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HURRICANE KATRINA’S LEXICAL STORM: THE USE OF
REFUGEE AS A LABEL FOR AMERICAN CITIZENS
PETER R. PETRUCCI & MICHAEL HEAD
Abstract: Prompted by the media’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina,
our article looks at the use of refugee as a label for American
citizens. Referring to archived articles from The New York Times, we
first demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, the label has been
used to represent Americans at home for some time. We then examine
when refugee appeared in The New York Times’ coverage of Katrina,
and how it positioned those it designated, and argue that it was the
media’s perception of a lack of control, both at the individual and
governmental level, that prompted its use. After addressing the
accompanying controversy over the use of refugee in the coverage of
Katrina, we discuss the dilemma the media face when a particular
lexical item that they consider denotatively appropriate is considered
inappropriate by the public. We explain this as a matter of conflicting
presuppositions.
These are not refugees. Let’s not refer to them as refugees.
They’re citizens. (Marc Morial, former mayor of New Orleans)1
I pay taxes to this country, you dig? What is so different between
you and me? I am not a refugee … They got the wrong term on
that. (The words of a Katrina survivor)2
The first few days of media coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in
New Orleans saw the use of refugee in what was for the American public an
apparently new way: as a label for American citizens. Pinpointing the first
use of this news actor label is difficult but by the third day of the disaster,
refugee appeared on-air and in newspaper headlines and reports across the
United States, as in, ‘Officials began planning for the evacuation of the
Superdome, where about 10,000 refugees huddled in increasingly grim
conditions as water and food were running out …’3
But, as the opening quotes indicate, identifying American citizens as
refugees was not without controversy. The term has a powerfully negative
connotation of an often forced large-scale displacement of people in
desperate need of aid and protection, an issue which is often viewed by
many Americans as more prevalent outside of the United States. In the
immediate days that followed Katrina, a range of citizens – from the public
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at large to civic leaders to the President of the United States – objected to
the use of refugee to represent Katrina’s newly homeless. Following
protests, as well as, perhaps, the completion of the evacuation of displaced
New Orleanians to Houston, San Antonio and other cities, the use of refugee
as a news actor label, within a week or so of its first appearance, quietly
diminished from the American press. Other terms, such as evacuee, survivor
and displaced, appeared in its stead in coverage of the nation’s recovery
from Hurricane Katrina.
What is it about refugee and its use by the press, then, that provoked such a
strong reaction during the first days of post-Katrina New Orleans?
Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines refugee as ‘a person who
flees from home or country to seek refuge elsewhere, as in a time of war or
of political or religious persecution.’4 The Merriam-Webster Online
Dictionary defines the term slightly differently: ‘one that flees; especially :
a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or
persecution.’5 This said, whether they left their homes prior to the storm or
after the breach of the levees, New Orleanians as well as affected residents
in coastal Mississippi and Alabama, were, strictly speaking, refugees,
because they fled and sought refuge elsewhere.
This article positions the controversy over the use of refugee as a label for
Katrina’s displaced against the background of how the word has been used
by the press previously in America’s history. Two dimensions to the
controversy are identified and discussed. First, as the opening quote implies,
there is a perception that American and refugee are mutually exclusive
terms: a person cannot be an American and a refugee. As archived articles
from The New York Times reveal, this has not always been the case.
Refugee in fact has been frequently used as a label for Americans in search
of refuge. It was only in the second half of the last century that its use in the
United States has considerably narrowed to refer primarily to people
seeking refuge in countries other than their own. Second, there is a
perception in the current controversy that the refugee label has only been
applied to less privileged or specific ethnic groups as opposed to others.
Although the media’s portrayal of ethnicity and/or race is an issue worthy of
study,6 this will not be the focus of this paper, because in our view we have
neither the means nor data to prove or disprove this contention. Rather, it is
our intention to argue that a crucial factor which prompted the use of
refugee as a label for Katrina’s displaced was the perception of a lack of
control – both at the individual level and at the government level – held by
the media and those they were reporting on during the first week or so of
storm coverage.
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The following discussion of pre-Katrina uses of refugee as a label for
Americans is primarily derived from articles from The New York Times. To
avoid ‘drowning in data’ when researching media language,7 coverage here
is necessarily selective and refers to archived articles accessed online.
Because the archives only go back to 1851, however, reference is also made
to a few earlier historical sources. This examination of pre-Katrina uses of
refugee is meant to provide a collage of the different ways the label has
been used for Americans. As for the discussion of the press’s use of the
refugee label in covering Hurricane Katrina, we note that, as Aitchison has
in relation to 9/11, reports on such momentous events can be ‘voluminous’
and therefore it is ‘impossible to keep track of every one published or
broadcast.’ 8 Consequently, discussion here is limited to articles available
from the online edition of The New York Times during the first two weeks of
coverage of the storm and its aftermath. The ensuing discussion explores the
first instances of the label as used by The New York Times’ own
correspondents in New Orleans and other centres affected by the storm, as
well as in Associated Press wire reports run by the paper. Following the
evacuation of the remaining New Orleanians from the city, along with the
adverse reaction to its use, refugee for the most part gradually diminishes
from the paper’s coverage of Katrina’s displaced.
