-------- Original Message --------
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, September
02, 2005
3:16 PM
To: Vic/Zadie/Dad; David
Summar;
Jennifer Stock; Liz Sodergren; Sarah Page; Sable; Reid; Oceana; Misha;
Mel;
Helene Lawson; Kate; Janice & Anya; Ed Haggard; Kathleen Ferris;
Charisse;
Andy/Anu/Sunfrog; Amy&Stuart
Subject: Editorials on
Katrina and
Government Evils
An excellent editorial on Katrina by Molly
Ivins:
And one by Mab Segrest, sent to a listserv
for Women's Studies Program
administrators (can't find it elsewhere online, so feel free to
forward):
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 11:46:04 -0400
From: "Segrest, Mabelle M." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [PAlist] Academic feminist response to Katrina disasters...
As have many of us, I have spent exhausting hours watching
social disaster unfold on top of natural disaster on the Gulf Coast.
Many of us were hosted by our friends and colleagues in New Orleans at
NWSA in three years ago and have those particular and shared memories of
New Orleans
even as we are quite literally watching people die before
our eyes on multiple cable stations. Clearly, this is a disaster the
proportions of which most people - and most evidently the people in
charge - have not yet understood. Those of us on dry, and high, ground
have some responsibility to do some forward thinking from the comfort of
our jobs and homes for those people mired along the coast. For people
outside of the Gulf region, the event is making itself personally felt
first at the g as pumps and anticipating the cost of winter heating
bills. But the effects are national and global and they will be
multiple.
The slowness of response in the South comes not only because of
the unprecedented level of catastrophe but because of the psychic
distance of the Delta and the Gulf
Coast from other parts of "America"
and because so many of its victims had already been written off anyway.
(All of the events of this week not only were predictable but had been
predicted.) The Mississippi Delta is historically one of the poorest
regions in the United
States
- a third world in the first - as are the
poorest 20% of the population trapped inside New Orleans, those who had
no cars to leave or who were too old, too young, or too sick to leave
(and those caretakers who stayed behind). Clearly but hardly officially
observed, poor African American women and children are bearing the brunt
of the disaster of disaster relief. Many repo rters have observed that
it is difficult to believe that the events in New Orleans are unfolding
in "an American city" - which is to imply that those of us living in
advanced industrial nations are supposed to be protected, somehow, from
natural and human disasters and that there are not fast and growing
groups of us who do not share in the affluence. The people I have seen
sitting outside the Convention Center and the Superdome know exactly
what is happening to them, and why. I noticed in the NYTimes this
morning, finally, an article noticing that most of the people still
trapped in New Orleans
are black and poor.
How do those of us with the comfort and privilege of intact jobs
and homes respond to this event? How should feminists in the academy
use our resources and our roles as public intellectuals? How will this
event shape our worlds, including our research and writing and activism?
How do we help, including helping colleges and universities affected in
the region; and how do we help them help their constituencies once they
are up again and running?
These are some of my questions this week. Let's start thinking
now about how to put feminist solidarity into action in response to this
event.
Thanks.
Mab Segrest, Chair, Gender and Women's Studies, Connecticut College
[EMAIL PROTECTED], 860-439-5379
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