Katrina exposes race and poverty divide in the US

MANY people feel Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed New Orleans and wrecked the Gulf Coast a year ago, has exposed a deep divide of race and poverty in the United States.

But has that divide narrowed at all in the past year? And do Americans find reason to hope that it will narrow in the future?

Leah Chase, 83, a chef, is known as the queen of creole cuisine. She and her husband of 60 years, Dooky, are restoring their damaged restaurant. At the moment, they are living in a government-subsidised trailer.

She said: “People get mad at me because I don’t talk about race or racism. To me, poverty is the thing. If you don’t have money, you’re going to have a hard time at everything, no matter what your skin colour is.

“We had been evacuated far away by the time Katrina hit, but I looked at those poor people on the TV — wading through flood water — and it just broke my heart. They were there because they were poor. They didn’t have money, or a vehicle, or a way to get out of town.

“Sometimes people will hit me with ‘they are poor because they are black’, but I can’t always go along with that.”

Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, said: “I was uplifted by hearing how many white Americans recognised that racial bias existed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and wanted to openly address the dilemma.

“There was Sara Roberts, for example, an accountant, who helped organise a flotilla of recreational fishing boats aimed at saving lives in flooded-out New Orleans East.

“She had prided herself in not being a bigot, but admits she automatically thought ‘looters’ when she saw two African-Americans coming out of a shop with big bags full of merchandise.

“Later that day she saw those same guys handing the supplies out among elderly people who had been left behind. She said it made her very ashamed.

“The hope of race relations in post-Katrina America depends on all of us confronting our inner demons. We must stop always snapping in knee-jerk fashion that racism doesn’t exist. It does. It takes courage to admit bias. That is where the healing must begin.”

Stephanie Mingo, who lived in a New Orleans housing project until Katrina, said: “I think it has got worse for poor people. I really do. Even with all those jobs they say they have available, some people still can’t find work. But I always tell people ‘don’t feel sorry for yourself. Just get up and do what you need to do’.”

Andrei Codrescu, a distinguished professor of English at Louisiana State University, claims Katrina tore away the thin veneer of the unstated agreement to not talk publicly about race.

“Race has become a code for poverty and crime that is used by conservative politicians to vote against social change. Black leaders have also soft-pedalled the issue of race because they were afraid of losing what social programmes were left.

“Katrina revealed there are people in America much poorer than is publicly acknowledged. The nation didn’t know just how segregated it was. Now it knows.

“Katrina also taught us that the government does not care much about the black and the poor unless they are embarrassed by the media in front of the whole world.

“I was hoping some social political awareness would come out of this, but the government has thrown so much money at our state and city officials that they have been corrupted. All we have seen so far is a frenzied free-for-all for the cash.”

Charles Regan Wilson, a historian, feels images of African-Americans trapped in flooded New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina will long haunt the country.

A year later, racial and economic divisions have in many ways grown worse. The biggest factor is that 350,000 people who used to be New Orleans residents have not returned since Katrina, and 80% of those are black.