Holding the shoe

"A Flower for the Graves," an editorial on the 1963 bombing of a black church that killed four children, written by then-Atlanta Constitution editor Eugene Patterson, begins with this paragraph:

A Negro mother went in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe--from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

America now holds another shoe, for the tragedy of Katrina.

Make no mistake--it is about race. This would not have happened, not to this extent, if the faces on the rooftops, the faces outside the Super Dome, were white. No, our country didn't purposely let thousands die of starvation, dehydration and medical complications because of the color of their skin. But whether we meant to or not, the result was the same.

Patterson continues:

We watched the stage set without staying it. We listened to the prologue unbestirred. We saw the curtain opening with disinterest. We have heard the play.

We have set the stage, as we ignored the vicious cycle of poor education and poverty that kept much of black New Orleans, and black America, trapped in its grip. That devastating poverty is the factor that kept many of those remaining in the city from evacuating--they had no means of leaving.

We can sit back and say it's not our fault they're poor, but as a nation, it is. As a nation, white America enslaved, then repressed and segregated, black America for centuries. And that was just a few decades ago. The results of that kind of oppression do not fade away overnight.

When I was an education reporter, I heard it often: Two of the biggest determinants of a child's success in school are the education level of the parents and the income level of the parents. Knowing that, it's easy to see how poverty perpetuates poverty. Poor, uneducated parents simply can't give their children the same resources to learn that more well-to-do parents can.

But the poverty of New Orleans is not the only reason this tragedy is about race. The mishandling of the response to this disaster is appalling. What was more appalling, though, was the lack of an uproar by America over the slow response. I would hope there were few Americans who looked at their TV screens and said to themselves, "Oh, they're black, it doesn't matter." But I think, as a whole, America saw those faces, and did not emotionally connect to them in the same way that they would have if the faces were white. If the faces were white, the uproar across the country would have been evident within two days of no food, no water. Instead, it took four.

And when the faces of the looters and the faces of the victims looked the same, it made it easier for outright and hidden racists alike to group them together and say, "We're trying to help them, but they don't want our help." If the looters had been black or Hispanic or Muslim, and the victims white, the response would have been more like, "We've got to find a way to help those people--look what they're going through, and those looters are making it worse."

Yes, America this is our fault. It's our fault for not planning, for not providing a means for the poor to evacuate, and for not responding as quickly as we should have. But in a larger sense, the blame rests with each of us, for not learning the lessons of history, for not learning how to live in harmony, and for not learning how to lift up those who need help every day, not just when disaster strikes.

We know better. We created the day. We bear the judgment... With a weeping Negro mother, we stand in the bitter smoke and hold a shoe.