**The Race Factor**

So the news media continue to raise the "race" question. Was race a factor in the loss of lives, predicted now to approach 10,000? That is a stupid question that begs a response of ridiculous, and worse, marginalizes the complexity of the race question.

Then there is the follow-up question of class. Again, a completely artificial way to set up the debate that becomes is easy to dismiss. One cannot seriously conclude that there was a systematic decision made to leave people behind because of their race and/or class. Our government doesn't operator at the level of such open and obvious racism.

But look deeper and across time and you can see how race is at the very core of the devastation in New Orleans. Not overt racism, but systemic structural racism. You have a city built upon the backs and cheap labor of an underclass. You have a city (and this is NOT limited to New Orleans) where the civil rights movement resulted in legal rights of equal opportunity, but not until all the natural resources and long term forms of wealth had been gobbled up by the elite anglo class. Great to have equal opportunity when there is no level playing field to begin with.

The very fact that the poor in New Orleans or in almost any metropolitan area in this country are African American should bring this fact home given we have had "equality" for 4 decades. The moment of devastation was not about race. The past 40 years of poverty and structural perpetuation of inequality is about race. Katrina just put it in front of the cameras so couch potato liberals and conservatives hiding behind the belief that widespread racism ended with the civil rights era, could not avert their eyes any longer.

Yes, it is about race and class. That fact that they intersect in the bowels of New Orleans; the fact that the faces crying for help from rooftops of shanties and from floating mattresses are overwhelmingly black; the fact that the city never developed an evacuation plan for the significant portion of the population that lives under the poverty level and does not have private transportation; brings racism and class, hopefully, into the public consciousness again.

Katrina did not discriminate in her destruction. She took the possessions of rich and poor alike. But the rich can rebuild. The rich have insurance. The rich have their lives.

To New Orleans, Lousianna and the U.S., the emperor is not wearing clothes.