SEATTLE — The multitude of anguished black faces telecast from New Orleans over the last six days has stirred a national discussion in living rooms, chat rooms and radio talk shows.
The central questions seem to be: Why are most of Hurricane Katrina's victims black, and does the color of their skin have any bearing on authorities' response, which has been criticized as slow?
In a radio interview Friday on hundreds of stations across North America, Beverly Wright, director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Xavier University in New Orleans, summarized the concerns this way:
"I am very angry, and I really, really believe that [the crisis] is driven by race," Wright said. "People can say what they want, but when you look at who is left behind, it is very disturbing to me."
Wright was referring to the thousands of predominantly lower-income blacks still stranded inside New Orleans. Media images have been dominated by scenes of dead, dying and crying blacks, their desperation and pleas for help sometimes laced with anger.
News reports have also described looters and armed gangs. There have been sporadic shootings and physical confrontations among the stranded.
The violence -- and the fear of it -- has slowed efforts to bring aid to the neediest parts of the city.
New Orleans is one of the poorest large cities in the United States.
Its population is 67% African American, about half of whom live below the poverty line.
Most middle-class blacks, like most white residents, were able to leave the city.
Some say the hurricane has exposed aracial fault line between blacks and whites in America.
In general, whites tend to see the situation one way, blacks another, said David Wellman, sociology professor at UC Santa Cruz and co-author of the book "Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (University of California Press).
"Many whites will focus on the lawlessness of what's going on in New Orleans," Wellman said. "Many blacks will focus on the desperation of the victims, the fact that they're being neglected and ignored."
Wellman said the racial fault line operated the same as a geological fault line: "They're invisible until there's an earthquake."
He said evidence of the racial divide was found in studies that showed 65% of white Americans do not believe that racial discrimination exists, and 75% of black Americans believe it does.