The New York Times was selected for two reasons. First, the paper’s
electronic archive, dating back to 1851, allows a chronological overview of
how the refugee label has been used. Second, The New York Times was one
of the few papers that defended its use of the refugee label in its coverage of
Hurricane Katrina.9 As will be apparent in the last section of the article, this
raises an interesting dilemma for the press: should a word with powerful
negative connotations be avoided even though its use can be considered
denotatively appropriate for the situation at hand?
Representations of Americans as Refugees Prior to Hurricane Katrina
The first recorded use of refugee in American English dates back to 1705
when the Calendar of Virginia State Papers noted that ‘[d]iverse petitions
[had been] heretofore presented by the ffrench Refugees, settled at
Manicantown, praying for naturalizacon.’10 Here the text is referring to the
first group labelled as refugees: French Huguenots fleeing religious
persecution in France (French refugié). Since then, refugee has been used
as a label for people who have fled life-threatening circumstances in their
homelands for safe haven in countries other than their own.
In fact, less than a hundred years after its first appearance in American
English, there are recorded uses of refugee to represent Americans fleeing
the United States. The first example of this type of American refugee was
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the Tories, colonists who, after supporting the British Crown during the War
of Independence, fled the United States for Canada. As The Encyclopedia
Britannica (3rd ed.) notes: ‘Since the revolt of the British Colonies in
America, we have frequently heard of American refugees.’11 A better
known group of Americans seeking refuge abroad were runaway slaves who
followed the Underground Railroad to Canada in the 1820s. The abolitionist
Benjamin Drew, in his introduction to a collection of fugitive slave
narratives, declares that St. Catherines, Ontario, is a ‘[r]efuge for Americans
escaping from abuse and cruel bondage in their native land’ and that once
there ‘the refugee finds a welcome and a home.’12 Ironically, a third group
of American refugees to flee to Canada were southern whites immediately
after the Civil War. As The New York Times reports, Canadians were
outraged when ‘Southern refugees assembled in [Toronto’s] chief hotel …
and entered upon a noisy debauch’ to celebrate the news of the assassination
of President Lincoln.13
Americans fleeing turmoil overseas to get back to the United States have
also been considered refugees. For example, in one of its first items on the
Mexican Revolution, The New York Times covers the arrival in San
Antonio, Texas, of the first trainload of Americans fleeing Mexico: ‘The
northbound International & Great Northern express, which arrived here this
afternoon, was crowded with refugees from Mexico, half of whom were
women and children.’14 Throughout their coverage of the revolution, the
paper continued to designate Americans stranded in or leaving Mexico as
refugees. Other incidents overseas in which The New York Times identified
American citizens as refugees include the Spanish-American War, the
Boxer Rebellion, and the First and Second World Wars.
Interestingly, the refugee label has also been used for people in the United
States who, because of fears of violence or persecution, have had to flee
from one area to another within the country. This flight sometimes involved
great distances. From the opening of the Civil War, for instance, many
people fled slave-holding states and territories west of the Mississippi and
sought refuge hundreds of miles away in Kansas, a newly established free
state: ‘The condition of the Union white and Cherokee refugees in and
around Fort Scott is indeed lamentable. There are several hundred of them
camped about there.’15 At other times, the safe haven was a short distance
away. For example, from the close of the 19th Century to the early 1920s,
occasional violent race riots in Midwestern cities compelled AfricanAmericans to flee one neighbourhood or city section for another, as shown
in a report of a 1917 riot: ‘Nearly 500 negro men, women, and children are
quartered in City Hall and the police station … trucks brought negro
refugees from burning sections to augment the cowering groups at these
refugee buildings, where a strong guard of troops was stationed.’16
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A third frequent pre-Katrina usage of refugee was for representing victims
of natural disasters like floods and hurricanes. One such natural disaster was
the hurricane destroying Galveston, Texas, on 8 September 1900. One
reporter wrote that as the waters began to rise around Galveston Island,
‘[h]undreds of residences along the beach front were hurriedly abandoned,
the families fleeing to dwellings in higher portions of the city. Every home
was opened to the refugees, black or white.’17 It was nearly a week before
the first group of survivors arrived in Houston, where they lived in
government tents in a city park.18 Another disaster to hit the southern United
States was flooding throughout the lower Mississippi Valley, which resulted
in over three hundred thousand people being driven from their homes. 19
Here too, refugee was used as a label for the victims of the flood: ‘An
Arkansas National Guard officer, flying over the territory between Little
Rock and Pine Bluff, yesterday reported refugees clinging to church
steeples and in trees to escape the rising tide.’20 After being rescued, the
flood victims were taken to ‘refugee camps’ – also referred to as
‘concentration camps’ – some of which ‘themselves were being
inundated.’21 The refugee label was not limited to floods and hurricanes. A
search of articles from the 1850s to just before the Second World War
reveals that The New York Times used the label for people affected by any
range of natural disasters, including epidemics (Memphis, Tennessee,
1878), fire (Boston, Massachusetts, 1908), tornados (Guion, Arkansas,
1929), earthquakes (Helena, Montana, 1935), and drought (the Dust Bowl in
the 1930s).
