When the White House recently announced the president would be visiting New Orleans and the “hurricane damaged” areas of the Gulf Coast in mid-October, in accordance with a campaign pledge, our immediate thought was we better get ready.
But since the initial notice was lacking additional facts, the Biloxi (Miss.) Sun Herald asked the White House press office directly — will he be coming to South Mississippi? The response was brief: “The president will be going to New Orleans.”
The president’s decision, or that of his advisers and inner circle, to visit the one place and not the other, underscores the persisting observation that South Mississippi has faded into obscurity, and that the consequence of four years of the Katrina narrative development is invisibility, even to the president of the United States.
Invisibility means that literally an object cannot be seen, but it can also mean that because of perception or philosophical blindness, or lack of knowledge, a person or group, or a place such as Mississippi may be invisible.
Ralph Ellison’s powerful novel, “Invisible Man,” is about an unnamed black who believes himself to be socially invisible. He tries over the course of the book to understand his place in American society. He is an unperson, and he is invisible because he is seen in the stereotypes that society has placed on his existence, and through the prism of those views he becomes invisible.
Aimee Berger and Kate Cochran addressed some of the reasons for our invisibility in a 2007 College English Association Forum exploring news coverage of Hurricane Katrina and how it had affected New Orleans as well as the Mississippi Coast.
Berger and Cochran frame their analysis of the coverage involving the two places by saying “Primary among the … Katrina narrative is the dialectic of invisibility and visibility, which displaced and erased Mississippi while rendering New Orleans hypervisible.”
They go on to say that as the cameras almost instantly shifted from here to there, the story portrayed New Orleans as “a most un-American city” chiefly populated by drug dealers, criminals and people who refused to leave.
The omission of coverage here, they say, was related to our “unique place in the national imagination,” a collective memory that focuses largely on poverty, high illiteracy rates, and “general social backwardness.” To many Americans the name “Mississippi” still evokes the past “and the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till and Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.” The violent eruptions surrounding the admission of James Meredith to Ole Miss is also cited in the 2007 Forum article.
(This was published more than a year before the historic presidential debate at Ole Miss on Oct. 7, 2008, between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain. Much of the coverage leading up to the debate recounted the problems involving race relations in Mississippi. A good deal of attention was paid to the progress that has occurred here over the last several decades.)
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