Ministers, leaders say Katrina aftermath spurring race dialogue

NASHVILLE — Tennessee religious leaders and civil rights advocates say Hurricane Katrina will continue to spur extensive discussions about race and class in America.

Since Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast about two weeks ago, some critics have said race played a factor in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s tardiness in rescuing thousands of poor blacks from New Orleans.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean told the National Baptist Convention of America in Miami last week that “skin color, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not.”

Some 71 percent of blacks say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in America, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Sept. 6-7 among 1,000 Americans; 56 percent of whites feel this was not a particularly important lesson.

And while 66 percent of blacks think the government’s response would have been faster if most of the victims had been white, 77 percent of whites disagreed.

“If these were middle-class white individuals, more action would have been taken,” said Tommy Royston, who is white. He’s director of programs for the Nashville chapter of the National Conference of Community and Justice. “It’s a horrible situation.”

Robert Parham, executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics, said Katrina simply exposed issues that America has been reluctant to talk about.

“Racism is America’s original sin,” Parham said. “Because we have never fully exorcized this evil, it always lurks beneath the surface. When Katrina ripped back the cover over the hidden poverty of African-Americans in New Orleans, it disclosed our racism in multiple ways.”

Many people were unaware of the poverty that existed in New Orleans, advocates say, which is why they were shocked by the images they saw on television — victims stranded at the Superdome and mothers looting to feed their children.

But Royston said Katrina has made more people aware of the poverty that exists in America and should create more “dialogue about race relations and class relations.”

“If there’s anything good to come out of this, it’s that,” he said.

The Rev. Enoch Fuzz, president of the Interdenominational Ministers Fellowship, a group of about 100 pastors across Middle Tennessee, said he welcomes more discussion about race, but he doesn’t expect much progress because “it’s an uncomfortable subject.”

“Americans hope to avoid it, even though it keeps coming up in their face,” Fuzz said.

However, Royston said his organization has seen just the opposite.

“People are concerned,” he said. “There have been people meeting to look at the short-term and long-term effect of what happened on the Gulf Coast.”

Dr. Gilman Whiting, professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University, said the racial issues surrounding Katrina have been a hot topic in his classes, as well as on campuses across the country.

“It’s a learning moment,” Whiting said.

Whiting wants to see discussions addressing why there were so many pictures of black people looting, when many of them were simply stealing to feed themselves and their families.

“If the media has the opportunity to put their perspective on it, and we don’t have different views in which to look at this national crisis, people will go off on their on tangents,” Whiting said.