Every example of the refugee label applied to American citizens discussed
thus far dates from before the Second World War. The close of the war saw
the term undergo a significant change, both in the United States and
elsewhere. With millions of displaced people escaping the devastation and
political turmoil of post-war Europe for new lives in countries like Great
Britain, Australia, and the United States, the Office of the United Nations
High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) was founded on 14 December
1950. In order to help people re-establish their lives effectively, the
UNHCR first had to draft official language identifying who it was that could
be designated as a refugee. To this end, in 1951 members of the United
Nations met in Geneva where, after days of deliberation, it was ratified that
refugees be defined as:
those persons who have a well founded fear of being persecuted
for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a
particular social group, or political opinion, are outside their
country of nationality and cannot, or owing to such fear, are
unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of that country.22
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Nations like the United States that receive people seeking safe refuge from
persecution in their homeland define refugee in a similar manner:
a person outside of his or her country of nationality who is
unable or unwilling to return because of persecution or a wellfounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion,
nationality, membership in a particular social group, or
political opinion.23
Crucial to both definitions is that refugees are outside their country of
nationality. In other words, much like the early American refugees in
Canada discussed earlier, they have fled their country for some other
country. When such a definition is ratified, the government officially
recognizes someone as a refugee and allows them entry and refuge as such.
Hence, the country is obliged to offer that person certain rights and
privileges such as legal residence and financial assistance.
With legally recognized definitions like those above, along with the
considerable influx of refugees into the United States since the end of the
Second World War, Americans have come to see the refugee label as
applying to non-citizens, to people who view the United States as a safe
refuge which offers them a new beginning. American sentiment towards
refugees, however, has been at best ambivalent, and oftentimes negative. 24
For instance, in 1978 when the Carter Administration established a special
category of refugee to allow greater numbers of Cubans and Haitians into
the country, there was an outcry from many people who felt their
communities would not be fully compensated by the federal government for
the assistance they were giving to the newcomers.25 Indeed, in the late
1980s and 1990s, the granting of refugee status had become such a divisive
issue in American politics that efforts were made to prevent refugee flows
by means of creating ‘safe haven zones’ outside of the United States, as well
as a policy of interdiction whereby potential refugees were returned to their
countries of origin where they were required to apply for refugee status at
the local United States embassy.26
After the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees in 1951, refugee
continued to be used by The New York Times as a label for Americans along
the lines outlined above. However, our search of the archives reveals that its
use appears to have lessened significantly across the years. For instance, we
briefly examined the use of the label in the paper’s coverage of Hurricanes
Camille and Andrew, two major storms that struck the southern United
States in 1969 and 1992, respectively. People affected by Camille, a
Category 5 hurricane that wreaked havoc on the Mississippi coast, were
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designated as refugees: ‘The Gulf Coast roads between New Orleans,
Gulfport and Biloxi was (sic) also bulging with bumper-to-bumper traffic as
a horde of refugees headed inland.’27 Those who didn’t evacuate found
shelter in ‘refugee centers,’ many of which ‘had run short of food and water
even before the storm arrived.’28 Throughout their coverage of Hurricane
Camille and its aftermath, The New York Times referred to people displaced
by the storm as refugees. The paper’s coverage of Hurricane Andrew, by
contrast, used refugee as a news actor label for American citizens affected
by the storm in fewer contexts.29 There was only one article which used
refugee alone: ‘The Washington-Williams-Ashley-McCoy clan was merely
the first wave of refugees from the damaged and overwhelmed shelters near
Homestead and Cutler Ridge, …’30 Two other articles used the term in the
compounds storm refugee or hurricane refugee.
The Lexical Storm: Representations of Americans as Refugees in the
Coverage of Hurricane Katrina
Unlike its coverage of Hurricane Camille, The New York Times did not
immediately use refugee as a news actor label in its reports on Hurricane
Katrina. In a front page story on 29 August 2005, the day after New Orleans
Mayor Ray Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation order and the day on
which the first levee broke, a range of terms were used to represent the
‘people’ affected by the storm and encouraged by the mayor to ‘head for
safer ground.’31 Those who were unable or unwilling to evacuate the city,
such as ‘residents’ and ‘stranded tourists,’ gathered at the Superdome,
which had been ‘designated as a shelter of last resort.’32 Entry into the
domed stadium was difficult, with ‘long lines of evacuees … waiting in the
rain,’ and other ‘residents’ found ‘refuge’ in the city’s hotels.33 The paper’s
articles from the following day were similar with regard to how people
stricken by the storm and its aftermath are represented.
