One of my smartest, most informed, and best buddies today insisted to me that the term "refugee" in the US only gets used to describe "non-white" people. My friend is incorrect:
1. In 1938 Woodie Guthrie -- as hard-core an anti-capitalist leftist who ever lived -- wrote a song, "Dustbowl Refugee" about poor white folks fleeing 1930s draught areas:
http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/refugee.html
This website illustrates the song with a photo of white Americans traveling from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, etc., to California, and includes an excerpt from Grapes of Wrath, also about these same honkies.
2. Here's a honkey from Virginia writing about his boyhood during the US Civil war. He titled his autobiography, "Recollections of a Refugee":
http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Cabana/1018/recall.html
3. Here's another autobiography of a honkey in the US civil war, title: Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War: By a Lady of Virginia
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803282230/002-8729905-8599268?v=glance&n=283155
4. Bosnians are crackers. And when they flee their homes, even in modern times, in search of REFUGE, media call them REFUGEES:
http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/soldierstories/story.php?story_id_key=8980
5. Of course we cannot forget the Irish Potato Famine Refugees (yes, they were and are still called that, in the press and by academics) which transformed the US population in the 1840s:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=255681020711176
6. Spaniards are honkeys. They had a civil war. During it, many people lost their homes. Those people suddenly found themselves traveling to points distant in search of REFUGE; they were REFUGEES, and refered to as such in books about them:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0964804263/ref=sib_aps_ref/002-8729905-8599268?ie=UTF8&keywords=refugee%20us%20civil%20war&v=search-inside
7. Here's a photo entitled, "Refugees in WW II." It exclusively comprises honkies, as does any of the hundreds of photos containing these words that you will find via a web search. This one contains Belgian refugees; you can hardly get any whiter than that.
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/WW2Timeline/refugees.html
8. This link describes "refugee physicists" from 1930s Germany, including Einstein. Yes, Jews are crackers (at least European Jews are).
9. This website lauds a "WWII refugee, writer" who is also an ofay.
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/8954/edition_id/170/format/html/displaystory.html
10. This autobiography of a German boy during WWII is titled, "A Refugee's Story"
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/8954/edition_id/170/format/html/displaystory.html
11. This article from 2002 describes German civillians who survived allied bombing as... what's th word for people leaving their homes in search of REFUGE? It applies even to honkies... Oh, yes: REFUGEE!
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/8954/edition_id/170/format/html/displaystory.html
12. Here's an article about Germans after WWII living in facilities openly known as, "Danish Refugee Camps". The word "Danish" here does not refer to breakfast pastries, and the word "Refugee" refers to honkies whose homes had been destroyed, living for extended periods of time in filthy camps. 10,000 German children died in these camps (!!!), with many named on their death certificates: "unknown refugee child." I wonder if during *that* catastrophe anybody wasted time arguing over terminology.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,355772,00.html
13. Poles are honkies, too, and during WWII many lost their homes. Such persons traveled in search of refuge. Historians called, and continue to call them, REFUGEEs:
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/106/261mcgin.html
My conclusion: Like all the other charges of "racism" pertaining to Katrina, this one collapses upon scrutiny, and wastes time. Because the ignorant raised such a fuss, and the informed instantly surrendered, here we have once a gain another ratchet-down of the overall intellectual standards in the US. The word "refugee" has take on a perjorative meaning that it never had before, and it is now off-limits for use. How many kids will get this word wrong now on the SAT, thanks to this senseless controversy?
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7 comments:
This is a non-issue. The displaced people were refugees by definition. It is a significant blight on the USA that this country has refugees. It epitomizes the fact that many communities in the US are on par economically with poor developing nations. Detroit is one of them.
It shows the disrespect the government and the media have always shown for the poor in America. Homeless people are arrested.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5643494
In Las Vegas it's illegal to feed the homeless in public. American society treats poor people alternately like either lepers or criminals.
Americans should be ashamed of their country. I am.
