Hurricane Katrina, Class and Race Term Paper

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These groups, Flaherty asserts, provided the first organizers in shelters, and continue to support the homeless and luckless victims of Katrina.

Meanwhile, an article in the journal Reason laid out the race and class dynamic with forceful simplicity: "Obviously, race and poverty are intertwined in America, and to that extent race was related to who survived in New Orleans" (Young, 2005). And when there are problems connected to the Republican Party that cry out for resolution and understanding - such as the ongoing American occupation and bloody civil strive in Iraq - there are GOP spin-doctors busy at work deflecting the criticism. Writer Young notes that "as the city began to retrieve its dead and the final tally was still expected to be in the thousands, some Republicans launched a spin cycle, suggesting that 10,000 dead in a nation of 300 million was that bad..."

Writing in Nieman Reports, Boston Globe journalist Kevin Cullen outlined the media's "bias against poor people, especially poor black people" in terms of how quickly unconfirmed reports of looting, rapes, hostage situations were accepted as fact, albeit those rumors only helped to feed the notion that somehow angry blacks were out of control (Cullen 2005). The idea of "poor black folks simultaneously looting Wal-Mart of guns and wide-screen TVs in some apocalyptic 'Get Whitey!' frenzy seemed perfectly feasible to many reporters and editors," Cullen wrote.

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And so the divisions between race and class - black and white, poor and rich - in New Orleans was exacerbated by feverishly uneven reporting. Adding to that problem, Cullen continues, was the fact that New Orleans' mayor and police chief, "who are black, did little to challenge and quite a bit to enhance the portrait of a city out of control."

The police chief (Eddie Compass) even went on Oprah Winfrey's popular afternoon TV show to claim that "babies had been raped in the Superdome" (Cullen 2005). The mayor, Ray Nagin, told Oprah, Cullen continued, that "hundreds of armed gang members' were, as it put it, 'running the show' inside the dome." Class and race "are inextricably bound up in New Orleans," Cullen went on, "and trying to make sense of it was as hard as trying to get accurate information." But when he reunited with two Boston Globe colleagues a week after "fanning out across southeastern Louisiana," one of his associates asked him, "Have you noticed how many people down here use the N word?" The racist language he encountered "was shocking," Cullen explained, albeit he and his colleagues rationalized that "...there are just as many bigoted people up north..."

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