Friday, September 16, 2005

Where the Floods Carry Us

Where have Hurricane Katrina’s devastating floods carried you?  For most of us within in the radio’s radius, the answer has likely been “not terribly far.” We’ve rallied with money, supplies, blood – all the things you’d hope a community would offer. These acts of kindness don’t stretch most of us much.  We’ve likely done the same at holidays, or for other causes. We’ve followed the stories of survivors and tried to empathize, tried to comprehend what it would be like to lose not just your house but your whole neighborhood – everyone close to you scattered, perhaps lost forever.  Tried to grasp having no material traces of your history left ...the few things that mean the most to you – a grandfather’s stained Boy Scout manual, a fragile vase that survived two wars – swept out of existence.  My imagination, at least, failed.  Despite my best intentions, the floods didn’t carry me far.

Once the permanence of the devastation was clear, I was surprised and pleased the diaspora of the evacuees included our area.  I have friends who immediately offered their homes, began borrowing beds, began cooking comfort stews to nourish the survivors.  I am proud to know them.  But when I thought seriously about opening my own home – perhaps indefinitely – to strangers, however desperate, my purring motor stalled out. Sure, we have the physical space to take people in.  But our lives, jammed with work, two children, school, lessons, appointments, are hard enough to keep afloat. I didn’t have the psychic space to take on more.  I am not proud of these thoughts.  How far am I willing to let the floods carry me?

I have been haunted these weeks by writer James Baldwin’s grim Civil Rights-era prophecy, borrowed from a slave song: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign./ No more water, the fire next time.” Of course, it was the fire last time – on 9/11 – that revealed painful truths to Americans about how the inequity of our power is seen by much of the world.  And it was water this time that revealed even more inadmissable truths about inequity at home, and our unwillingness to use our power to alter it. Was it just last year that vice-presidential candidate John Edwards raised the unsettling idea that there are “two Americas”?  What illusions of American equality have been washed away by these flood waters?  Where will they carry us?

The president insists that the storm did not discriminate by color, but it surely has revealed that class is not color-blind in this country. One shocker in the tidal wave of horrific survivor tales is that some middle-class white Americans found themselves experiencing black America.  What does it feel like to be treated like an enemy in your own city? To have guns pulled on you by those meant to protect you?  These stories have horrified all who hear them, but they are not surprising stories to many Americans.  Over a hundred years ago, the black intellectual W.E.B. duBois captured the nervous delicacy with which well-meaning whites asked him, in one way or another, “How does it feel to be a problem?” Many Americans cannot imagine being seen every minute of the day through such a damaging, demoralizing lens.  Many Americans have never experienced anything else.

In my college classes, I often have students read an essay by Peggy McIntosh about the invisible privileges that come with being white in this country – the over-privileges that give whites unearned assets, and about which whites are ‘‘meant’ to remain oblivious.” So, for example, whites can’t imagine not seeing themselves reflected everywhere, positively, in the media, in general literature and history books, even in greeting cards.  Whites are not called to “represent their race,” or to second-guess whether race played a role when their cars are pulled over, or when they’re followed by Security in a store.  White students often tell me they’ve never learned anything so surprising and painful in their lives.  Their eyes have been washed, and everything looks different.  Black students often say “I can’t believe I’m reading this in a class, and that we’re talking about it.  Finally.” This knowledge – like the knowledge revealed by the floods – makes all of us freshly accountable.  Where will it carry us? 

In Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, she captures the fury of another hurricane, the “monstropolous” one in 1928 that broke the dike of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, killing untold thousands, and changing the course of her character’s lives.  As the dikes crumble and unleash the churning lake waters, Hurston’s characters “seem to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.” After the tragedy, though, it’s not prayer but difficult human effort into the unknown that enables the heroine to emerge stronger, bathed in love and light.

The floods of Katrina have carried our brothers and sisters further than they ever hoped to go.  Where will they take you? Here, on dry ground, we need not venture into unknown waters.  But we should.  Our eyes washed clean, how far are we willing to let the waters carry us?

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on September 16, 2005
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