Did Hurricane Katrina reveal a historic reality?

The right-wingers, she says, convinced us that the poor are illiterate, sick, and unemployed because of welfare, and because they choose to be. “So we turned our backs on the impoverished and tuned them out, leaving them stranded in the worst neighborhoods, worst schools and the worst geography.” Tucker writes that the images of the poor in the wake of Katrina shouldn’t surprise us, since it is the outgrowth of a culture that has left the poor to their own devices. Tucker concludes her column with a rousing portrayal of the insular attitudes that deny the privileges of the well to do, blame the poor for their ills, and sweep the plight of the poor under our collective social carpet.

In fact, it’s easy for all of us who live in relative prosperity to forget that most of us are here because we had the good sense to be born to the right parents. While a few impoverished young adults can still scratch and claw their way into the mainstream, it is getting harder and harder to do so as the industrial jobs that created the great middle class are disappearing. (Why do you think so many working-class sons and daughters volunteer for the armed forces?) Income inequality is increasing in this country; the latest census shows that the number of people living in poverty is rising. Still, a few predictable voices on the far-right fringe are already thinking up ways to blame Hurricane Katrina’s victims for their plight. Some are playing up the lawlessness of a few thugs; others are casting responsibility for the crisis solely on local authorities. Haven’t we listened to those callous self-promoters long enough? Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn’t have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America’s poor deserve better than this.

But less than a year before Tucker’s heroic defense of the vulnerable, she had heartily endorsed Cosby’s equally callous condemnation of the black poor. In a column entitled “Bill Cosby’s Pointed Remarks May Spark Much-Needed Debate,” Tucker lauded the comedian–cum–social critic for his willingness to ­address the black poor’s “self-inflicted wounds” in his “pointedly politically incorrect” diatribe against the black poor. After briefly acknowledging that American society “still bears some responsibility for the failure of so many black Americans to join the economic and cultural mainstream,” Tucker asked if black Americans shouldn’t “acknowledge that, at the dawn of the 21st century, personal responsibility has at least as much to do with success in modern America as race, especially since the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board rolled back much of systemic racism?”

A few months later, in a column entitled “Bill Cosby’s Plain-Spokenness Comes Not a Moment Too Soon,” Tucker affirmed the need for the Afristocracy to bear down on their less-fortunate kin by favorably citing the earlier example of black elites doing just that. “Throughout the first half of the 20th century, accomplished blacks routinely policed the behavior of their less-polished brethren, urging thrift, moderation, tidiness.” Such policing of black behavior gave way to a black leadership class during the civil rights movement that was loath to admit black failure for fear that it “would damage the movement,” while black power advocates “denounced any black critic of black failure as a race traitor.” Tucker concludes her column comparing American blacks to their kin throughout the diaspora who come to this country and succeed against the odds. She draws the lesson from their success that race simply isn’t that big a barrier to black achievement.

But black parents ought to note this, as well: The success of black immigrants strongly suggests that race is no great barrier to achievement. While many black activists contend that there is still a grave disadvantage in being the descendant of slaves, it is hard to see what that could be. (Note, too, that black West Indians are also the descendants of slaves.) Yes, our ancestors suffered. But the 21st-century racist aims his hate at the color of our skin—not at where we came from or who our grandparents were.

Nowhere does Tucker mention, as she did in her column after Katrina, the conservative philosophy and policies that hamper the progress and achievement of the black poor. No mention of deindustrialization, fortunate birth to middle-class parents, or the income inequality she previously addressed as reasons for poverty. Absent is the sense that blaming the poor for their problems is but the reflection of our callous refusal to acknowledge society’s role in black poverty. Completely missing is the insight that Katrina brought to Tucker: that is, that we have collective responsibility for banishing the poor to the margins of the economy through horrible communities, schools, and living conditions. After Katrina, Tucker saw social and political responsibility; whereas after Cosby, she had seen only personal responsibility and self-determining fate. It is not that Tucker is unaware of the need to balance the call for personal and social responsibility—she pays lip service to the latter in her Cosby columns. But she tips the scales heavily in favor of the poor creating the conditions of their success or failure. Thus she relegates her citation of the social forces that constrain them to a footnote. When it concerns Cosby’s carping, she is no longer outraged with society having turned its back on the poor—as if a black back turner is not as destructive and influential in his denunciations as a white conservative. Instead, Tucker joins Cosby in calling for Afristocrats to police the behavior of the poor. Tucker’s endorsement of such elitism is telling, a symptom of the condescension and paternalism that the Afristocracy has historically displayed toward the poor.

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