Today's Guest Blogger is Gay J. McDougall, United Nations Independent Expert on Minority Issues.
Commanding a center stage in the international
community, America has the responsibility to lead as it expects others
to act. As we mark the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, that
leadership is sorely needed here at home.
Our nation’s inadequate response to low income
and minority people during and since Katrina was cited in a report that
the United Nations Human Rights Committee released last month. The
Committee expressed concern that “poor people and in particular African
Americans, were disadvantaged by the rescue and evacuation plans
implemented when Hurricane Katrina hit the United States of America,
and continue to be disadvantaged under the reconstruction plans.” That
pattern of unequal treatment violates our national values. It also
violates international human rights standards and undermines our
leadership role at home and abroad.
The UN Committee’s findings followed a hearing
last month in Geneva in which a sizeable U.S. delegation offered
dramatic, first-hand testimony about the treatment of Katrina evacuees
and the still substandard response to pressing human needs. An elderly
African American woman described how she was prevented from returning
from her house to claim her belongings, including those of her deceased
husband. She commented that the items were “Cultural things that
brought freedom to him – the freedom that his country could not give to
him, as a disenfranchised African American.”
That testimony is supported by mounting evidence
of continuing unequal treatment. In one of the most comprehensive
studies of post-Katrina conditions, the Advancement Project found that
many African American survivors of the hurricane have been shut out of
reconstruction jobs as a result of inadequate housing reconstruction,
lack of transportation, and job discrimination. An Economic Policy
Institute analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data revealed that
African Americans and Latinos in the Gulf Coast were more than twice as
likely as whites to be unemployed two months after the storm.
People still displaced by Katrina have
encountered similar obstacles. A study by the National Fair Housing
Alliance, for example, found that nearly two-thirds of African
Americans displaced from the Gulf Coast have encountered housing
discrimination in their attempts to relocate.
The Human Rights Committee’s findings should be
our call to action. As we mark Katrina’s first anniversary, the United
States has an opportunity to claim a leadership role in protecting the
human rights of all people.
An important first step is implementing the UN
Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, which the U.S. has
consistently supported in its application to other countries. The
Guidelines call for equal and adequate access to resettlement, housing,
education and healthcare for affected people and communities, whatever
their race or ethnicity. It’s time to apply them here at home.
More broadly, the unequal opportunity facing
displaced Gulf Coast residents in other parts of the country
underscores the need to increase civil rights enforcement in housing,
employment, and other sectors. Our anti-discrimination laws offer an
important model for human rights enforcement, but they require far
greater resources and enforcement than they currently receive.
How a nation treats its racial and ethnic
minority populations is a statement on how tall it stands in the
world. The Katrina tragedy has called on our government to exert
leadership, not in the far-flung corners of the globe, but within our
borders. Doing so will strengthen our nation, rekindle the confidence
of the American people, and lead by example within the world community.
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