Today's paper was full of reference to the vocabulary being used in the media to describe the "displaced persons" of the Gulf Coast. It seems that several major news organizations have established as policy that the term "refugee" is not to be applied to those who fled the Gulf Coast to find... refuge... in other areas. As you know, certain outspoken persons have declared that the term is racist.
This had me scratching my head for a while there.
If, before Katrina, you were asked to come up with a mental image of "refugees," very likely you would have pictured a throng of desperate people, and if they were generally people of color, most likely that is because the most recent waves of refugees we have seen in the news have been from areas like Sudan (think "lost boys") and Rwanda. Thirty years ago, the word "refugee" would have brought Asian images to mind (think "boat people"). And if you had mentioned the word around the time of World War II, probably many people would have thought of European Jews, refugees. Those who find the term racist and exclusionary, may be restricting desperation to non-Americans from the world's southern hemisphere. As if being American ever meant being a fair-skinned descendent of Europeans. (Which would make "refugee" an extremely racist term.)
I know I am treading on really risky ground here, being a nun of Franco-Irish descent and all (and remember, this is only my personal opinion), but my parents are living in someone else's hunting lodge in a Louisiana pine forest while their possessions, spared the foaming wrath of the flood, are being destroyed by mildew and fuzzy mold. They are, in a word, refugees.
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