Katrina article
Can't remember if I posted up here or not (my memory isn't what it used to be!) that I had an article about Katrina, Race and the Left's response printed in Left Turn Magazine (http://www.leftturn.org/Articles/Viewer.aspx?id=828&type=M). It was really powerful to write the article and to see the work that people of color are doing in the south as well as around the country to address the issues inherent in the storms, and to talk to folks about some of the things I've seen and experienced while in New Orleans and coming back in terms of white activists' behavior. I like the article, though I definitely think it has some flaws, because I didn't have as much time to write and research it as I would have wanted (there's never enough time for a writer with a deadline! As M said, "Things are never done, they're just due."). I wanted to talk to a Native organization doing work post Katrina/Rita, and had contacted two different peope but wasn't able to interview them. So there is nothing in the article about Native folks which is a huge oversight on my part, because I should have at least put something in, because the mainstream coverage of the hurricanes has so ignored and silenced Native folks and immigrants especially. But you know, you learn from your mistakes and always try to improve in the future.

I've been getting some interesting feedback from the article. Some folks have been supportive, but there are a ton of white folks who have been wiling out, just pissed, telling me that I need to bridge alliance and not "create divides" as my article down. One dude accused me of trying to provide the narrow perspective of the "new black left" (he's a white dude) and that he had talked to residents down there and they were just grateful that white folks were coming down to help them. Clearly there is so much fucking work to do. I wrote back and was like, "Hey thanks for proving the entire point of my article."

Anyway Molly who is a really awesome white anti racism and sexual health organizer in Philly wrote a great article before that I'm forwarding to all the white folks I know. =) I wanted to post it here too if folks are interested in checking it...

Solidarity not Charity: Racism in Katrina Relief Work
By Molly McClure

I recently spent three weeks working at the Common Ground Relief Clinic in New Orleans, an all-volunteer run free healthcare project that opened a week after the hurricane. The following are some thoughts I had about the difference between solidarity and charity, specifically reflecting on the role of folks like me--- white activists from out of town--- in Katrina relief work.

As many people have said, the mess of Katrina was caused by a storm of racism and poverty more than wind and water. Katrina was about the racism of war that took money away from fixing the levees and other much-needed disaster preparations and went instead to the killing of poor people of color in Iraq and around the world. Katrina was about the racism of US-led capitalism that accelerates global warming, bringing bigger hurricanes and tsunamis and other “natural disasters” which always disproportionately affect the poor. Katrina was about the legacy of slavery, which meant that many white New Orleanians had the economic resources to evacuate, such as a car or other means to escape the storm and subsequent flooding, while many Black New Orleanians did not. Katrina was about the racism of FEMA and the Bush administration in their murderously slow response (you know it would have looked different in Connecticut!). And Katrina was about the racism of the police chief of Gretna, who, with the support of his predominantly white town, turned Black survivors away at gunpoint as they tried to cross the Crescent City Bridge to safety because he “didn’t want Gretna to turn into the Superdome.”

Like most of you, I’m guessing, I was outraged and heartbroken by what I saw, and I wanted to go down and see if there was some way I could support the people of the Gulf Coast in their efforts to deal with this mess. When I got there I saw and heard devastating things, stories of loss my ears are still full of, images of destruction that cut into the meat of my heart. I also saw and heard many, many inspiring things--- stories of resistance and hope, of survival and vision. I met incredible people who fed me red beans and rice on Mondays and told me about their families and their lives, who shared with me some of what New Orleans meant to them, people who through their stories helped me understand the depth and breadth of this atrocity.

(By the way, I’d really encourage folks to seek out these first-hand stories, and prioritize reading information and analysis about Katrina written by survivors and long-time residents of the Gulf Coast, for example “New Orleans and Women of Color: Connecting the Personal and Political” by Janelle L. White, which is available online).

