Biloxi Blues [MAJ] 


Pour redevenir sérieux (cf.note du 30/8 dont j'ai un peu honte), deux articles éclairants. 

D'autant plus éclairants quand on revient de là-bas, qu'on a vu cette sous-classe de citoyens que constituent les Noirs aux Etats-Unis, que la tragédie de cet ouragan vient encore renforcer.

Slate et Salon disent la même chose et analysent la situation de la même façon : c'est la pauvreté qui tue, pas le cyclone (ça on le savait, on le vit chez nous : le fameux "froid qui tue"), mais que les médias mainstream semblent ne pas vouloir le dire.

Slate 
Nearly every rescued person, temporary resident of the Superdome, looter, or loiterer on the high ground of the freeway I saw on TV was African-American. And from the look of it, they weren't wealthy residents of the Garden District. This storm appears to have hurt blacks more directly than whites, but the broadcasters scarcely mentioned that fact. 
[...] in the their frenzy to beat freshness into the endless loops of disaster footage that have been running all day, broadcasters might have mentioned that nearly all the visible people left behind in New Orleans are of the black persuasion, and mostly poor. 
To be sure, some reporters sidled up to the race and class issue. I heard them ask the storm's New Orleans victims why they hadn't left town when the evacuation call came. Many said they were broke—"I live from paycheck to paycheck," explained one woman. Others said they didn't own a car with which to escape and that they hadn't understood the importance of evacuation.
--
Salon 
The nightmare in New Orleans has a lot to tell us about poverty: the desperate poverty of the city's African-American population, of course, but also the poverty of political debate in the U.S. today. The crisis unfolding before us -- dispossession, looting, people shooting at rescue workers, the president's dim response, and now, people dying in front of our eyes outside the Superdome -– rubs our noses in so much that's wrong in our country, it's excruciating to watch.  
[...]Personally, with all the destruction in view on Tuesday and Wednesday, I couldn't be horrified by people stealing food; I didn't even care much about people running off with sneakers and beer and TVs. Looting Wal-Mart? I don't defend it, but what do we expect? These are desperately poor people who've been deliberately left behind, in so many senses of the word -- left behind by society, shut up in housing projects and hideous poverty, and now truly left behind by local and federal officials who failed to come up with an evacuation plan for people too poor and isolated to leave on their own. If looting Wal-Mart was the worst of it, I thought, we should consider ourselves lucky. 
But it wasn't. Thursday we saw people shooting at rescue helicopters (with guns they stole from Wal-Mart, perhaps?), at hospital supply trucks, at workers trying to evacuate the sick from hospitals, the horrifying next chapter in an already awful story. I started to feel like my indifference to yesterday's looting was morally lazy, a reflexive shrug at having to really think about the poor, who they are, why they are. What a crazy, depraved way to treat people who are trying to help. But having said that, we're not absolved from trying to understand and reckon with the chaos. Like it or not, this crisis is going to be with us for a long time, because it's been coming for a long time -– we're going to have to face issues of race, poverty and civil rights we've long chosen to ignore.

A lire absolument, même si c'est dur.
(Le lire quand on rentre de là-bas, d'une autre grande ville, à forte minorité noire, telle que Chicago, où les clochards -uniquement- noirs vous accostent continuellement, on est saisi d'un mélange de colère et de nausée...
Pas facile de naître noir, encore aujourd'hui aux US ...)

-> http://slate.msn.com/id/2124688/
-> http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/09/01/katrina_race/index.html

[Addendum pour ceux qui me liraient vite et mal : "colère et nausée" parce que le même pays dépense en même temps, 6 milliards de dollars, par mois, dans une guerre aux raisons de moins en moins compréhensibles, aux justifications de plus en plus douteuses - y compris désormais aux yeux du peuple américain.

On me répondra que je mélange tout, que ça n'a rien à voir : faut croire...
Mais je continuerai longtemps à penser que soit y'a de l'argent soit y'en a pas (je dois être bloqué intellectuellement à mes années de lycée où j'envoyais ma correspondance - c'était avant l'internet- sur des enveloppes anti-militaristes [qui ne l'a pas fait ?].



[MAJ] Je rattrape mon retard sur cette catastrophe - apparemment tout le monde était en retard, de la couverture médiatique à à saisir l'ampleur et la gravité du drame à, plus grave, l'Etat fédéral - et les articles qui s'amassent décrivent une situation/société apocalyptique, et une administration parfaitement incompétente (mais ça on le savait ça non ?) : deux jours pour que l'aide arrive à Banda Aceh, cinq pour qu'elle parvienne à La Nouvelle Orléans.


Je ne sais plus où et sous la plume de qui je lisais que, originaire de cette ville, 1° il avait toujours voulu y emmener ces enfants, 2° pour ensuite leur faire promettre de ne plus jamais y retourner.
Et moi que ça tentait ...


PS : trop de liens, d'articles, d'op-ed (voire de blogs) : je vous renvoie vers vos cantines habituelles
(pour moi, vous le savez Salon - Slate - NYT - USAT - Alternet - MotherJones etc...) 

Posté : Ven. - Septembre 2, 2005 à 01:00 PM        
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