Lucinda Breeding

I was one of the guilty three years ago. The Southwest, and indeed the nation, was reeling at the unspeakable aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Worse yet, Hurricane Rita was hot on her trail.

I had sinned.

I had called those left by the devastation of the storm “refugees.” 

To me, it was the best word to describe the faces and bodies beamed into our living rooms with horrible reality. Usually, this kind of picture came from far, far away. From places like Asia, Africa or Albania.

But the images from New Orleans were close. Too close.

The people left behind looked to me like refugees. Until I used that word in print in our collective coverage of the storm’s impact on North Texas, I had no idea just how inflammatory the word was to so many people.

The next day, a man called the newsroom and demanded I be fired.

After that first story ran and my job was demanded as a price, I switched to the softer, less honest word: evacuees.

To my peers who insist “refugees are never white,” and pin me with a racist badge, I say: Look back. Look back to the ships of Irishmen and women chased to our shores by famine and tyranny.

And shame on you for forgetting the tattered souls drifting between Serbian and Albanian turf wars, looking for anything like peace. Were those faces not white? Was their welcome any warmer?

As a journalist, I’ve always been needled to find the best word. I fail more often than I’d like. But the journalist in me prickles, angry and raw, when euphemisms neuter the meaning of things.

My hackles lift when the words “homicide bombing” scroll beneath the talking head on the news. Please.

The term “suicide bombing” isn’t political code of sympathy for the aggressor. “Suicide bombing” is exact. It expresses the desperation that roots so deeply in a human heart than the man — or woman — carrying it becomes the incendiary device that slaughters innocents.

Any missile aimed at civilian space is a homicide bomb. A suicide bomb is a different weapon all together.

It’s not just a cold shell molded over impersonal circuitry. A suicide bomb is a human being so bereft of hope that he — or she — deals death in the public square with nary a judge or jury. “Homicide bomb” makes me angry.

It’s the same with refugee, whether you want to admit it or not.

A refugee is a survivor who is fleeing devastation, or a soul stranded by it. You’ve seen their frail forms on the national news. Impoverished tribes stick together against the marauding dogs of war, or the yawning gut of merciless Nature. Their money has been stolen or made meaningless. Their bodies bear the marks of starvation, dehydration, rape and trauma.

They are haunted and haunting figures, and they are most certainly not evacuees. I’ve been an evacuee.

A jaunt to Target was shortened by a brat who phoned in a bomb scare. The survivors of Hurricane Katrina never looked like inconvenienced shoppers, though they were labeled looters if they were black.

A refugee is an uninvited guest given the barest hospitality by neighboring governments — or his own. A refugee is always The Other. Not a brother or sister, never one of us.

The skirmish over this innocent word drove me to the dictionary to find out if I’d misunderstood it all my life.

It didn’t help. I was right. I was so right I got indignant.

When the analysis about Katrina began, everything told me I was right to use the word. If a refugee is “one who or that which flees, especially to a foreign country,” then I was more than dead-on in my word choice.

Commentators explained that one big storm had blown the cultural cover off the nation to reveal another land, a Third World country within our own borders. Day after day, the presidential administration, FEMA and the elected leaders of Louisiana were called to account for this other country. On and on it went, the accusations of government withholding services to rightful citizens whipsawed by tragedy.

But we weren’t permitted to use the word that suggested what they were. “Refugee” was a slur.

Here in Denton, we put up a good front. We gathered supplies and volunteers. When the busloads came to Denton, they were welcomed warmly into religious retreat centers.

But it was only a week after the exhausted, often penniless, families surged into Denton that I got my first e-mail forward about these dangerous “foreigners” hiding in the parking lot of Golden Triangle Mall. You know the e-mails I’m talking about.

They’re the urban legends starring black men from New Orleans who had infested our happy, middle class city to prey on hapless white women. I lost count of how much e-mail I got warning me about the lurking men.

These aren’t the cautionary tales spread throughout a land ringed by refugees?

This, to me, was the unexplored indignity of Hurricane Katrina. Denton was so kind, so happy to haul boxes of clothes, toiletries and furniture to our offices so that the evacuees would have a fresh start.

We’d make the grand Christian gesture, and some local businesses would persist in giving shelter, food and job leads to the evacuees.

But we’d make sure it was followed up by the ugly, one-two punch that insists poor black men are a danger wherever they happen to sit. It proved to me that our “evacuees” were, in fact refugees.

We could talk around it. We could deconstruct hip-hop artist Kanye West’s tirade against George W. Bush, his rant about a president indifferent to black people. But we dare not use the word “refugee.”

Words are supposed to paint pictures. “Evacuee” paints nothing at all. It might even excuse us for ignoring the itchy discomfort we felt for letting race and class relegate the heart of New Orleans to Third World status.  It’s time for truth telling about Katrina, and about ourselves. There were refugees among us the summer of 2005. They are still with us, living as uninvited guests, getting our barest hospitality and even barer justice.

The gates of the city are still closed, and talk about solutions is carefully neutered.

And me? I fester here with my forbidden word and my anger.

Both refuse to leave.

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.