Katrina Reveals Neglect of Ghettos
by Carol Lobes
(September 8, 2005, Wisconsin State Journal)

It has taken Katrina to get us to see.

It has taken a hurricane and the resulting levee breach to bring into clear focus the reality of the lives of poor persons, mostly of color, in New Orleans.

Suddenly the lives of quiet, on-the-edge struggle, health challenges and month-to-month survival were seen by the whole nation, not closeted away in largely unseen ghettoes.

New Orleans is not unique in this regard. These ghettoes exist in most urban areas. Wisconsin's own Milwaukee is one of the most segregated big cities in the nation. Wisconsin incarcerates an inordinately high number of poor persons of color. The two dynamics are directly related.

As a privileged white person who has lived and worked in the ghettoes of Detroit, Milwaukee, Bedford-Stuyvesant (Brooklyn, N.Y.), and Cincinnati, I have experienced firsthand the desperation and jaw-dropping public neglect in these places. I know that too many people like me have only the most minimal idea of the courage, wit and heart it takes to just live in these conditions.

I know that many of my counterparts judge these lives from a distance without knowing the hellish challenges endured by our own neighbors in this country. Katrina has ripped away the veil.

Part of the larger tragedy is that there is so much talent, soul and untapped skill in those settings. All of that potential could make major contributions to the whole of society were it not trapped beneath our radar.

Had disaster planners actually understood the reality of the lives of thousands of trapped poor people who had few resources to enable them to leave (especially at the end of the month) the outcome would have been different. Had we equally valued the lives of the deep underclass, the response would have been competent and effective. Instead, planners seem to have relied on the blithe assumption that most could just leave. Clearly they could not.

In all of the horrific death and destruction wrought by Katrina, she also brought to light a terrible social disparity. We watched relationships and connections made across our usual separations as people became "just people" and the preciousness of all life was more important than our disconnects.

The truth is we are all connected. With insight and a fierce will, we can change the abyss of separation and the killing of human potential that is too much a part of our society. We all have a role. It is about so much more than New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, even as it is immediately about them.

Katrina brought us temporarily to our knees. As we rise, let us do so with a new vision and a new agenda.