied a precarious perch in society, fighting disparities in housing, schooling, and income. When disaster struck, they took the brunt of it. Most of the residents who did not—or could not—evacuate were black (nearly 60 percent of black individuals did not own a car, compared with 17 percent of whites). Those blacks who stayed struggled to access the emergency assistance and resources they so desperately needed.
Katrina showed that race remained an important topic in modern society, Miller says, and it “was being brushed over in the media and by those speaking on behalf of the president.” West and other critics “were challenging the nation’s inability to take this serious issue into account.”
Hurricane Katrina is the entry point for Miller’s CAS course on disasters in America, which examines a catastrophic event “not only structurally, but how it demolishes or challenges the identity of a community.” Miller and her students study how disasters like the Dust Bowl, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the Great Chicago Fire rip open communities and force their deeply rooted tensions and conflicts—racism, violence, gender inequality, and poverty—to the surface.
The class also examines how the media reports on—and becomes complicit in embedding—those frictions. Miller points to the September 12, 2005, cover of Newsweek, which featured a distraught black woman clutching an infant and a toddler as she raced for an evacuation bus; the caption read “A Katrina refugee and her two children.” Portraying New Orleans’ black population as refugees invokes “the idea that they were foreigners,” she says, “set apart, rather than presented as a population that had lost their homes.”
“A lot of trauma and shame has occurred in this nation, and its impact has varied depending on who you are: your class, your race, your gender.”
As they struggle to rebuild their homes, disaster survivors grapple with systemic problems like inequality and poverty, and with society’s perception of their community. Miller emphasizes that they are not helpless in this pursuit; the black residents of New Orleans reclaimed the city after Katrina, she notes, and fought to assert themselves as citizens worthy of assistance from the nation. As an example, she points to Women of the Storm, an organization of racially and economically diverse women who petitioned Congress to visit New Orleans to see the need for federal relief funds. Lawmakers subsequently approved financial assistance to a housing restoration program.
“Disasters highlight how much our identities are rooted in conflict,” says Miller. From the first settlers who arrived in this country seeking independence, Americans have had to construct what it means to be American. The forging of identity “may be more complicated when it comes to the African American population or populations of color,” who constantly have had to redefine their concept of home and reestablish the right to call it their own. “A lot of trauma and shame has occurred in this nation, and its impact has varied depending on who you are: your class, your race, your gender,” Miller says. “I see America as a terrain of struggle.”
