"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.

"...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.