By 31 August, however, the newspaper saw its first use of refugee as a
representation for people in New Orleans – primarily for those stranded at
the Superdome – as water poured into the city. The label appeared in articles
written by The New York Times’ own reporters as well as in Associated
Press articles run by the paper. Although it has not been possible to
determine in which article the label was first used, an examination of how
Katrina survivors are represented in an article entitled ‘New Orleans Mayor
Says Hurricane May Have Killed Thousands’34 is revealing. Towards the
beginning of the article, people remaining in New Orleans after the storm
are represented as evacuees (emphasis added):
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1: …authorities drew up plans to clear out the tens of
thousands of people left in the Big Easy and practically abandon
the flooded-out city. Many of the evacuees – including thousands
now staying in the Superdome – will be moved to the Astrodome
in Houston, 350 miles away.
There will be a ‘total evacuation of the city. We have to. The city
will not be functional for two or three months,’ Nagin said. And
he said people will not be allowed back into their homes for at
least a month or two.35
EXTRACT
Later, although qualified by another noun or possessive noun, refugees is
used to represent the same group of people:
EXTRACT 2:
With the streets awash and looters brazenly cleaning
out stores with law enforcement officers too busy to do anything
about it, authorities planned to move at least 25,000 New
Orleans’ storm refugees to the Astrodome in a vast, two-day
caravan of some 475 buses.
Many of the city’s refugees – 15,000 to 20,000 people – were in
the Superdome, which had become hot and stuffy, with broken
toilets and nowhere for anyone to bathe. ‘It can no longer
operate as a shelter of last resort,’ the mayor said.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the situation was desperate and there
was no choice but to clear out.36
Finally, towards the end of the article, the refugee label occurs without a
qualifier and is followed by a powerful simile:
3: On some of the few roads that were still passable,
people waved at passing cars with empty water jugs, begging for
relief. Hundreds of people appeared to have spent the night on a
crippled highway.
In one east New Orleans neighborhood, refugees were loaded
onto the backs of moving vans like cattle…37
EXTRACT
How is it, then, that a single Associated Press report represents the same
group of storm survivors as evacuees, on the one hand, and refugees, on the
other? A careful reading of the extracts suggests that the terms are not
entirely synonymous for the reporters who filed the article. In the first
extract evacuees is used when there is some semblance of order, some
official control over the situation. In this case, authorities drew up plans for
the total evacuation of New Orleans, and once the city has been evacuated,
the authorities will not let people return for quite some time. The other
extracts, by contrast, describe situations of little or no control. Even though
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the mayor and governor are mentioned in the second extract, for instance,
the primary focus lies on escalating conditions that authorities cannot
handle: reports of lawlessness in the streets and of overcrowding, heat,
unsanitary facilities, and a lack of food and water in the Superdome. As for
the final extract, here too refugees is situated in a description of deplorable
conditions apparently beyond anyone’s control. Once the refugee label is
used in texts like these, the plight of the New Orleanians as portrayed in the
press is – much like Governor Blanco states in the second extract – an
image of despair, something Americans often associate with refugees from
or in other countries.
A further example of how refugee came to replace evacuee as a news actor
label can be seen by comparing two brief extracts from successive reports
filed by Joseph B. Treaster, The New York Times’ journalist who covered
events as they developed in the Superdome:
1: The hurricane’s howling winds stripped 15-foot
sections off the roof of the Superdome, where as many as
10,000 evacuees took shelter.38
EXTRACT 2: By 11 a.m., the water was nearly three feet deep
outside the Superdome, where more than 12,000 refugees are
being sheltered.39
EXTRACT
The second extract is arguably a revised update of the previous day’s story,
a common practice among journalists under pressure to file developing
stories on time.40 The extracts have the same basic clause structure:
independent clause + subordinate clause. How, then, do they differ from
each other? The independent clause in the first extract relates the danger of
the hurricane’s howling winds to the stadium, while on the following day it
is rising waters that pose a threat to the structure. As for the subordinate
clauses – though the first uses evacuees whereas the second uses refugees –
they appear to have the same fundamental meaning: there are thousands of
people sheltered in the Superdome. However, by examining how the labels
are positioned and how they function within the subordinate clause, we
come once again to the issue of control. In the earlier extract, the people
represented as evacuees are positioned through the language to be ‘Actors’
that ‘do something to a Patient (person or thing affected by action)’41: in this
case, they deliberately took shelter. The evacuees, therefore, were in some
control of their actions, despite the fact that they had been ordered earlier by
city authorities to leave their homes and report to the Superdome or other
designated shelter of last resort. In the extract on the following day, Treaster
labels the same group of people as refugees, and positions them through the
language as Patients, as no longer in control of their immediate actions.
Hence, the refugees are being sheltered by an unnamed Actor, that is, the
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authorities. Consequently, the use of the refugee label invokes an image of
the people in the Superdome as being powerless and unable to make their
own decisions. Instead, they are dependent upon the actions of authorities,
who were, by most media reports, and subsequent official inquiries, unable
to manage the situation.42
The Superdome was not the only context in which the refugee label was
used. In New Orleans, later reports spoke of refugees waiting for help at the
city’s convention centre, airport and at a highway overpass. Once rescued
from the rising waters and evacuated to cities beyond New Orleans,
Katrina’s displaced continued to be labelled as refugees, at least for a while.
