Hurricane Katrina is racist?

This Monday somebody told me about a hurricane savaging a certain southern state of the U.S., lots of people evacuated, mixed with comments like "now the Americans know what it means to be a refugee". I don't have a TV at home, so I didn't have any idea about the scale of the disaster.

Nobody deserve to suffer from calamities, and usually it is the poorest and the weakest to pay the highest price and are the least capable to recover from it afterwards. That was what I thought, but anyway, since then I started to pay attention to the news coverage on Internet on Katrina the Hurricane.

Then something strikes me - is it Katrina or the journalists who focus on the blacks? Almost all of the pictures about the hurricane show African-American victims.

Neither of those. The area is mostly populated by African-Americans. Here is the racial makeup and poverty level of the city New Orleans:

28.05% White, 67.25% African American, 0.20% Native American, 2.26% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 0.93% from other races, and 1.28% from two or more races. 3.06% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.

And 27.9% of the population and 23.7% of families are below the poverty line.

Source: Wikipedia

And we should also be reminded that between 2001 and 2005, the government budget spent on flood and hurricane protection projects in New Orleans declined from $147 million to $82 million. Hurricanes are natural disasters, but there is nothing natural about what makes it so destructive. It is neglect and poverty.

Neglect by the most powerful and influential country on our planet. Poverty in the very same and richest country of the world.

Read also:
Hurricane Katrina: a calamity compounded by poverty and neglect, by Joseph Kay, on World Socialist Website, 31 August 2005
Race and Hurricane Katrina: two questions, on Amardeep Singh's blog

Categories: Disaster, Humanitarian, Inequity, Poverty, Race, Refugees, USA