One of the most pungent gallows humor quips on the
Katrina disaster surmised that the federal response to the hurricane
victims might not have been so criminally slow if Natalee Holloway
had been discovered in New Orleans. In that scenario, the cavalry would
have descended, homeland security would have been restored and Bush’s
malign neglect would have been aimed at a less conspicuous target.
Images of black women and children fighting for basic human dignity
and accountability were some of the most anguishing scenes to come
out of the disaster footage. This graphic display of black suffering,
of the bankruptcy of American domestic policy, flickered on the global
screen for a brief moment then receded into a swirl of white supremacist
bromides. The female face of Katrina’s devastation, that of women
and children who were wrenched, not just from single family homes,
but from row houses, multifamily units and homeless shelters, underscored
the iron link between black femininity and urban poverty. As with the
Natalee Holloway scenario, some black observers speculated that had
the world been turned inside out and blond white children and their
mothers been depicted roaming water-logged streets or crammed into
the filth of the Superdome for days on end there would have been a
seismic shift in the terms of national debate on poverty and social
welfare. The class currency or inherent capital that whiteness and
white skin privilege confers would have surely preempted the ensuing
right wing debate on the dispossessed hurricane victims’ lack
of self-sufficiency and bootstraps rugged individualism. For graphic
though the Katrina images were mainstream perceptions of black cultural
pathology remained firmly in place. Despite all of its professed unease
over the “third
world” conditions exposed and exacerbated by the Katrina damage,
white middle America maintained its belief in the victims’ complicity
in the city’s social breakdown, and promptly recovered from its
voyage to “sub-Saharan Africa” cum New Orleans, in due
time.
Racist Katrina propaganda was fueled in part by the debased black
female body, for, what real mother, what true keeper of home and hearth,
would allow her children to be trotted out in sub-Dickensian squalor
on national TV? The debased black female body has always existed in
the interstice of public and private space. While the Cult of True
Womanhood and Domesticity formed the basis for early models of white
femininity, black women have historically been represented as hypersexual
Jezebels or asexual mammy figures. Be she hypersexualized as a man-eating
emasculating slut or hyper-domesticated (and hence stripped of femininity)
as serviceable domestic/helpmate to white families, the black female
body fulfilled a very specific role in the maintenance of white domesticity
and national security. During the post World War II era the federal
emphasis on facilitating white working and lower middle class access
to the American dream via such New Deal social entitlements as FHA
mortgage loans and the GI Bill led to the rise of the segregated white
suburb and the elevation of the white nuclear family as national ideal.
Excluded from the generous economic and social welfare opportunities
afforded by the FHA and the GI Bill, African Americans were brutally
dispossessed of this postwar inheritance.
Indeed, the “moribund” kitchens of the feminine mystique
owe their daunting vacuity to this inheritance of white entitlement.
While white middle class women promoted a second wave feminism defined
by liberation from the confines of nuclear domesticity, black women
and other women of color scrubbed the floors, drove the buses, swept
the trash, and cleaned the cafeteria toilets of a prosperous America
steeped in a culture of affirmative action for whites. This revolution
of suburban manifest destiny is largely responsible for the vast differences
in family wealth and capital that exist between whites and African
Americans. Now more than ever before, in a climate in which defined
benefit plans, wages, and health care access have declined, the house
of imprisonment for so many white women is literally the bedrock of
middle class economic sustainability. In Los Angeles County, the affordability
index (which measures the number of potential homebuyers who can afford
a single family home) hovers in the lowly 20% range, and many families
of color are increasingly being priced out of middle class communities
in traditionally African American areas like Leimert Park and Inglewood.
The billions of dollars in home equity that this residential “wage
of whiteness” has conferred on average white homeowners belie
the oft-stated claim that class has eclipsed race as the most significant
factor in determining social advantage and disadvantage.
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