For instance, the lead sentence in a report about the evacuation of New
Orleanians to Houston ran as ‘Refugees from New Orleans arrived
Thursday at the Houston Astrodome.’43 In spite of the acknowledged
improved conditions, the New Orleanians newly arrived in Houston were
again portrayed as having a lack of control: ‘…many of the refugees, dirty
and hungry, wandered around aimlessly’ and others were turned away and
‘packed into hotels and church shelters.’44 By 4 September a full week after
the first levee was breached in New Orleans, The New York Times reported
that there were ‘[m]ore than 120,000 refugees … in 97 shelters’ across
Texas and thousands more ‘refugees’ in states like Louisiana, Mississippi
and Alabama.45 Clearly, although the refugee label was first applied to
evacuees in the Superdome, it came to be used by The New York Times as a
general term for Katrina’s displaced.
Significantly, the press’s use of language during its coverage of the first few
days of the storm’s aftermath is plainly linked to a perceived failure of the
authorities at the city, state and national levels to respond to the situation in
a controlled and organized manner. This perception and the concomitant
reaction, were held by the displaced themselves, the media and national
spokespeople. As for those stranded in New Orleans awaiting evacuation,
there was the impression that people were dependent on authorities who
were unable to handle the events unleashed by Katrina. For example, one of
the displaced, in line with thousands outside the Superdome waiting for a
bus to Houston, remarked that officials are ‘not organized. Nobody has any
plans. We’re depending on them for food, water and shelter. Who’s in
charge?’46 Some of the displaced were now resigned to their assigned status:
‘It’s a free-for-all,’ said one storm survivor. ‘It don’t really matter where we
go, as long as we get processed as refugees and get out of this chaos.’ 47
The media’s response to the lack of control was also one of disbelief and
anger. One television correspondent remarked that it was ‘a scene out of
another country.’48 Or, as another reporter put it: ‘This is not Iraq, this is
not Somalia. This is home.’49 The media was not satisfied with the
government’s response to the crisis in New Orleans; one correspondent
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33
noted, for example, ‘[s]o much is not being done for these people.’50 If this
was the perception held by the media and by the public it is not surprising
that the term refugee – given its use in the official discourse of institutions
like the United Nations as well as in the media’s coverage of large-scale
population displacement in other countries – came to be used in describing
the situation which for a little over a week was evidently out of control.
Although it is in one sense understandable how the refugee label first came
to be used in the coverage of post-Katrina New Orleans, the outrage that
quickly developed against its application is equally understandable. After
all, a term that many Americans had previously viewed as strictly applying
to non-citizens, was suddenly being used to represent US citizens at home
and in one of the country’s most beloved cities. What is more, the vast
majority of Katrina’s displaced assigned the refugee label were African
American and/or poor. For this reason, some felt the term was explicitly
racist. For instance, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, when asked on 3
September 2005, by an MSNBC broadcaster whether there was a racial
component to the government’s failed rapid response to the plight of
stranded New Orleanians, foregrounded the controversy over the use of the
refugee label in his opening comments: ‘Point one. We are not “refugees”.
That in itself is racist language. We are American citizens. We are not
“refugees”. We are citizens who have not been well served by our
government.’51 Jackson’s last sentiment – that American citizens cannot be
refugees in their own land – was supported by other civic leaders such as
Marc Morial, former mayor of New Orleans, as well as by the public at
large as expressed in discussions on blogs and internet forums. The depth of
this feeling is epitomized by the statement of one displaced New Orleanian
who said in an interview on National Public Radio:
I pay taxes. My taxes probably helped pay for this shelter ...
and I am not a refugee. I wasn't shipped here … we are
United States citizens ... a lot of us are taxpaying, honest,
hardworking people … when did I come from another
country? … I am a survivor … They need to say the ‘survivors
of Katrina.’ 52
Indeed, the issue of the use of the refugee label had gained such momentum
that on 6 September 2005, President Bush felt compelled to respond:
You know, there’s a debate here about refugees. Let me tell
you my attitude and the attitude of the people around this
table: The people we’re talking about are not refugees. They
are Americans, and they need the help and love and
compassion of our fellow citizens.53
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Obviously President Bush’s statement was a reaction to the furore that had
erupted over the use of refugee as a label for the citizens of New Orleans.
