The sad faces and the miserable condition of the black and poor people of New Orleans shown to the world by Hurricane Katrina, come from the past, not as remnants of an ancient splendor, but as evidence of an entity founded on injustice and a Nation well begun and poorly concluded.
I have always been amazed by the lucidity of the founders of the United States for how much they did and foresaw and I was amazed by their myopia for everything they omitted or left unresolved.
What we have seen in these days, existed long before the storm exposed the hidden face of wild America, the one in which racism, poverty and exclusion appear as established as opulence and consumerism.
In the four centuries that the slave trade lasted, no less than 10 million slaves brought from Africa were unloaded on the coasts of the United States, who for almost 400 years worked for free for the prosperity of a country that never included them in its progress.
The drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, some of whom owned large endowments, legitimized slavery. The American revolution was only for whites.
Between 1776, the anniversary of independence, and 1865, the date on which the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted, which ended slavery, 89 years passed. Another 99 years passed until 1964, when the law on civil rights was approved during the Johnson administration. A total of 188 years for blacks, at least legally, to have the same rights as whites.
229 years after independence, 141 years after abolition and 41 years after the elimination of racial segregation, Katrina arrived to remind us that the work is incomplete and that blacks have not won the battle for their emancipation.
No drama and no film has been able to reveal the suffering and anger that fit in so many centuries and so many souls and the vileness that was wasted to turn the proud and virile African blacks that Kunta Kinte tried to personify into that meek, taciturn and resigned race that populates the Mississippi Delta. The music of the south is sad like a lament, because there are no joys to sing.
In the United States there are 37 million poor people, they are 12.7% of the population of the richest country in the world, three quarters are black. The average wealth of a white American family is 88,651 dollars, that of a black family does not reach 6,000. 8.5 of white Americans are poor. blacks are 40 percent. Half of all the poor people in the United States live in the South.
On average, blacks live 8 years less than whites. The infant mortality rate for black children is double that of white children. The percentage of creatures with low birth weight is three times higher among blacks than among whites.
The United States has a penal population of 2 million people, three quarters are black.
The suffering North American blacks are not the United States, but the mirror that reflects the image of the Mississippi.
Jorge Gómez Barata