Blind Side

A few weeks ago my husband and I attended a
large social function. My husband went to get us something to drink. What should have been a short trip for a drink turned into a long absence. I looked around the room and saw that someone with whom we had a passing ac quaintance had pulled my husband into an intense conversation. I managed to catch his eye to give him an inquisitive and impatient look. My husband looked back in a way that said he had to finish this conversation. When he finally returned, he said the man’s wife told him she wanted to leave him. Without meaning to be heartless, I asked why it took so long to talk about that. My husband then provided more of the story, “He said he did not see it coming—he was completely blindsided.” His story could belong to many of us. He was so consumed with his daily life that the frantic pace and hypnotizing routine blinded him to the fragile nature of all those things we live for and love but so often take for granted.

That fragility was magnified hundreds of thousands of times when New Orleans was reduced to a swamped ghost town in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, leaving a million people homeless. For the majority of those escaping the disaster, nothing about their daily life will be routine for years to come. The fragility of almost every material thing they loved and lived for was demonstrated when they were blindsided by the storm. For those tens of thousands of poor people who could not escape the city, the fragility of less material things was also exposed. After the storm, the city was engulfed in chaos as frantic families combed through stores for food and water while criminals looted abandoned businesses and homes. The unrelenting images splashed across the television screen told a grim story: Those left after the storm were nearly all black, poor, and desperate. The thousands of people packed into the Superdome were reduced to a pathetic state of waiting for food and water while conditions around them dete-riorated rapidly. Their belief that our government, the government of one of the wealthiest nations on the earth, would come to their rescue was exposed as an all too fragile assumption that government was supposed to serve the public good. But government agencies appeared paralyzed, unable to provide food, water, or medical supplies for three or four days. There were images of young men racing through water-filled streets clutching boxes and bags of looted goods. There were images of mothers and fathers looking for lost children, and families reduced to the status of refugees in their own country. Seeing these people, we could see that one last thing we have taken for granted was exposed by the storm. The fragile illusion that race no longer matters in 21st-century America was blindsided by the color of those left behind to suffer.

But are we really blindsided by any of these events? The story the man at the party told my husband included signs that a marriage was going cold. He refused to see this until he was blindsided. What about New Orleans? A network of levees and canals protected a city that was 10 feet below sea level when the Mississippi River flooded, but the result was the disappearance of millions of acres of marshes and barrier islands that would have cushioned the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina. We may have a blind belief in our ability to change nature to suit ourselves, but without these natural barriers, this natural catastrophe was inevitable.

The human catastrophe that followed it, however, was not. Government agencies whose responsibility was to have a disaster plan in place appeared to be blindsided, but the fact is that there was no local or state plan to evacuate the estimated 134,000 residents, short of the illusion that they would all use their own cars. Affluent and middle-class residents were able to jump into their cars or buy airplane tickets before the storm hit. The poor, who in New Orleans were living in the city’s lowest-lying districts, had no cars and had probably already exhausted their monthly subsistence checks even could they have found buses to take them to safety. And no one could have been blindsided by the presence of the poor. New Orleans had high rates of illiteracy and high rates of poverty long before Hurricane Katrina hit. About 60% of births in the city are out of wedlock. Stripped of the economic and emotional support of a two-parent family and condemned to one of the worst school systems in the country, too many black children grow up without the basic tools they need to escape poverty. We were blindsided by these things because we turned our heads and looked the other way.

My husband and I were driving to Toronto for a wedding as this tragedy was playing out. When we listened to the wedding vows, I was reminded that all the fragile promises we make toward the future—the ones we make both to ourselves and to the ones we love, as well as those we make publicly as citizens of a democratic nation—require constant vigilance. We cannot be held accountable for the unexpected natural disaster, but we are responsible for the things the storm exposed. And much of what was exposed was there all along, there on our blind side.

Jian Leng, Assistant Director
The Center for the Humanities

save the date: upcoming talk about cultural studies in china

Visiting east Asian Professionals Program
The Center for the Humanities
The Center for International and Area Studies

Wang Ning, one of China’s leading and most intriguing humanist scholars in literary and cultural studies, will visit Washington University on Monday and Tuesday, October 10 and 11. He will speak at a free brown bag lunch open to faculty and students on Monday, October 10 at noon. Please RSVP at 314-935-5576, since seating is very limited. He will speak again on Tuesday, October 11 at 12-2 P.M. to National Narratives Study Group. For locations, check the website for the Center for the Humanities at http://cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu/ after Sept. 20.

Dr. Wang is the Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University. Apart from his numerous publications in Chinese, his English essays on comparative literature and cultural studies frequently appear in New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, European Review, Comparative Literature Studies, etc. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Wang’s presentation on October 10th will deal exclusively with cultural studies, including elite culture and its products—literature and performing arts—as well as studies of film, TV, and other channels of popular culture in contemporary China. His talk will particularly emphasize the currently prevailing model of cultural studies introduced from the West into China in the early 1990s. Wang will address the following issues: how cultural studies was introduced into the Chinese context, how it is integrated with domestic elite culture studies and comparative literature studies, how it is institutionalized in the Chinese context, and how it is developing into an equal intellectual partner in dialogue with the Western scholarship in the age of globalization. Wang maintains that cultural studies and literary studies have a lot in common, especially in the Chinese context, so that these two branches of learning need not oppose each other. Rather, a sort of complementary dialogue could be realized between the two fields.

Please call 935-5576 for more information.

St. Louis Literary Calendars

Check out the most recent literary events for adults and children in the St. Louis area.

The Center for the Humanities
Advisory Board 2005-2006

Nancy Berg
Associate Professor of The Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Studies Program

Ken Botnick
Associate Professor of Art

Lorenzo Carcaterra
Writer

Letty Chen
Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Literature

Robert Henke
Associate Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature
Chair of Comparative Literature

Michael Kahn
Attorney at Law, Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin

Larry May
Professor of Philosophy

Steven Meyer
Associate Professor of English

Angela Miller
Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology

Linda Nicholson
Stiritz Distinguished Professor of Women and Gender Studies

Dolores Pesce
Professor of Music

Joe Pollack
KWMU Theatre & Film Critic

Bart Schneider
Editor of Speakeasy

Jeff Smith
Associate Professor of Performing Arts
Director of Film and Media Studies

Robert Vinson
Assistant Professor of History and African and African American Studies

James V. Wertsch
Marshall S. Snow Professor of Arts and Sciences
International and Area Studies

Ex officio

Edward S. Macias
Executive Vice Chancellor & Dean of Arts and Sciences, Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor on Arts & Sciences