More Than Black And White

Prospect: Fallout Over Relief Spreads Beyond Racial Issues

(The American Prospect)  This column was written by LaNitra Walker.

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When Hurricane Katrina bombarded the Gulf Coast last week, she blew open a Pandora’s box of race and class issues that Americans thought they had packed away. In the wake of a destruction of the hurricane, we simply weren’t prepared to see how poor Americans in the South really are, and how many of the poorest are black. The media focused on the tired and desperate victims in the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center pleading for aid in the hours after the storm, and television audiences could see that they were almost all black. Journalists were too busy covering the dramatic rescue efforts to ask why only black Americans had become victims of the storm. Instead, the media focused on how federal and local officials were handling the disaster. Then, after much footage of Army helicopters shown plucking entire black families off of rooftops, the questions turned to whether or not the victims’ race played a role in the slow relief response.

In New Orleans and most of the South, race relations are inextricably bound to a caste system that most Americans have spent little time trying to understand. The amount of poverty in New Orleans is astounding, and black residents of New Orleans bear the greatest burden. According to the 2004 American Community Survey, the median family income in New Orleans is estimated to be just two-thirds of the national average. An estimated 80 percent of those living below the poverty line are black.

But not all black people in New Orleans are poor. The city has a substantial population of middle-class blacks and Creoles, as well as people of mixed-race background. Because of its geographic proximity to the Caribbean islands and its history as an outpost in the French and Spanish empires, New Orleans has become as rich and culturally mixed as its famous gumbos and jambalayas. In the years following the Haitian revolution, which raged from 1791 to 1804, black slaves and French slave owners sought refuge in New Orleans, bringing new ideas about race and class to our budding nation. In addition to these refugees, thousands of free blacks, known as "free people of color," lived in New Orleans in the 19th century. Many of these blacks were educated and owned property, and some even owned slaves. The mixture of landowners of French, Spanish, Indian, Acadian, and African descent created a middle class of Creoles who have helped to define New Orleans' culture.