Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. Almost all the people who live there, be they black or white, are terribly poor. Poverty is America's great divide, not race, not religion. It's poverty.
I've been down that way, in Mississippi and Louisiana, and I know that what I think of as my lowest point financially would be a step up for many of the people there.
I know a little bit about living in poverty, not having a car, getting up an hour early to ride the bus to work, picking which bills to pay each month, turning off the AC in July because the electric bill was unpayable. I know how hopeless it feels, how you can never seem to get ahead.
I know that the life of a person doing temp jobs or day-labor, even call center and office work is just a new formulation of a very old social situation. Serfs, peones, temps, day laborers, customer service representatives, indentured servants, what is the difference?
But wait, modern laborers are "free." Free how? Free to walk away, but also not free, bound by social pressure, by morality and practicality. Workers today are free to quit their jobs whenever they want, if they don't mind being evicted from their homes, harassed by collection agents, (who are themselves caught in the same predicament) and put through the often humiliating process of finding work.
How are poor Americans kept in this perpetual state of servitude? Surely they could work together and demand some simple social supports, unions and social democratic parties in Europe have stood up for workers and made life more bearable for those citizens who aren't highly educated, wealth-generating, top-ten-percenters. Why not here? Because here in America, we have several different colors of poor people, and they all hate each other.
That's why we hear Kanye West saying "George Bush doesn't care about black people." It's just not true, George Bush probably cares quite a bit about Condoleeza Rice, and maybe even cares a little bit about Colin Powell, and I'm pretty sure they qualify as "black people."
It wasn't racism that screwed up the evacuation of New Orleans, it was the inability of the ruling classes to understand the situation. They were simply unable to imagine people who didn't own cars. They gave the order to evacuate, (again) and didn't understand that thousands of people who wanted to leave simply couldn't.
In America, we have reached a day where a man no longer judged by the color of his skin, but rather, by the content of his bank account.