Hurricane Katrina had no deliberate target, but in the aftermath it’s clear that the victims – who are now facing a horrifying lack of rescue and care – are mostly black and mostly poor.
So many photographs from the devastation of New Orleans show the same faces: Desperate. Grief-stricken.
Black.
“Love has no color,” Cassandra Robinson said as she huddled with her family in a parking entrance along New Orleans’ Convention Center Boulevard. “But I’ve seen where this is all black and everybody else who is Caucasian, they’re up high in the hotels.”
In fact, those in hotels complained bitterly they were neglected, too. But Robinson’s comment echoes those of others who question the part race may have played in New Orleans’ crippling crisis.
Would the response have been more urgent if the victims had been mainly white?
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed the criticism. “I think everybody is very emotional,” Rice said. “It’s so hard to watch pictures of any Americans going through this.”
Rice agreed that the black community has been heavily affected. But, she said, “nobody wants to see Americans suffer, and I think everybody understands that.”
Rice, who is black, plans to go to Alabama, her native state, on Sunday to inspect some of the damage.
Is economic class a factor more than race? In Orleans Parish, where the boundaries are the same as the city limits, 66.6 percent of the residents are black. The black population nationwide is 12.1 percent.
New Orleans neighborhoods, once lined with old live oaks, charming cottages and imposing mansions, had been proof of the ease with which black and white could live side by side.
Uptown New Orleans, around Tulane University, was mostly white and affluent; the areas north of the French Quarter and east of downtown tended to be poorer and more heavily populated by minorities.
But New Orleanians were divided not so much by race as by economic class, a daily fact of life in a city where birthlines mean much.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, a blue-eyed blond, is the daughter of a former mayor. Marc Morial, the color of café au lait, followed his own father into the mayor’s office and stayed for eight years before C. Ray Nagin took office.
The political power structure is, to the eye, firmly controlled by people with African blood in their veins; most of the economic power of the city is held in very white hands.
When 80 percent of the city’s population, according to the mayor, evacuated before Hurricane Katrina, that left behind those with no cars, no resources, no way out.
Twenty-one percent of Orleans Parish households earn less than $10,000 a year. Nearly 27,000 families are below the poverty level. Most of those families are black.
Larry E. Davis, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center on Race and Social Problems, said images of the disaster are an embarrassment to this nation.
“It suggests that the residuals of a racist legacy are still very much intact,” he said.