I was also inspired by how many folks from outside New Orleans had gone down to volunteer, had seen what was happening and were appalled, and found a way to go down and support in any way they could. I met incredibly committed activists, folks with skills and energy and immense creativity and huge hearts.
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And while it was moving to see how many people came down to volunteer, with that also came one of the unexpected heartbreaks for me of being in the Gulf Coast post-Katrina: the racism that white activists like myself brought along with us, even as we came intending to stand in solidarity with the people of New Orleans. And although there are many many stories I want to tell, this is what I feel a really deep need to write about, and I see this as part of an ongoing conversation. (Note: for this article, I’ll be using the People’s Institute definition of racism, which is race prejudice plus power, and using it interchangeably with “white supremacy,” meaning the system of wealth, power, and privilege which keeps racism in place).

First, I want to say that I’m not approaching this conversation as if I’ve got it all figured out, because I have a ton of work to do and make plenty of mistakes, including the ones I’m about to discuss. And I want to say that while I will be speaking from my own perspective, there have been many people of color whose analysis and experiences have helped me develop the antiracist framework I’m using to think about this situation. I just want to put that out because I think it’s important to recognize whose labor and experiences have helped inform what I am saying, and how I’m saying it.

So having said all that, I want to talk a little about the ways that we white folks, no matter how well-intentioned, bring our white privilege and our racism with us wherever we go, and how this really hijacks solidarity projects and imperils our capacity to be true allies. Despite the fact that what happened in New Orleans was understood by the majority of whites even slightly left of center to have its roots in racism, it does not seem that this awareness has translated into us wrestling any more seriously with white supremacy, even as many of us mobilize to support the communities of the Gulf Coast.

One example I want to give is about the looter/finder distinction made by mainstream media outlets in describing stranded New Orleanians carrying food. Do folks remember seeing that? The captions of pictures said white people “found” stuff, and Black people “looted” stuff, though the images were identical except for race. Lots of us forwarded an email around about this, and were justifiably outraged at the blatant criminalizing of Black survivors in the media. People I know wrote letters to the editors of newspapers, sent scathing emails, and called in to radio shows to protest that and other racist portrayals of Katrina survivors.

The question I want to ask is how many of us white folks make these kind of looter/finder assumptions about people’s behavior all the time, in our heads? How many of us make these kinds of racialized good guy/bad guy distinctions when we’re walking down the street in our hometowns, standing at a bus stop late at night, interacting with new people in our activist spaces, talking to co-workers at our jobs, seeing patients in the clinic?

While the media portrayals were egregious and telling, I think the insidious, often unconscious prejudice that we’ve learned by living in a racist culture is also incredibly dangerous. The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond calls this “internalized racial superiority,” and that’s what I saw playing out so dramatically among many white solidarity workers who came to New Orleans, even though many of us were there because we felt a deep desire to take action against what was clearly a race-based hate crime.

So I have some questions for white folks thinking about going down, questions I am still asking myself: first of all, why you? Why are you going? Could our resources and energy be better used supporting survivor organizing at home or fundraising, rather than spent traveling to the South? Are we committed to doing support work that may not feel as “exciting” as going down ourselves? How did it come to be that we are able to travel to and around New Orleans, while many survivors still can’t go home? What are we bringing with us, what will we take back? What has been the role of white people and white institutions in the destruction and reshaping of communities of color in the US, in the history of New Orleans? When we go down, are we expecting to be thanked, to be welcomed, what is our real motivation for going? What will be the long-term impact of our work on the Gulf Coast communities with whom we're supposedly standing in solidarity? How are we going to be accountable to what we saw and heard and did when we come back, and to whom do we feel accountable? How are we going to make meaningful connections to the same kind of injustices back home? Do we know about the issues facing poor communities and communities of color in our hometown, and are we as motivated, as committed to dealing with those issues where we live, which could bear a striking resemblance to what’s going on in New Orleans? Are we seeing survivors of Katrina as “worthy” poor, deserving of resources and relief work, without recognizing that the poverty back home is equally a result of systemic racism, and equally crucial to address?