We would further argue, however, that it is a reaction to how the use of the
label represents not only the displaced but also the Government and, for that
matter, the President himself. Inherent in the use of a word like refugee is
that if someone is deemed a refugee then something or someone is
responsible for that condition. Katrina was clearly a natural disaster, but
there was an assumption by those affected by the storm and the American
public in general that all levels of government should have done more to
prevent the breaching of the levees, assist with evacuation of the city before
the storm, and control the situation after it. Indeed, the vulnerability of the
levees protecting New Orleans was well documented prior to Katrina. 54
Furthermore, post 11 September 2001, authorities at the city, state, and
federal levels were expected to be capable of responding to the aftermath of
a major incident. As one member of the House of Representatives lamented,
‘Shame, shame on America. We were put to the test, and we have failed.’ 55
So, for President Bush and other government officials it was equally
important that Katrina’s displaced not be identified as refugees in their own
land, otherwise by association the government would be held accountable
for their plight.
By 5 September 2005, the press itself began to take up the issue of whether
or not refugee was an appropriate term for Katrina’s displaced. One of the
earliest commentaries was from Boston Globe columnist, Adrian Walker,
who argued that, even though Katrina’s displaced, having fled and sought
refuge, were literally ‘refugees,’ the term was both inappropriate and
unfortunate. In his view it represented the New Orleanians ‘as outsiders – as
others, as foreigners.’56 Because of this, they were ‘not quite Americans,
not quite our own’ so it was ‘acceptable for the nation to do less than its best
by them.’57 In fact, The Boston Globe refused to use refugee from the outset
and other papers, including The Washington Post and The Miami Herald,
banned its use early on in their coverage of the crisis, as did National Public
Radio.58
The Associated Press and The New York Times, however, both defended
their use of refugee as a news actor label. The Associated Press felt the term
was apt for capturing the extent of the crisis and the conditions those
affected by it found themselves in. What is more, Executive Editor,
Kathleen Carroll, said that Katrina’s displaced were ‘refugees … [u]ntil
such time as they were able to take up new lives in their new communities
or return to their former homes.’59 This position regarding the term refugee
is, as argued previously, inextricably linked to the control individuals exert
over their situation. As for The New York Times, the paper from which the
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35
majority of data for this study originates, spokeswoman Catherine Mathis,
was reported as saying that the use of refugee had not been banned. Rather,
the paper used the term to fit what reporters were observing in New Orleans
and elsewhere when they thought it was an appropriate designation. Mathis
went on to explain that refugee ‘certainly does justice to the suffering
legions driven from their homes by Katrina.’60
A search of The New York Times’ archives with the keyword refugee
indicates that the term began to diminish from the paper’s coverage of
Katrina around 8 September 2005, just after the majority of Katrina’s
displaced were settling in to the reception centers to which they had
evacuated or had been evacuated. The focus of much of the paper’s
coverage had shifted from the immediacy of securing basic needs to the
future. For instance, in an article filed on 11 September 2005, Timothy
Egan cites the following aspirations of relocated ‘citizens of the drowned
city of New Orleans’61:
1: If I had a brother or sister or someone here [in
Utah], maybe I might stay. But I don’t know anybody. If I’m
gonna die, I want to die back in New Orleans.62
EXTRACT 2: ‘It’s just time for another change, for me to start
my life over,’ said Matthew Brown, 37, newly relocated to
Amarillo … ‘I have a job and a couple of offers. The money’s
nice. People like me, treat me right.’ 63
EXTRACT
Whether Katrina’s displaced were to return to New Orleans, stay in the city
where they are presently located and look for employment there, or move on
to some other place, these sentiments are significant as they are indicative of
the re-emergence of the survivors’ personal control and, by inference, the
emergence of some degree of control on the part of the authorities. It is
therefore not surprising that in Egan’s New York Times’ report – as well as
in others following the evacuation of New Orleans – terms like evacuee,
citizen and people came to replace the controversial term refugee.
Concluding Discussion
Although the use of the term refugee during the Katrina crisis was the
subject of controversy, our examination of examples from the electronic
archives of The New York Times has shown that there was precedent for
using this news actor label to represent American citizens both at home and
abroad. The newspaper’s use of refugee was in accord with the word’s
broad denotation of ‘someone who had fled and sought refuge.’ However,
in the 1950s the word acquired an internationally recognized legalistic
definition, which, for many Americans, came to be associated with
36
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
foreigners seeking refuge in countries like the United States. Subsequently,
in The New York Times, at least, the word over time decreased in its use as a
label for Americans at home, because of, arguably, its connotation of
foreignness or otherness. The scale of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction and
displacement of people, however, caused some media outlets, including The
New York Times, to reinstate the word as a label for American citizens at
home in crisis. The refugee label first surfaced in reports on New Orleanians
stranded in the Superdome and other parts of the city, and it was later used,
albeit briefly, for Katrina’s evacuees in reception centres around the
country. This article has contended that a key factor prompting the use of
the refugee label was the issue of control. Secondly, the application of the
term grammatically positioned the displaced, who lacked control of their
immediate situation, as Patients, that is, ‘as people … affected by the
actions of others’64 or, in this case, the inactions of others. Within a few
days of the media’s first use of the refugee label, there was a strong negative
reaction by many Americans. As members of the public argued, and as
President Bush was compelled to clarify, the use of the term was, in
principle, inappropriate because Americans could not be refugees in their
own land. Some media organizations refused to use the refugee label
whereas others, like The New York Times, continued to use it until they felt
some control had re-emerged.
