What's In A Word.

There has been a fierce debate right in the U.S. over the use of the word "refugee" for the Hurricane Katrina "survivors", "victims" or "evacuees". Many consider the term 'refugee' inappropriate -- even racist -- when applied to Hurricane Katrina evacuees as if the displaced victims, many of whom are black, were second-class citizens — or not even Americans. Rev. Jesse Jackson went as far as saying that "It is racist to call American citizens refugees".

As a result The Washington Post, the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe have for instance banned the word from their coveage of the current crisis while AP and The New York Times have continued to use the term.

From a European perspective the whole debate may be hard to understand and it may be seen as yet another form of 'political correctness'. After all, a refugee is simply "an individual seeking refuge or asylum" and a refuge is "protection or shelter, as from danger or hardship" and a refugee can be a person of any 'race'. So what's the big deal?

Well, first it is interesting to note that if you consider the word from a U.N. perspective, the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention describes a refugee as "someone who has fled across an international border to escape violence or persecution".
It is also worth noticing that many commentators have compared the scene in New Orleans to that of a Third-World country - something unimaginable in the United-States. By doing so they have not only underlined the economic and racial divide in today's American (southern?) society but also the idea of 'otherness' associated with a whole section of society. Clearly a lot of the poor southern blacks who stayed in N.O. live 'outside' [mainstream] America and so, one may wonder if calling them 'refugees' may actually be very accurate at some level. The anger expressed by many black leaders and by Katrina 'evacuees' is understandable precisely because the word connotes a situation too close to the truth that they cannot bear. No doubt that President Bush is happy to see the debate shift from his lack of management to the use of the word refugee by the media when he weighed in the debate and said that Hurricane survivors are "not refugees." "These are Americans, and they need the help and love and compassion of our fellow citizens," he said.