In the three weeks I was working in New Orleans, I spent most of my time at the Common Ground Clinic, where most of the volunteers and healthcare providers are white. (Though the call to create Common Ground was put out by Malik Rahim, a Black activist and organizer who never evacuated New Orleans, the people with the resources and time to respond first to that call were overwhelmingly white, class-privileged folks, who continue to be numerically the majority). While I was there, I heard comments like “this is so cool that New Orleans is going to have a free clinic now!” or other statements suggesting that we, the white saviors, had come to bring capital a ACTIVISM to the region, which before we got there was presumably some kind of political wasteland. Now, I definitely didn’t do my homework like I should have before I got there, but I was pretty sure that the city had had a vibrant history of resistance and organizing from the time of the slave revolts on, and I had recently learned about the Saint Thomas Clinic and other local healthcare justice projects. The fact that the town was so intensely depopulated may have made it possible for an inexperienced out-of-towner to mistake the absence of people with the absence of organizing. But I know there was more to it than that--- racism fosters in white people an easy, unconscious arrogance, an inability to see past ourselves, the capacity to be “blinded by the white.” Mixed up in this also, I think, is the classist assumption that poor folks aren’t politically conscious or organized, or that they only “become” so when outside organizers arrive.

Another example of these racist assumptions could be seen when folks expressed the valid concern that the community wasn’t involved enough in running the health center, even though flyers were put up around the surrounding Algiers neighborhood inviting residents to volunteer and become a part of the clinic. I’ve been part of this dynamic in the past--- wondering why “they” don’t come to “our” meeting or event, without understanding how alienating the white culture of our project or organization might be to people of color, from the language, timing, and structure of our meetings to the way we dress (especially in places like Common Ground, which, when I was there, had a predominantly punk/hippie subcultural scene going on). When there has been a lack of community involvement in other neighborhood projects of which I’ve been a part, it’s usually because the project began or evolved without a concerted effort to connect in a respectful, non-tokenizing way with people in the neighborhood to see what they were working on already, what their priorities were, what strategies they’d tried before, how we might support their work before starting a brand spanking new project with us in leadership.

In the case of the clinic in particular, it was an immediate disaster relief project that needed to happen, and I see it as a fantastic example of the capacity of the left to effectively mobilize in an emergency when the state infrastructure failed. But now that the clinic is a more permanent fixture, there will be some real wrestling with power and privilege in the months ahead, if it is to reach the stated goal of transitioning to community control, and if it is to have a role that is less about service provision and more about rebuilding infrastructure and offering resources in a way that supports community self-determination.

Another example I want to offer is a hand-painted sign at the clinic that said, “Less Tears More Action!” I never found out who painted this, but I’m guessing it was a white person from out of town, like me. And no matter who created the sign, I wondered what the impact of that statement was (for the day it was up) on the people who came to the clinic, who were mourning immeasurable losses and experiencing worlds of grief that we as outsiders would never be able to fully comprehend. Yet we felt entitled to offer brightly-painted suggestions about it being time to quit whining and move on, and presumably we were to be the role models of what kind of “action” folks should take.

A big slogan at the Common Ground Clinic was “Solidarity not Charity,” which is easy to say, but what does it mean? And how do we know if what we’re doing is charity or solidarity--- is it as simple as choosing to work with Common Ground instead of the Red Cross? This was one of the biggest lessons for me, and something I’m still thinking a lot about.

A definition of solidarity I’ve heard is that it’s about providing concrete support to an oppressed group so that they can more easily use their own power to change the conditions of their lives. As I understand it, solidarity is about working with people who are struggling for their own liberation in a way that means my future gets bound up with theirs.