"Americans should be ashamed of their country. I am."
By this I mean ashamed of how our government and our people treat the poor and the needy.
Since you are not debating me on using the term "refugee" to describe the people whom Katrina displaced, I will refrain from debating you (much) on your assessment of how poor people in the US get "treated", especially with respect to the "treatment" that poor people in the rest of the world get treated.
Katrina did not cause refugees because leaders in the US disrespect poor people; Katrina caused refugees because leaders in the NOLA area for decades have failed to protect their own interests. Had these leaders honored their obligations simply to themselves, they would have overseen the construction and maintainance of a levee system that would have kept their metro area safe from flooding. These leaders -- black and white, politicians, owners and managers of large, medium and small business, over 50 years -- failed by any measure. But their failure had nothing to do with a their attitudes towards poor people or black people.
"By this I mean ashamed of how our government and our people treat the poor and the needy."
You've got to be f*cking kidding me. Do you have any idea how much money people like my wife and I donate through their churches and private instituions which goes DIRECTLY to the homeless and the needy? Our church on a regular basis raises money for homeless families, even takes them in and gives themn food and shelter in the church itself.
How many more billions of our tax dollars does our gov't have to spend on the "war on poverty" before you'll be happy?
Did you know that someone - I forget who offhand - did the math and figured out that if you took the grand total the gov't spends on the so-called "war on poverty", divided it equally among those Americans living below the recognized poverty line and gave the money directly to them they'd each get somewhere in the area of about $30 to $35,000 per year? I think I could live on that. How about you?
The gov't is not the answer, it's the problem. So much tax money earmarked for the WOP gets siphoned off and wasted by gov't beauracracy that it never makes it to the people who need it.
Americans are extremely generous. Stop taxing them to death and they'll donate more. Look at the millions and millions of dollars Americans have donated and continue to donate to Katrina relief and even to the non-American tsunami victims, many of whom despise us and spit on us.
You're statement is completely un-founded.
Six: I agree with you. The "poor" people in the US suffer from obesity, not malnutrition. More than any other poor people on earth, in the history of the world, they have opportunities to merely make sensible life choices in order to obtain for themselves a prosperous place in the economy. One of Nadir's heros, Michael Eric Dyson, in the Spike Lee film said that "the War on Poverty has become The War on the Poor." You and I disagree with this statement, but both ensorse such a switch in tactics: A war on the Poor Choices that keep Americas "poor" in US poverty. I use the term "US poverty" rather than merely "poverty" since "US poverty" is so much better than poverty elsewhere that poor people from other nations who have incentive very often invest great effort and expense into immigrating to the US.
I grew up less than one block from housing projects (which served as my primary stomping grounds in 5, 6, and 7th grade) in Austin, Tx, in a neighborhood dominated by Section 8 houses. My neighborhood was effectively 100% black (my family the exception). I have seen up close the power of personal choices in the US. Many of the people I grew up with made constructive personal choices; they are all doing very well indeed. But many more made poor choices, often people in the same family. Life has turned out poorly for them, though of course they are not starving to death in the US, or living without color cable TV, cigarettes, beer, potato chips, running water, flush toilets, a dry floor, air conditioning, or an airtight roof. They are living without books, though, except the occasional tabloid paper or Jet magazine, which they call "books".
http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=57
Oxford historian describes Germans entering Rome, using the term "refugee" to describe these honkey newcomers:
“In 376 a large band of Gothic refugees arrived at the Empire’s Danube frontier, asking for asylum. In a complete break with established Roman policy, they were allowed in, unsubdued. They revolted, and within two years had defeated and killed the emperor Valens – the one who had received them – along with two-thirds of his army, at the battle of Hadrianople.”
I'm watching the 1980 classic film, "Breaker Morant", about the British vs. Dutch "Boar War" in South Africa during the 1920s. The British refer to a Boar "refugee camp"; the Boars were Dutch settlers, crackers every one.
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