Within the faith blogsphere, there’s been some backlash against negative media coverage of the response to Hurricane Katrina. There’s a poignant post at Razorkiss — the author lives in Gulfport, ground zero — summing up some of that frustration; my buddy Jeff at Dawn Treader picks up the theme.
These criticisms of the national television media, I think, are probably largely right. They (the national media, not my blogging buddies) are sharks, and care mostly about ratings. Yet, I’m a little concerned that we as Christians don’t sugar-coat the political and racial issues that do underlie this tragedy.
My neighbors attend a Christian Reformed church that is overwhelmingly African-American. The church’s head pastor is white. They related how, this weekend, the pastor challenged the church’s white members to empathize with how their black brothers and sisters feel about Katrina. There is strong suspicion in the African-American community that many of Katrina’s victims were negelected, both in the preparedness for such a storm and in the inefficiency of the initial response, because many of them were black and poor.
When we discussed this, I challenged that proposition. It’s an empirical claim that I’m not sure has been adequately demonstrated. Someone else who participated in that discussion reminded me, however, that my response, from the perspective of many in the African-American community, is a typically privileged suburban white guy response. I’ve never experienced the soul-draining poverty that many in the poorest New Orleans neighborhoods knew. I have a car, credit cards, a little cash in the bank, and friends and family all over the country. It would never occur to me that, if I received an evacuation order, I might have no place to go and no way to get there.
Scholars will no doubt gather and discuss empirical data about the response to Katrina for years to come. Whatever broad trends that data shows, we must remember that, for many, the experience of Katrina was an extension of their seemingly hopeless economic and social circumstances. Yes, we need to celebrate all the good things folks have done in response to Katrina, and in particular to highlight the amazing, consistent, powerful love and compassion shown by Christian churches of all sorts to the victims. Yet, we also need to be continually reforming ourselves in regard to the entrenched problems of poverty and race. When the next Katrina-like event hits, let’s pray that there are some who can say “this would have been much worse, if not for the efforts of Christians who loved the poor residents of our city enough to advocate for structual changes on their behalf.”