“Katrina” Exposes the Deep Scar of American Racism
Story by Troy Curtis

Many things were swept away during the effects of hurricane Katrina.   Monstrous winds have raged against the southern landscape, throwing it against itself, turning houses inside out and breaking neighborhoods into unrecognizable plains of rubble. Whole areas and communities have been swallowed by the delta. But it hasn't just been material things that have dissolved. The twenty-four hour news channels are showing the results, not just of the hurricane, but also of the poor African-Americans who have been and are currently being left to rot and die in the Deep South. With the images of this disaster the thin veil of indifference has risen on this country's racial divide. The lack of effort to help evacuate people in need before hand and the slow response to help in the aftermath leaves much doubt.

For the last few decades minorities have been led to believe by mainstream media and pop culture that racism is a bad memory that has no bearing on present life or current politics. That to cry racism is to have brought race into the situation yourself. Racism is a deeply worn scar that has long been accepted on the face of the nation. Once again the lives of poor African Americans and the subconscious of the rich have met in America's Deep South.    Like a wise matron nature has flooded reality upon the shores of willful ignorance. The media and the White House will continue to attempt to dissolve race issues by claming them as solely economic. This tactic has been used since the days of post Civil War reconstruction. But as we face this new reconstruction let us excavate this American wound without the pertinence that this is merely a natural disaster.

America now has in its care tens of thousands of its people.   Many of which are African Americans who without the means to evacuate have gone from having little to having nothing. To think that it is by mere coincidence or chance that poor people especially African-Americans would be stranded in a wasteland of devastation and danger is short sighted. Right now in this time of emergency America is neglecting these citizens. Not “refugees” as the news reports but American citizens whose ancestors build this counties wealth while others managed it.

The sound bite echoing from a George w. Bush press conference is that he is ”… unsatisfied with the results.” The President of the United States of America is billed as the most powerful person in the free world, a person who has focused this country's resources and wealth on a foreign war at his will. If he is “unsatisfied” with the “results” maybe he could get on the phone and effect some change. Bush's armchair quarterback reaction is of no comfort to the thousands dying on the streets.

There are tens of thousands of people in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana who will need good houses, jobs, schools and hospitals, but it wasn't only Hurricane Katrina that created such a situation. Many of the areas devastated by the hurricane had long since been devastated by under funding neglect and racism. Does it take a natural disaster to address a national one? Will all the southern communities be rebuilt, or will the poor African-American communities be forgotten? America has always found ways to justify conditions in the poor and urban ghettos, but now with an international eye sympathetically focused on the devastated southern coast, will the American government rise above it's soiled past to aid these Americans in constructing a flourishing future?