Commentaries
Racial Emergency: 2007 San Diego Fires
The Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California-San Diego acknowledges the losses suffered by all of those directly affected by the 2007 fires. As Critical Racial/Ethnic Studies scholars, however, we see as our duty to read beyond headlines, sound bites, and quick camera shots. While dealing with the fear of having our homes burnt to the ground; wondering about relatives, friends, and neighbors – even if safe with friends that offered us refuge – we could not miss how the local, national, and international media have chosen to highlight how middle and upper-middle class white San Diegans have been dealing with the havoc these fires brought to their lives: the shot of a yellow Porsche rescued by overworked firefighters; descriptions of the congenial atmosphere at the Qualcomm Stadium; the heroic male rule-breakers that stayed to save houses or returned to rescue vintage automobiles the never-ending reports on the predicament of those who did not know how to find shelters for their cats, dogs, and horses.
After watching the effects of Hurricane Katrina, however, most of us know that this is not the whole story. Certain neighborhoods, districts, suffer more losses due to their location, the materials from which they are built, a smaller tax base, and a general reluctance to tax for common protection coupled with decisions to commit resources to projects more likely to be enjoyed by the privileged few. In the aftermath of these disasters, some will have deal with insurance companies that set up all kinds of impediments to meet their claims; on the other hand, others will not have any insurance and will have to deal with government agencies that, for the most part, fail to ensure access to needed resources in a timely fashion. We can very quickly guess the racial and
socioeconomic make up of the communities who will deal with insurance companies and the ones who will have to face FEMA’s redtape.
Fire and water have no political or ideological allegiances; they do not distinguish between the rich and the poor. They hit black, brown and white people on their path: Embers fly. Levies break. We are all in it together, so it seems. But why? Natural disasters do not happen in an empty space. They abruptly disclose economic and symbolic materializations of centuries of institutional (legal and corporate) decisions that position people of color in a subaltern condition. When looking at actual and symbolic effects of the 2007 San Diego fires, we cannot but notice the racial text – in its socioeconomic and symbolic dimensions – that underlies the un-mediated commentaries, especially in the media, that explicitly and implicitly compare to San Diegans to the reactions of New Orleans residents to the devastation that Hurricane Katrina brought to their lives. The racial text functions to explain the process of unmarking those whose bear an unequal burden during disasters like hurricanes, tsunamis, and wildfires, in a manner that makes them invisible.
Yet it seems that this ‘lesson’ from Katrina has been missed. For the past week, we have been exposed to a parade of privilege all the while pinpointed by comments about how much this situation differs from the aftermath of Katrina. We hear the staff of donation centers asking people not to give any more, telling them that Qualcomm Stadium is overwhelmed by their demonstrations of concern. What we don’t hear, however, are references to how the fires have affected working San Diegans of color, about whether and where they found refuge, speculations about how many might have lost their homes and other mementos of a lifetime. Why don’t we? That they live in the
area is certain because they work in the County as janitors, nannies, cooks, gardeners and farm-workers; much of the wealth we saw parading on TV also embodies their labor power. Why don’t we hear more from and about them? We know there is a donation center operating in Chicano Park that, unlike Qualcomm Stadium, needs more donations. We know that the fires hit at least eleven of the county’s eighteen Indian reservations. We know that the border patrol has been very active, despite public denials, looking out for undocumented workers, even removing them from among evacuees at Qualcomm Stadium. We know that many of them will not seek relief because they fear ‘la migra’ and the Minute Men. We know that migrants perished in the fires without access to reverse 911 calls, official evacuations, or welcome at shelters, although we may never know how many.
We know so much while the media tell us so little about working-class San Diegans of color precisely because the prevailing representation of how San Diegans deal with natural disasters is framed by a racial text, an interpretive framework of the US social space that provides the meanings we capture when seeing or watching wealthy whites and economically dispossessed black, and brown folks in any situation. Because this racial text provides all necessary meanings, a ready-made symbolic apparatus, there is no need for explicit racial comparisons. The mere mention of Katrina by a newscaster, after a report on how much the wildfire refugees at the Qualcomm Stadium are enjoying the break from their daily routines, is enough to produce the image of San Diego as, in the words of one of our graduate students notes, a ‘model community.’
As mentioned earlier, our objective is not to minimize the impact of this disaster upon all San Diegans, including those of us who were not directly affected by the fires
but had our daily lives disrupted by closed highways, bad air quality, etc. Our goal here is to unsettle the racial text by identifying its operation and commenting on that which it silences. The links below will take you to some of the analysis a number of us have produced and gathered while, like many San Diegans, we watched on TV or heard on the radio descriptions and interpretations of how San Diego County deals with the fire this time.
Ethnic Studies Department Statement on Immigrant Rights
We, the Department of Ethnic Studies at UCSD, stand firmly in support of the current mass demonstrations for immigrant rights. We believe these mass actions—the largest in California history—affirm the vital importance of immigrants to our national social, cultural, economic, and political life. Current proposed immigration legislation that increases the militarization of the border, restrict access to social safety-net programs including health care, and keep children from equal access to education, function to unjustly criminalize individuals and their families. This legislation is far-reaching given the precarious boundary between “legal” and “illegal” status within many families. Such criminalization is particularly chilling in a post 9/11 atmosphere in which immigration and criminalization is often conflated with terrorism. While the current debate is focused on Latinos, these issues affect the health of social citizenship for all ethnic and racial groups. This legislation contributes to the further erosion of human rights and protections for all members of the United States.