The lexical storm stemming from the use of refugee as a label during the
coverage of Hurricane Katrina raises an important issue for the media. Do
reporters and editors continue to use words or phrases that are denotatively
accurate and that have precedent use but which have since acquired negative
connotations, or do they avoid those words altogether? When asked what
label he would have used had he covered events in New Orleans, William
Safire, The New York Times columnist who writes a weekly piece entitled
‘On Language,’ noted that, even though a ‘refugee’ is, by definition, ‘a
person who seeks refuge,’ he probably would have used ‘the term “flood
victims”, to avoid any political connotations.’65 As the preceding account of
the controversy surrounding the use of refugee indicates, as does earlier
research by experts in the language of the media,66 choices about lexical
items and their grammatical positioning can have powerful ramifications.
However, these choices are not just about which lexical item and
grammatical structure should be used in a report but also about what
presuppositions are inherent in them. As critical discourse analyst Norman
Fairclough notes: ‘If something is presupposed, it is in a sense present in the
text, but as part of its implicit meaning.’67 This article has proposed that the
differing positions regarding the appropriateness of the refugee label stem
from differing presuppositions attributed to it. For The New York Times and
other media outlets who defended their use of the label, refugee as a
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
37
representation for Katrina’s displaced was appropriate because its use
presupposed the implicit meaning of someone who had sought refuge. In
reporting the events in New Orleans, the journalists were unlikely to make
this explicit because there was presumably an assumption that readers or
viewers would hold the same presupposition. Given the reaction to the use
of the term, many members of the public clearly held different and perhaps
conflicting presuppositions for the label. For them, implicit in the use of
refugee were traces of the legalistic definition and the concomitant
connotation of foreignness or otherness. This then forced the media to
explicitly state the presuppositions that they had made when they either
chose to use or not use refugee as a representation for Katrina’s displaced.
What path will refugee take in the future? Will the word ever be used again
as a representation for Americans at home, or will it go the path of the word
concentration camp which, as noted previously, was actually used by The
New York Times to designate evacuee centers during the 1927 Mississippi
flood? That is, presuppositions and negative connotations may ‘colonize’ a
particular lexical item to such an extent that, even though there may be a
precedent or denotative basis for the term, an aversion develops, both within
and outside of the media, for its use. In the case of refugee, the reaction to
its use as a representation for those displaced by Hurricane Katrina suggests
that for the American media that point may have already been reached.
ENDNOTES
1
NBC’s Meet the Press, 4 September 2005. Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9179790/.
2
Jemimah Noonoo, ‘Refugee Vs. Evacuee Sparks Protest,’ Columbia Missourian, 16
September 2005. Source: http://columbiamissourian.com/news/print.php?ID=16047.
3
Joseph B. Treaster and N.R. Kleinfield, ‘New Orleans is Inundated as 2 Levees Fail,’ The
New York Times (henceforth TNYT), 31 August 2005. TimesSelect electronic archive
(henceforth TS), p. 1.
4
Victoria Neufeldt, ed., Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 3rd ed. Macmillan, New
York, 1996, p. 1129.
5
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/refugee.
6
See, for example, Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media and the Crisis of Civil Society: From
Watts to Rodney King, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.
7
Alan Bell, The Language of News Media, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991.
8
Jean Aitchison, ‘From Armageddon to War: The Vocabulary of Terrorism’ in J. Aitchison
and Diana M. Lewis, eds., New Media Language, Routledge, London, 2003, p. 193.
9
Jocelyn Noveck, ‘Use of the Word “Refugee” Stirs Debate,’ Associated Press, 7 September
2005. Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap.
10
Sir William A. Craigie, ed., A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles,
Oxford University Press, London, 1959, p. 1923.
11
Ibid.
12
Benjamin Drew, The Refugee: A North-Side View of Slavery, Negro Universities Press,
New York, 1968, p. 11.
13
‘The Feeling in Canada,’ TNYT, 22 April 1865. ProQuest electronic database (henceforth,
PQ), p. 8.
38
14
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
‘American Refugees Tell of Hardships,’ TNYT, 8 May 1911. PQ, p. 3.
‘The War on the Frontier,’ TNYT, 15 February 1863. PQ, p. 8.
16
‘Race Rioters Fire East St. Louis and Shoot or Hang Many Negroes,’ TNYT, 3 July 1917.
PQ, p. 1.
17
‘The Wrecking of Galveston,’ TNYT, 11 September 1900. PQ, p. 1.
18
‘Refugees Reach Houston,’ TNYT, 14 September 1900. PQ, p. 2.
19
Pete Daniel, Deep’n As It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1977.
20
‘Flood Sufferers Now Put at 100,000,’ TNYT, 21 April 1927. PQ, p. 5.
21
Ibid.
22
1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, as cited in Rita J. Simon, ‘Public and
Political Opinion on the Admission of Refugees’ in David W. Haines, ed., Refugees in
America in the 1990s: A Reference Handbook, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1996, p.
