So said Congressman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md),¹ a prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), whose members—with rains of Katrina still wreaking havoc—leveled repeated criticism of the President for the federal government's sluggish response to the disaster, alleging personal and national racism as primary causes.

But in the three months since Cummings' call for a gale-force outreach, what sort of response have we seen at ! the CBC? Katrina was a Category 4 to 5 hurricane, with winds clocked up to 175 miles per hour. It took only three days for it to travel over the southern tip of Florida to the Gulf Coast, growing into a monster as it fed off the warm Gulf waters. Has the CBC relief effort even attempted to mimic this fury?

If quick growth is what Cummings had in mind, the CBC has certainly been growing its coffers, having taken in "somewhere in the neighborhood of $350 to $400,000" for Katrina-related relief, according to Patty Rice, spokeswoman for the CBC.² But in terms of immediate distribution of the money—a logical part of that Katrina-like response—the CBC is a big fat Category Zero, its relief funds lumbering in a continual spin pattern somewhere over Washington D.C.

This is not to say that the CBC has ! been idle. It has spent the time crafting a sizable bill, called the Hurricane Katrina Recovery, Reclamation, Restoration, Reconstruction and Reunion Act of 2005 (H.R. 4197),³ that is designed to further institutionalize racism as federal policy. Instead of focusing strictly on relief for all peoples, the bill prefers minorities, seeking to enforce wage control and affirmative action, to set up a victim restoration fund (covering everything from death to "inconvenience"), and to create provisions for absentee voting for evacuees.

Former Representative J.C. Watts (R-Ok) called the CBC "race-hustling poverty pimps," and he was right. It surprised no one that the organization began using Katrina to foment racism right away, accusing the Bush administration and the Republicans of ignoring, even targeting, poor blacks in New Orleans. No evidence has justified these accusations, but recently Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Ca), a CBC member, pumped up the rhetoric again, saying, "The Bush administration and the Republican Congress have consistently refused to acknowledge or take any substantive action to address the role that race and poverty played in the Katrina disaster. Now, after a lot of pious words, they have basically turned their back on the region."⁴

According to Cybercast News reporter Marc Morano, recent statistics from Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, show that "fewer than half of the victims of Hurricane Katrina were black, and that whites died at the highest rate of all races in New Orleans."⁵ Most of the stories of uncontrolled violence and the willful disregard of poor minorities have proved false, and even the body counts fell far short of the original 10 to 20,000 projections. Mistakes were certainly made, in abundance and at every level of government, but none that should not be expected when dealing with a rare meteorological incident.

The media's over-hyped focus on one section of one city bred an atmosphere of fallaciousness that spawned fantastic claims of terror, suffering and mistreatment of blacks, and created an impression that black people in the South, purportedly still being crushed by racist policies that hindered their economic and environmental well-being, were targeted for final destruction. Consequently the media largely ignored the reality of other areas all along the Gulf Coast, where Katrina, paying no attention to skin color or class distinction, was far mor! e brutal and complete.

Meanwhile, it is not true that Republicans have "turned their back on the region." The President and Congress, along with our military, numerous federal agencies, the Red Cross and countless service organizations, have been relentless in bringing relief in the wake of the storm, and FEMA continues to pour millions into the area. Recently the President signed the Republican-initiated Gulf Opportunity Zone Act Of 2005 (H.R. 4440), passed almost unanimously by Congress, which provides tax relief and other assistance for small businesses affected by the disaster.⁶ This bill passed quickly because it made real sense to attempt to stimulate the local economies of all Katrina-hit areas. While the CBC has been seeking ways to exploit victims, the Republicans have been looking for ways to generate opportunit! ies for self-reliance.

The Congressional Black Caucus needs to end its pattern of exploitation now. It can start by distributing, with full disclosure and without delay, the monies (with interest accrued) that good people donated to help the victims of Katrina. And the CBC owes an apology to President Bush and the American people for playing the race card.

The CBC claims it needs time to determine how best to handle the donations, but many other organizations, who didn't feel the need to bash the President, are having no trouble in this regard. So what is the problem?

There is no good reason to be holding onto that money (save for the interest it is accruing), because funds are already being distributed with relative speed and efficiency by other entities, including one of which the CBC claims to be a part, namely, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and its Katrina relief effort called ReBuild Hope NOW—which see! ms to be living up to its name. It would be a fairly simple matter for the CBC to hand over its funds to ReBuild Hope NOW, or to the Red Cross, or to the Salvation Army, or even to FEMA.

In conjunction with Project 21's Mychal Massie,⁷ a commentator and activist who has been monitoring this situation closely, I have built an automated e-mailer that readers can use to send a strong message to the CBC.⁸ Perhaps if its members find their in-boxes flooded with letters from concerned citizens, they will finally "respond with a force equal to that of Hurricane Katrina."

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1) http://www.cbcfinc.org/Newsroom/katrina.html

2) http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=\SpecialReports\archive\200512\SPE20051222a.html

3) http://www.novoco.com/Legislations/2005/hr_4197.pdf

4) http://www.sfbayview.com/121405/victimsfight121405.shtml

5) http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=%5CNation%5Carchive%5C200512%5CNAT20051214b.html

6) http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051221-10.html

7) http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21Index.html

8) http://www.amsiriano.com/blog.php?archive=200601#1715

Copyright © 2006 by A. M. Siriano, All Rights Reserved