The most egregious is the Sensenbrenner Bill (HR 4437), which would not only make being in this country without documentation a felony, but also label anyone who assists an undocumented individual as a felon. This proposal is unfortunately similar in intention to many others before it that assumed that punishing immigrants will somehow “control” the border. This bill, and others like it, is misleading and ineffectual because it blames individuals who immigrate to help their families survive, instead of the policies that impoverish the immigrants’ homelands and force them to leave. This legislation obfuscates the role of the United States in creating the global flow of migration in the first place through international interventions, including trade agreements such as NAFTA, which affect other nations’ domestic policies in the pursuit of global capital. It is clear that the global movement of people accompanies the global movement of capital. And, it should go without saying that people who migrate—like all people—have the right to expect dignity, respect, and hope regardless of which border they cross.
UCSD Ethnic Studies Scholars Make a Statement on Academic Freedom*
It is during times of political conflict and social upheaval when our most cherished national values are tested. Since the events of September 11, 2001 our nation has been struggling with the balancing act of ensuring our national security while upholding our hard fought constitutional protections such as the freedom of speech. This tension emerges quite palpably on university campuses and in the media in public discussions over academic freedom and whether scholars have the right to voice opinions that are in deep conflict with those held by much of the citizenry. We must guard steadfastly against the desire to curb our most basic freedoms in these times. This applies most especially to those of us who may wish to exercise dissent, whether it be in the town square, in a public hearing, in a place of worship, on the airwaves, or in our nation’s centers of higher education. As university scholars, we have dedicated our lives to education—through our teaching, writing, and service—and its critical role in creating and sustaining democratic societies. For this reason, we find it a reprehensible distortion of the most revered principles of education to encourage students and faculty to make lists of teachers and professors labeled as “radical” or “conservative,” instead of engaging them intellectually. Academics have an obligation and responsibility to promote critical thinking in university classrooms and in the public sphere. In other words, one of the most important parts of our job is to encourage students and publics to ask difficult and sometimes troubling questions about our society. Finally, we would also issue an urgent reminder to those who would tread on the academic freedom of others, that the very nation they wish to shelter from controversial expressions of opinion (excluding hate speech, of course) by some individuals and groups, is most at risk when we fail to also protect the rights and freedoms of those persons.
*The University of California’s own policy on academic freedom guarantees these rights as well
Ethnic Studies Department Statement on the Hurricane Katrina Crisis
The recent natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the humanitarian crisis that followed have weighed heavily on our hearts. As scholars who study issues of race, class, gender and inequality, we know that the extent of devastation felt by gulf coast communities is linked directly to social and economic structures.
Local, state, and federal governments failed to act to protect the safety and dignity of the tens of thousands of people left stranded in the gulf region. It is a human tragedy that so many of “the poor, the elderly, the sick, the young, most of them African Americans” were essentially abandoned in places like New Orleans, left to fend for themselves and try their best to survive. We recognize the ways in which racialized groups have historically been criminalized in our society and we are deeply saddened and angered by the media's repeated portrayals of African American victims of Hurricane Katrina as lawless and as looters. We are also outraged by the lack of aid, language-sensitive emergency information, and media attention given to other underrepresented communities that were also devastated along the gulf coast such as Vietnamese and Latino immigrant communities.
We call on the ethnic studies community to remain critical of the federal administration's response to the crisis and also of the media's portrayal of victims. Race, class and gender played a significant role in this catastrophe, an event that has brought to the public eye the stark socioeconomic inequalities that persist in our society. We hope that as recovery and rebuilding continue, we can also carry on open discussions on these issues as we strive for greater social justice in our world.
HOW YOU CAN HELP?
Below is a list of organizations with a strong record of working with underrepresented communities:
- Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN)
1-888-HLP-LEAN (457-5326) - LAST (Louisiana Advocacy Support Team) Relief!
(Assist foster and adoptive parents who have lost everything in the hurricane)
Linda Christmas
610B S. 16th Street
Monroe, LA 71202
(318) 340-0230 or (888) 655-9564 - The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond
www.pisab.org
Send donations to:
Peoples Institute NYC
P.O. Box 250809
New York, NY 10025. - Habitat for Humanity:
http://www.habitat.org/ - People's Hurricane Fund/Community Labor United (Louisiana/Mississippi)
http://www.qecr.org./index.html - The Southern Relief Fund
c/o The Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights
PO Box 1223
Greenville, MS 38702
(662) 334-1122 - S.O.S - Saving Our Selves
Att: Beni Ivey
Center for Democratic Renewal
PO Box 50469
Atlanta, GA 30302
(404) 221-0025 - Louisiana Environmental Action Network
http://www.leanweb.org - Alejandro Rosales
Oxfam regional organizer for the hurricane relief, with a focus on immigrants
Biloxi, Mississippi
(818) 434-6495 or
E-mail: Emily Parry of OxFam, eparry@oxfamamerica.org
Other Resources
New York Collective of Radical Educators. Unnatural Disaster: A Critical Resource Guide for Addressing the
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Classroom.
To download a copy, please visit http://www.nycore.org
The National Alliance of Vietnamese American Service Agencies has created a Katrina Relief Effort Forum
(http://www.navasa.org/board) that allows postings of topics in reference to Hurricane Katrina (e.g.
Volunteer Services, Donations, Fundraising Events, etc.).