Visual Vandal

As pictured in my photo post below, it’s pretty obvious how Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. It hyper focuses on the African Americans and other non-caucasian people who were displaced in the middle of Katrina. But I’m curious, what’s unseen and what bias are we witnessing in this documentary? Sure it’s obvious the lack of help that these people had, but Lee neglected to show us these ‘whites’ who were getting all the aid. Did they have aid or are we just neglecting viewing the people who had left New Orleans when warned. Did these people fail to receive assistance because of their skin color or was there no assistance and these happened to be the people who were unable to leave because of financial or family status?

I’d also like to discuss the ever prevalent Sandy. In comparison to Katrina, Sandy caused about 90,000 more damaged or destroyed houses, peaked at 1,390,000 more power outages than Katrina, and impacted 246,600 more businesses than Katrina. Yet there were only 132 deaths in comparison to Katrina’s 1,833 death toll. Why is this?

This could be the president and their respective approaches to emergency situations, location and crowded-ness of the disaster zones, maybe New Englanders are more used to bad weather, or maybe it was truly a racial thing. I’d be curious who the active rescue worker demographics were in comparison to Katrina and their origins. 

I enjoyed Lee’s film but I thought it was too hot winded, too controversy for the sake of controversy  A good, convincing documentary shows both sides and lets you realize the racism, lets you realize the sin and flaws in humanity. This one was just too force fed.