Two Americas Live in the United States
Floor Speech
TWO AMERICAS LIVE IN THE UNITED STATES -- (House of Representatives - September 14, 2005)
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Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee) for organizing us this evening to talk about poverty. As a matter of fact, I know that the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee) had already began to organize around the issues of poverty and had been trying to focus us for some time to really get involved in unveiling what is going on in America. And, despite the fact that there are so many competing interests and despite the fact that not enough Members of Congress have the courage to talk about poverty or race or class, Katrina has brought us face to face with what is wrong in America.
As we stand here today with this picture from Newsweek, with this child's face, this baby's face with the tears running down, the caption: ``Poverty, Race, and Katrina: Lessons of a National Shame,'' we are forced to have to deal with these issues of poverty, race, and class.
There was an interesting debate going on when this hurricane first struck. The journalists would say to African American legislators, did race have anything to do with this? They were looking for the confrontation, helping to draw out the right-wing conservatives so that they could say what they normally say when we begin to describe what is wrong in America: Ah, there they go, playing the race card again, or trying to marginalize someone when they dare to get up and talk about race, poverty, and class.
Well, what is interesting about this discussion is every journalist who confronted an African American legislator raised the question until finally I said to them, you are asking this question so often, you must know something. You must know something that you want to talk about. Do you think this is about race? And so I say to my colleagues I have decided, based on what has happened with this horrendous disaster, that we must talk about class, race, and poverty.
As a matter of fact, as I sat in my bedroom watching the 20,000 or more people sitting outside the convention center and I heard the head of FEMA, Mr. Michael Brown, say that he did not know they had been sitting there for 3 days, they were without water, they were without food, they were without lights, and that coming on the heels of what had happened in the dome where the evacuees were placed, no electricity, toilets not working, food ran out, water ran out, I got up from my seat and caught a plane and went to Louisiana, because I could not sit there any longer watching what was happening to the most vulnerable people in the world.
Going there, going to these shelters, going to the Louis Armstrong Airport, watching people suffering, thousands of people without water, without food, without medical care, old women in wheelchairs who needed their medicine, people with diabetes and high blood pressure and the morgue that was being placed right there in the airport to accommodate the people who were dying on the sidewalks, I decided that it may not be politic to talk about race or class or poverty, but, Mr. Speaker, when I came to this place, I came to talk about those issues, and I decided that I, too, had been organized by the right-wing and others not to confront the issues in ways that I know I feel deeply about.
So I do not care what happens and from whence it shall come. In addition to everything that I do, call me whatever you want to call me, say that I am playing the race card, say whatever you want to say. I am going to talk about race, I am going to talk about poverty, and I am going to talk about the class issues of America.
We are brought face to face with these issues, looking at what happened in New Orleans. The population of New Orleans is 448,000 people; 67 percent of the city's population is African American. About 27 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. The city's median household income is $27,514. Two in 10 households in the disaster area had no car, compared with 1 in 10 nationwide. About 4.5 percent of the disaster area received public assistance. Nationwide, the number was about 3.5 percent. In 2000, New Orleans had the fifth highest poverty rate and the fourth lowest household income of major American cities. In the lower ninth ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the floodwaters, 98 percent of the residents are black, and more than a third live in poverty. Sixty-five percent of these families are one-parent families. The housing in New Orleans is much older than the national average, with 43 percent built in 1949 or earlier, compared with 22 percent for the United States and only 11 percent of them built since 1980, compared with 35 percent for the United States.
New Orleans public schools are 93 percent black; 55 of the State's 78 worst schools are in New Orleans. The State of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as academically unacceptable, and another 26 percent are under academic warning.
About 25 percent of New Orleans adults have no high school diploma, and we can go on and on and on. Louisiana has the largest percentage of children living in poverty, 30 percent.
Louisiana and Mississippi have the highest infant mortality rate in the Nation, 10.3 percent per 1,000 births. Louisiana and Arizona have the biggest teen dropout rate in the Nation. Well, as we travel around the Nation and we take a look at poverty, today we are talking about New Orleans, but let us take a look in St. Louis, Missouri, let us take a look in Philadelphia, let us take a look up in Harlem, let us take a look in Appalachia. Let us take a look at poverty in America.
We cannot continue to place our heads in the sand. Why do we have this poverty? Why it is that public policy no longer discusses poverty, race, and class? It is because the right wing conservatives have been very successful at silencing those of us who should be discussing it.
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