Race, Poverty and Hurricane Katrina
Even some conservatives, such as David Brooks of the New York Times, have fallen for the nonsense that racism or an animosity toward the poor have anything to do with Hurricane Katrina. "The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned," claimed Brooks. Others note that there are a disproportionate amount of poor, black people who are affected by the hurricane, but they often fail to mention that New Orleans was disproportionately black (67.25%) with a high rate of poverty (23.7% of families are below the poverty line) so it should be no surprise that the majority of those left behind were black and that many were poor. It is true that it is much more difficulte for people of little means to leave a city like New Orleans because they have no car and rarely have an extended social network, but that doesn't mean that those who were able to leave "abandoned" those left behind. In addition, the black mayor of of New Orleans didn't use the school buses to evacuate those who had no other means of transportion and I believe we can safely assume that racism didn't play a part in this.
As for the rich/poor issue: In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming "tribes" and dividing up the labor.
And despite the ranting and wailing of talking heads on TV, there are signs that race relations might even be improving: In the last week, Joseph Brant lost his apartment, walked by scores of dead in the streets, traversed pools of toxic water and endured an arduous journey to escape the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in his hometown New Orleans.
On Sunday, he was praising the Lord, saying the ordeal was a test that ended up dispelling his lifelong distrust of white people and setting his life on a new course. He said he hitched a ride on Friday in a van driven by a group of white folks.
"Before this whole thing I had a complex about white people; this thing changed me forever," said Brant, 36, a truck driver who, like many of the refugees receiving public assistance in Houston, Texas, is black.
Moreover, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the most senior black member of the President's Cabinet, toured the devastated areas and rejected the notion that racism played any role in the disaster or relief efforts: "I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African-Americans. I just don't believe it for a minute," said Rice, while visiting a hurricane relief center outside of Mobile, Alabama.
"I see people across the spectrum -- Asians and blacks and whites and Latinos -- helping each other. What you are seeing is Americans are helping Americans," said Rice, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and often speaks about experiencing segregation firsthand while growing up in America's South.
Now can we all just put the petty politics and finger-pointing aside and focus on the really important matters, like rebuilding New Orleans and Mississippi?
As for the rich/poor issue: In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming "tribes" and dividing up the labor.
And despite the ranting and wailing of talking heads on TV, there are signs that race relations might even be improving: In the last week, Joseph Brant lost his apartment, walked by scores of dead in the streets, traversed pools of toxic water and endured an arduous journey to escape the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in his hometown New Orleans.
On Sunday, he was praising the Lord, saying the ordeal was a test that ended up dispelling his lifelong distrust of white people and setting his life on a new course. He said he hitched a ride on Friday in a van driven by a group of white folks.
"Before this whole thing I had a complex about white people; this thing changed me forever," said Brant, 36, a truck driver who, like many of the refugees receiving public assistance in Houston, Texas, is black.
Moreover, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the most senior black member of the President's Cabinet, toured the devastated areas and rejected the notion that racism played any role in the disaster or relief efforts: "I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African-Americans. I just don't believe it for a minute," said Rice, while visiting a hurricane relief center outside of Mobile, Alabama.
"I see people across the spectrum -- Asians and blacks and whites and Latinos -- helping each other. What you are seeing is Americans are helping Americans," said Rice, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and often speaks about experiencing segregation firsthand while growing up in America's South.
Now can we all just put the petty politics and finger-pointing aside and focus on the really important matters, like rebuilding New Orleans and Mississippi?