355.
23
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Source: http://uscis.gov.
24
Rita J. Simon, ‘Public and Political Opinion on the Admission of Refugees’ in David W.
Haines, ed., Refugees in America in the 1990s: A Reference Handbook, Greenwood Press,
Westport, CT, 1996.
25
Tad Szulc, ‘The Refugee Explosion,’ TNYT, 23 November 1980. PQ, p. 34ff.
26
Mark Cutts, ed., The State of the World’s Refugees: 50 Years of Humanitarian Action,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000; Bill Frelick, ‘Hardening the Heart: The Global
Refugee Problem in the 1990s’ in David W. Haines, ed., Refugees in America in the 1990s: A
Reference Handbook, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1996, pp. 372-382.
27
‘Hurricane Stuns Mississippi Coast as 200,000 Flee,’ TNYT, 18 August 1969. PQ, p. 22.
28
Ibid.
29
There were other articles which used the label but in the better known UNHCR sense of
the word (e.g. Haitian and Cuban refugees in the Miami area who were affected by the
storm).
30
Felicity Barringer, ‘Huddled in Shelter, Clan That Can Never Go Home,’ TNYT, 26 August
1992. TS, p. 21.
31
Joseph B. Treaster and Abby Goodnough, ‘Powerful Storm Threatens Havoc Along Gulf
Coast,’ TNYT, 29 August 2005. TS, p. 1.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
34
‘New Orleans Mayor Says Hurricane May Have Killed Thousands,’ Associated Press, 31
August 2005. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/.
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
38
Joseph B. Treaster and Kate Zernike, ‘Hurricane Katrina Slams into Gulf Coast,’ TNYT, 30
August 2005. TS, p. 1. Because Zernike’s reports were filed from Montgomery, Alabama, we
assume that the words describing the situation in New Orleans are Treaster’s.
39
Joseph B. Treaster, ‘Life-or-Death Words of a Battered City: “I Had to Get Out”,’ TNYT,
31 August 2005. TS, p. 15.
40
Bell, The Language of News Media.
41
Norman Fairclough, Media Discourse, Edward Arnold, London, 1995, p. 112.
42
Eric Lipton, ‘Homeland Security Would Share Duties for Disaster Response Under
Proposal,’ TNYT, 14 February 2006. TS, p. 19.
43
John M. Broder and Simon Romero, ‘Astrodome a Step Up From the New Orleans Chaos,’
TNYT, 2 September 2005. TS, p. 19.
44
Ibid.
45
Robert D. McFadden, ‘Bush Pledges More Troops as Evacuation Grows,’ TNYT, 4
September 2005. TS, p. 1.
15
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
46
39
James Dao, Joseph B. Treaster and Felicity Barringer, ‘New Orleans Is Awaiting
Deliverance,’ TNYT, 2 September 2005. TS, p. 15.
47
Ibid.
48
Alessandra Stanley, ‘Cameras Captured a Disaster But Now Focus on Suffering,’ TNYT, 2
September 2005. TS, p. 21.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.
51
‘Racial Component?’, NBC’s Meet the Press, 3 September, 2005. Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9232071.
52
Michelle Norris, ‘Katrina Survivors Contemplate Whether to Go Home,’ National Public
Radio, 7 September 2005. Source:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4836564&ft=1&f=2.
53
‘President Meets with Representatives from National Voluntary Organizations,’ White
House Press Release, 6 September 2005. Source:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050906-1.html.
54
In 2002, for example, The Times Picayune presented a five-part series of reports entitled
‘Washing Away’ which discussed New Orleans’ vulnerability in the case of a major
hurricane. Source:
http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf?/washingaway/thebigone_1.html. Also of interest
is Mark Fischetti’s article, ‘Drowning New Orleans,’ Scientific American, October 2001, pp.
76-85.
55
Carl Hulse, ‘Lawmakers Criticize U.S. Response,’ TNYT, 3 September 2005. TS, p. 14.
56
Adrian Walker, ‘ “Refugees” in Their Own Land,’ Boston Globe, 5 September 2005.
Boston Globe archives.
57
Ibid.
58
Noveck, ‘Use of the Word “Refugee” Stirs Debate’; Mike Pesca, ‘Are Katrina’s Victims
“Refugees” or “Evacuees”?’, National Public Radio, 5 September 2005. Source:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4833613&ft=1&f=1092.
59
Noveck, ‘Use of the Word “Refugee” Stirs Debate’.
60
Ibid.
61
Timothy Egan, ‘Uprooted and Scattered Far From the Familiar,’ TNYT, 11 September
2005. TS, p. 1.
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
64
Fairclough, Media Discourse, p. 112.
65
Noveck, ‘Use of the Word “Refugee” Stirs Debate’.
66
Bell, The Language of News Media; Fairclough, Media Discourse; Aitchison, ‘From
Armageddon to War: The Vocabulary of Terrorism.’
67
Fairclough, Media Discourse, p. 106.