Everyone, it seems, wants to weigh in on the subject.
There is the white TV anchor who muses that the left-behind are living paycheck to paycheck and therefore could not afford to evacuate, and how that paycheck-to-paycheck hustle is not a part of the white American experience. (Tell that to the scores of middle-class whites struggling to service their debt.) Or stand-up comic Bill Maher riffing on the subtleties of 21st century racism and the hurricane. And rapper Kanye West declaring at a concert fundraiser for victims, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." He said America is set up "to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible."
This feeling of being disregarded is pervasive in the African American community, where old wounds still sting. Witness a "Saturday Night Live" skit from 1998, where Samuel L. Jackson and Tracy Morgan indulge in a bit of hyperbole, playing African Americans in the fifth class steerage of the Titanic. Everyone was rescued before them -- even the furniture.
While that may have been comedy, its message is conveyed in all kinds of real-life ways. Deborah Willis, photographer and professor of the arts at New York University, laments some of the images coming out of New Orleans.
The frequent replay of what has become an iconic looting photo -- the guy with the flying braids and falling pants -- "desensitizes the viewer of finding compassion for what happened to the thousands of people who have died or who have suffered," she says.
It's an us- vs .-them kind of image, she says, and "a racialized image because of the way it's been used and reused over again."
Ian Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, agrees: "If you see a photo from New Orleans of a white person with a shotgun, you think, 'Defending property.' If the news flashes a picture of a black person with a shotgun, you think, 'Looter.' "
Then, too, for many people of color, those images come loaded with baggage, in particular, a reflexive sense of guilt, the fear that the looting African Americans will be used to serve as a stand-in for the race as a whole. Ward Connerly admits that he felt a twinge when he saw the images: "I thought this is only going to fuel the perception, there those people go again. It was not as a -- quote -- black man, it was as a citizen who hates to see that kind of thing, but being fully aware of how it plays out in the minds of people."
The image of the ghoulish Other arose in natural disasters more than a century ago. In the Chicago Fire of 1871, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, minority groups (Germans, African Americans and Chinese) were rumored to be preying on white women by chewing on their fingers to steal their jewelry. It's not such a stretch to see parallels in the unconfirmed reports of roving bands of rapists in New Orleans.
So what lessons does New Orleans offer?
We are a multi-racial society, and indeed, New Orleans has historically been famed for its racial mixing and matching and resulting complicated family lines. Still, as a nation, we seem to keep aligning ourselves along strict black/white lines, never mind the more complex, brown and beige reality.
Remember Guinier's black canary in the mine. And the troubling specter of the federal government's seeming incompetence in the wake of a catastrophic national disaster.
"The lesson we can take from this is that the society cannot blithely ignore extreme disparities in economic and social situations," Adams says.
Noel Ignatiev, author of "How the Irish Became White" and editor of Race Traitor, a journal dedicated to the "New Abolitionism," suggests that the nation is poised at a pivotal point. He sees an opportunity for a realignment of thinking.
"White is not a matter of color. White is a matter of a sense of entitlement, a sense they are or ought to be entitled to specially protected place in society," he says. "But there are plenty of white folks on the bottom rung of society, people for whom whiteness isn't doing much at all.
Some may be awakening to the notion there's no use clinging to an identity that's doing them no good. If white folks start thinking of themselves as poor and dispossessed instead of privileged, it will change the way they act. We will see the beginnings of class conflict."
