Race, Katrina, and Greyhound

I had to travel on a Greyhound bus last Friday. It was Labor Day weekend and everyone was traveling and there were a million people there and all the buses were delayed and everyone was having to wait around in the hot bus depot, with almost no reliable information about when and how they’d be getting where they needed to go. Your basic nightmare traveling situation. Having spent the whole week reading about New Orleans, the whole issue of race and access to services was sort of in the forefront of my mind, and I kind of started interpreting every development in those terms. And the main thing that struck me was how I, along with the other white middle class people there, were way more dissatisfied with the whole situation than any of the black people were. To us, the fact that we were having to wait, and no one was giving us good information, and Greyhound had clearly done an appalling job of catering to its customers' needs in an efficient way, was totally outrageous. We got out of line and demanded answers from people in uniform, and when those answers weren’t forthcoming, we laughed and shook our heads sadly at each other to indicate how pathetic we deemed the whole situation, and how grievously we’d been wronged. But the black people just waited, and joked around, and generally acted like nothing was owed them. And it seemed like this was just something that was totally in keeping with their everyday lives. I mean, not to generalize too much, but a lot of them probably spend a good part of every day waiting a while for the bus, or waiting around at some underfunded government agency, or waiting to have their kid see a doctor in some understaffed public hospital, or whatever. The way things are set up just means that that kind of inconvenience is just a built in feature of their lives. I know this is kind of obvious, and I don’t have any grand conclusions to draw from this but it just sort of struck me in a new way.