Race and the Response to Katrina?

Racism is a sin and it's endemic to America.

That's why the Associated Press news photos that came out on Tuesday are so offensive and so telling. One photo shows an African-American wading through flood waters in New Orleans holding a bag containing food that the accompanying caption tells us, he "looted" from a grocery store. Another shows two white Americans who have "found food" in a grocery store.

Three people. One black. Two white. All did the same thing. But the black person looted, while the white people found food.

Racism is a sin and it's endemic to America.

But are members of the Democratic Black congressional caucus right in asserting that racism accounts for the seeming lack of a federal response in the first days after Katrina hit?

Let's look at the facts.

There is a large black underclass in America. That includes New Orleans. Much of that has its roots in America's institutionalized racism, to be sure. And it may be a measure of a lack of compassion on the part of the white middle- and upper-class citizens of that city that they got out after the federal government told people to evacuate before Katrina made landfall. But many poor African-Americans didn't have access to transportation out of the city and were stranded.

Besides, as President Clinton pointed out in a joint interview that he and former President Bush gave to CNN in New Orleans, the city government there had encouraged those unable to evacuate to go to the Super Dome where, they assured folks, they could ride out the storm. Then, when the levee broke, thousands were stranded.

Unaccountably, the New Orleans city government failed to commandeer mass transit buses or local school buses to help the poor to evacuate the city before Katrina hit.

After the storm hit, the response of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) was, undoubtedly, slowed by the unexpected levee breaks. But it still seemed excruciatingly slow to move, a result perhaps, of the "reorganization" that put the agency under the Homeland Security Department, confusing the lines of authority.

Racism is a sin and it's endemic to America.

You can blame city and FEMA officials for incompetence perhaps. But I don't think that they're guilty of racism.

UPDATE: If you look at Mark Congdon's comments below, you'll see that I was misinformed regarding the sources of the two photographs. I apologize for not doing a better job of tracking things down. I decided to nonetheless keep the post up because I think that the larger points I wanted to make--racism is real and the inadequate initial response was not racially-driven--remain valid.