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. With the exception, perhaps, of the toniest areas of St. Charles Avenue, and the poorest blocks of housing projects, black and white homeowners chatted to each other from their front porches and greeted each other as they walked their dogs down the streets.
While Hurricane Katrina had no deliberate target as it ravaged the Gulf Coast, in the aftermath it’s clear that the victims 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 huddling 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 also were neglected. 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? Is economic class a factor even more than race?
The images of the black poor struggling in New Orleans’ chaos should be “a powerful wake-up call,” said Dr. Jeff Johnson, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine.
“The message is that these people are in some sense abandoned, and that’s why they’re so angry,” he said, “but that abandonment occurred not just around this storm. They’ve been abandoned by our society in the last decade. That’s something as a society we have to acknowledge and grapple with.”
Jesse Jackson said racial injustice and indifference to black suffering was at the root of the disaster response. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the administration’s highest-ranking black, dismissed any such suggestion.
Although she agreed that the black community has been heavily affected, Rice said “nobody wants to see Americans suffer, and I think everybody understands that.”
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.
D.J. Kelly, stood on a wet New Orleans sidewalk Friday with an American flag that he plucked from a gutter and washed with “some of my precious water.” Kelly, who is black, said the disaster has nothing to do with the color of anyone’s skin.
“Don’t make it seem like no racial thing,” he said. “That’s not the way I feel. We all is in this together.”
Black members of Congress, however, denounced the slow federal response to the storm. “We cannot allow it to be said by history that the difference between those who lived and those who died in the great storm and flood of 2005 was nothing more than poverty, age or skin color,” said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md. “It would be unconscionable to stand by and do nothing.”
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 blonde, is the daughter of a former mayor. Marc Morial, who is light-skinned, followed his father into the mayor’s 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.
