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An Interview With Latosha Brown of SOS Katrina
by
BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
"We
saw that people affected by the tsunami in Southeast Asia are
often doing better in terms of being able to return and rebuld and
remain than American residents of the Gulf Coast"
SOS
Katrina, featured in a September 15, 2006 Black Commentator story, is
one of many grassroots community self-help organizations that sprung up
in the wake of the natural and man-made disasters of Katrina. BAR
interviewed Latosha Brown of SOS Katrina in Atlanta just after her
return from a conference of similar organizations formed by
disaster-affected residents of Thailand, Indonesia and other countries
after last year's devastating tsunami.
Brown:
There were representatives of grassroots organizations, some with
and some without government support, from several countries in
southeast Asia. We briefly toured some of the urban
neighborborhoods and rural areas affected. What we saw was
inspiring and amazing. We saw that the people affected by the
tsunami in Southeast Asia, one of the poorest places on earth, are
often doing better in terms of being able to return, rebuild and remain
than the American residents of the Gulf Coast, citizens of the
wealthiest nation on this planet..
BAR: How is that possible?
Brown:
The first thing is that in those countries there was no policy on
the part of government authorities, the Red Cross and authorities to
move populations of folks hundreds of miles away, to break up and
disperse those communities as there was in the city of New Orleans and
some other places inhabited by people of color on the Gulf Coast.
Renters, who were mostly black are gone, with no rights to speak
of at all, and many small black property owners have been shut out too,
are not permitted to reoccupy or rebuild. That was not the case
over there.
BAR: So tsunami victims were not also targets of white racism.
Local authorities did not use the tsunami as an opportunity for
ethnic cleansing. I'd say that was a very large difference to
start with.
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"...these
people had not given up their hope as individuals or their will to act
collectively, like so many of our people have. They were not
defeated."
Brown: When
we described people, whole neighborhoods, even families broken up, and
people put on buses and even planes, sent hundreds of miles away,
people were incredulous. Tsunami victims only went a short
distance inland and after the waters retreated most were soon
back. In many cases they were greeted by multinational
coporations or local real estate speculators who claimed they now had
title to the land which those folks had lived on for generations.
BAR: So what did they do?
Brown: They got organized. Sometimes they occupied the
land, squatted and began to rebuild anyway. In many cases they
went to court to try and prove they had rights to the land.
Coconut trees, for instance are domestic plants that last and
produce for decades. They were able to prove, and to make the
courts accept their proof, that since the coconut trees were in place
on some of this land for sixty, seventy years that they had been there
at least that long and could not have had the land sold out from under
them. Over there the courts actually ruled based on common sense,
based on what everybody knew was right.
BAR: That's a very different legal system ove there, one which
does not necessarily place property rights over human rights.
Brown: You can say that too, but what we took away from it was
that these were people just like us, but from a different culture and
materially much poorer than us. But these people had not
given up their hope, their agency, their will to act collectively on
their own behalf like so many of our people have. They were not
defeated. I see people here all the time who have been completely
shattered, who have given up. Compared to them we live in a very
regimented and regulated society, a materialistic world that gives us
all these things to want and to chase after, but which takes away from
us a lot more than it gives. It takes away much of our
willingness to get organized, to use our people power. Folks over
there don't have money, they don't have resources, but they do have
people power, and they cooperate and make the most of it in ways that
put us to shame.
BAR: What was the most disturbing thing you saw?
Brown: I've done a fair amount of travel overseas with NGOs
and social justice organizations the last few years. As a
black woman, usually in a group of African Americans in places
where a black American face is a rarity and people don't even speak
English, people will come up to you and point and say "Martin Luther
King" or "Jesse Jackson". That has always been the image of our
people overseas. You've got this one image, the image of white
America, and you have quite a different image of our people around the
world as a people of conscience and struggle. But this time, in
three of the five countries we went to, people walked up to me and said
"Condoleeza Rice".
BAR: Condoleeza Rice?
Brown: They identified us with the faces of white and mainstream
America's foreign policy, with one of the chief and principal
warmongers, with Condoleeza Rice! This is ugly. It's
something I've never seen before, and something we all ought to be
deeply concerned about. Our good name is being trashed around the
world by the Colin Powells and the Condi Rices. People who have
always looked at us as being apart from the American foreign policy of
invasions and interventions and policing the world and stealing the
resources of others are beginning to see us --- black people in
America, as part of the world's problem instead of the solution.
"...We
have to make ourselves heard... as an organizend force that publicly
and louldy disagrees... with America's unjust wars and hypocritical
foreign policy too."
BAR: That can't be good.
Brown: No, it can't. Whatever moral authority the US had
say, a decade ago has been squandered in these bloody wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. The question is whether we as African
people in America consent to them spending our moral capital too.
We mustn't It's just not enough any more to politely
and quietly disagree with Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell and
whichever other black face the government throws out there. We
have to make ourselves heard as African people in America, make
ourselves highly and definitely visible as an organized force that
publicly and loudly disagrees not just with the domestic policies of
this nation, but with America's unjust wars and hypocritical foreign
policy too.
BAR: What was the most important thing you took away from this
conference and the exchange of information between representatives of
self-help groups on the Gulf Coast and those of tsunami victims in
Southeast Asia?
Brown: Not one thing, but several. First, what I saw
reaffirmed my belief that communities of people can, like our
predecessors, organize and struggle against overwhelming odds, despite
poverty and other obstacles, that people power can triumph over almost
anything. That means that locally we need to organize, organize,
organize. Start something or join something and do something.
Now. That's local. The second thing is that while we
organize locally we think globally. We need to know and to act
like what we are, in many ways a separate political entity from
white America, and we must reconnect with the rest of the world on that
basis. The rest of the world is not nearly as impressed with the
armed might or with the supposed economic clout of white America as we
are. Thirdly we need to know that this stuff about America being
an "indispensable nation" and the "sole superpower" does not reflect
the world that is coming into being. Twenty years ago, the Soviet
Union was a nuclear armed "superpower" calling shots far from its own
borders. You wouldn't know it from the media in this country, but
a new world is coming into being in which many of the shots will no
longer be called from these shores. We need to get ready for it.
Atlanta-based Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and can be contacted at bruce.dixon at blackagendareport.com
SOS Katrina can be contacted at
925B Peachtree Street #307
Altlanta GA 30309
404-586-9860
And Ms. Brown can be reached at soscoalition@bellsouth.net, brown1133@bellsouth.net, or www.sosafterkatrina.org
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