I recently finished reading the book Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. This book is based on a true story, although I really wish it weren’t true. Zeitoun is a Muslim man who lived in New Orleans for years. When Katrina hit, he decided to stay behind while his family left thinking that the storm wouldn’t be too bad. After his neighborhood flooded, he spent the days paddling around in his canoe rescuing elderly folks, feeding abandoned animals, checking on his properties, and just being basically a great person. His wife kept warning him on the phone that there were a lot of guns in the city and that there were a lot of reports of violence. None of this meant anything since Zeitoun hadn’t seen any looting in his time paddling around. Then one day as he’s talking to his brother on the phone, several police officers, security contractors, and soldiers bust down his door and arrest him and 3 other men with him. They are taken to a makeshift prison in downtown New Orleans where they are told they’re being held under suspicion of looting and terrorism. Yes, you read that right, this man who had done nothing but good after the hurricane was being charged as a member of Al Qaeda all because of the color of his skin. What follows is a harrowing tale of racism and idiocy as he is held with no trial, put in solitary confinement, and essentially tortured.
I rarely have visceral reactions to books, but Zeitoun really got me going. Racism and injustice committed by the state infuriate me. What we see in this story is power granted during an emergency being abused to hold a man unconstitutionally. As his wife tries to speak to the media at the prison Zeitoun is held at, the military kicks the journalist out of the prison with threats of arrest, censoring Zeitoun’s wife and the journalist. As I was reading this, I was shocked at the amount of unconstitutional bullying that took place to those in New Orleans after Katrina. Censoring of free speech, being held in prison with no trial and no bail, not being given phone calls in prison, being subjected to strip searches that served no purpose. Everything about this story screamed incompetence and racism.
As Christians, we should find this sort of thing to be morally appalling. Discrimination based on race, gender, or religion is despicable. Holding a Muslim man as a terrorist based on the color of his skin is nothing short of racial profiling. The worst part about any of this is that no one is being held accountable. The mayor of New Orleans even praised the prison that Zeitoun was held in as heralding a return of civilization so soon after the hurricane destroyed New Orleans. This prison should not be heralded as a great achievement or as a return of civilization but as the exact opposite. It should show us the depths we are able to sink to when chaos happens. We should take Zeitoun’s story as a warning. This is certainly not the last time that such a catastrophe will happen to the United States. The next time it happens, we need to keep a greater watch on the city, we need to hold those in power accountable for their actions, and we need to ensure that basic constitutional and human rights are being upheld in the days, weeks, and months following such a tragedy.