On the other hand, charity is about me feeling good, assuaging guilt, feeling like I’m doing something about injustice but without actually threatening the status quo. Charity doesn’t really cost me anything, especially my self-image as being someone who’s down with the struggle and on the side of the oppressed. With charity I don’t have to acknowledge my privilege in a situation, and in the case of work in New Orleans, I don’t have to take responsibility for the fact that my family and I have materially benefited, historically and presently, from the racism that bludgeoned the south long before the hurricane. With charity, I don’t have to connect the dots between sudden catastrophes like Katrina, and the perhaps slower but very similar economic devastation happening in poor communities and communities of color, every day, right here, in my city. And most importantly, with charity, I don’t have risk that what I’m doing might truly transform society in such a way that white folks like me may not end up on top anymore, because charity actually reinforces existing relationships of power. And while the work we did at Common Ground may have been in solidarity with a liberation-oriented vision, I’m not sure that was enough. It scares and pains me to admit it, but despite the sign proclaiming proudly that the clinic was about “solidarity not charity,” I think the majority of what I saw us white activists doing at Common Ground was essentially charity.

One day at the clinic, Kimberley Richards and Bridget Lehane, organizers from The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, came to meet with us about the possibility of doing an antiracism training for volunteers at the clinic. Kimberley pointed out that like it or not, we--- mostly white healthcare providers and activists in a hurricane-ravaged poor Black town--- stood to profit off our time in New Orleans, either socially through gaining “activist points” or professionally by writing papers or books about our experience. She asked us how were we going to be accountable to that fact, how we were going to make sure that the people most affected by this tragedy would also stand to gain and not be profited off, as they so often were by the organizations and institutions that were supposedly serving them.

The difference between charity and solidarity felt huge that day and as we discussed whether or not we could--- more truthful to say whether or not we would--- close the clinic in order to participate in their two and a half day training, called the “Undoing Racism Workshop.” I realized that solidarity felt easier when I thought about it in terms of us simply offering a crucial resource to the community --- providing free, accessible healthcare and free medications in a place and time when that was a dire, dire necessity. And that’s incredibly important.

But the challenge of real solidarity is that it requires us to take a critical look at the bigger picture of Katrina, the context, and to see how we fit in. Solidarity means looking at how power and privilege play out in our own lives, and obligates us to consider our role in relation to the state and system that helped engineer this disaster. To be in solidarity we would need to understand how our class and race privilege impact why we were the ones able to offer the healthcare resources in the first place, and be real about whether the clinic serves to challenge or reinforce that inequality. Solidarity requires us to seriously grapple with our racial prejudice, and recognize how it affects the work we do in the clinic and how we interact with the community. To really be in solidarity, we would need to more fully examine and drastically overhaul the assumptions and biases in how we deliver healthcare, we would have to acknowledge and deal with the white culture of the project and how that affected our patients and which providers felt welcome in the clinic, and we would need to see and wrestle with the fact that our presence in New Orleans was profoundly changing the class and race dynamics of the intensely depopulated neighborhood and town. We would have to be willing to look at and be accountable to the ways in which we might actually stand to gain more in the long term from our “solidarity work” in the clinic than the community who we were supposedly serving.

At this point I still have more questions than answers about what being in solidarity really means. But I know solidarity’s a hell of a lot less comfortable than charity, and involves me not just going to someone else’s decimated town and helping out for a little while or even a long while and then going home and doing a reportback, or writing a reflection piece, though that could be part of it. Real solidarity means keeping up the conversation about race and class in the US with other white folks, and working diligently to break down the racism in mainstream white communities---where institutional power currently resides---as well as challenging racism in the white left. Real solidarity requires me to go on an ongoing, difficult journey to reckon with my own stuff, and my family’s stuff--- to recognize and challenge our collusion in the system of white supremacy. My experience in New Orleans makes me ask myself what I’m doing right now, right here, to support the self-determination of communities of color and of low-income people, what I’m doing right now to support a revolutionary transformation of systems of power in this country. It makes me ask myself what I’m doing right now, right here, to help root out the racism in my own heart and the heart of communities I’m a part of, so that I can struggle in true solidarity with communities most affected by injustice as they lead the movement for radical social change.

Molly McClure does sexual health and racial justice work in Philadelphia, and is excited to hear your comments, questions and discussion: genderific@hotmail.com. This writing happened with a lot of support, feedback, and insightful conversation for which I’m incredibly grateful.