On TV, we watch them: His braids are flying above his head and he's got a wild look on his face. He's running, one arm clutching a load of looted clothes, the other reaching back to tug at his pants, which are in danger of sliding past his rump. She's crying and forlorn and too young to be carrying a baby in her arms, but carrying one she is, and both are dirty and sweaty and hungry, reduced to an animal-like state of waiting and starving and begging for help. We see them through our respective prisms of race, and call them "refugees," as if they are foreigners in their own land.

They are the Other, these victims of Katrina.

And in this country, the Other is black. Poor. Desperate.

Mainstream America too often demonizes the Other because, well, we've been conditioned to do so. And because it's easier to put people in a box and then shove it in the corner, away from view. Then it becomes their problem, not ours. To talk about race, for those who are weary of it, is to invite glazed-over eyes and stifled yawns -- or even hostility.

But Katrina blew open the box, putting the urban poor front and center, with images of once-invisible folks pleading from rooftops, wading through flooded streets, starving at the Superdome and requiring a massive federal outlay of resources. Or dead, wheelchairs pushed up against the wall, a blanket thrown over still bodies. The Other is there, staring us in the face, exposing our issues on an international stage. It is at once an embarrassment -- how did we go from can-do to can't-do-for-our-own? -- and a challenge, critics charge: How do we stop ignoring the folks in the box, the inner-city destitute, and realize that their fate is ours as well?

Poor black people, says Lani Guinier, a Harvard University law professor, are "the canary in the mine. Poor black people are the throwaway people. And we pathologize them in order to justify our disregard."

But, she says, "this is not just about poor black people in New Orleans. This is about a social movement, with an administration that is bent on weakening the capacity of the national government to act. . . . I hope this is a wake-up call to all of America. To see this as the tip of the iceberg, the thin edge of the wedge. We ignored the early warning signals. But this is another early warning that we are ill prepared to function as a society."

Just as the United States was embarrassed globally by its ugly tradition -- racism -- being exposed during the civil rights movement, it is now shamed again by "the spectacle of a Baghdad on the Mississippi River and our own people being so poor and so destitute and so helpless at a time when we are talking about trying to spread democracy and curb looting in Baghdad," says Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University.

Jesse Jackson describes the New Orleans convention center, where tens of thousands live in fetid conditions, as "the hull of a slaveship."

Inside the proverbial slaveship are the "captives," who have been described as running completely amok. But witness the man who feels so guilty about the pita bread, water and juice that he'd taken from a Wal-Mart to feed his family that he kept a list -- so he can pay it back later....

Roger Wilkins, the George Mason University historian, sees the historic sweep of the legacy of slavery in the helpless straits of folks marooned by the storm. Seen through that arc of history, Wilkins says that Monday's unmasking of the vast inequality within New Orleans is a "day a reckoning" for the United States: of reckoning with a history of ignoring the poorest of the poor that dates back to our earliest days.

"The worst education in the country is ladled out to the poor kids in big cities. And we're incarcerating black males at a higher rate than any time in our history. After all this time, one in four black people is still impoverished," says Wilkins.

The history of marginalizing black folk in America, especially poor ones, runs so deep that it occurs like second nature. It is one reason, say several prominent black intellectuals, that the response to the devastation of Katrina was so slow.

Racism runs "so deep that the folks who are slow to respond can't see it," says Russell Adams, professor of Afro-American studies at Howard University. "That's the unperceived character of racial behavior, of what I would call hidden racism where you don't know that this situation has a racial character to it, just like fish have trouble defining water."...

Lawrence Brooks Hughes - 9/13/2005

There has yet been no instance of racism yet published about all the gulf coast horrors.

It has been demonstrated that the response to these events needs a military command system, and probably a military officer in charge. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you, you are probably someone like George S. Patton... The Coast Guard Admiral was ideal. He once held the position of Atlantic Ocean commander, U.S. Coast Guard, and accordingly was no stranger to such emergencies.

Lawrence Brooks Hughes - 9/5/2005

I don't assume everything adverse which happens to a black person occurs because of his skin color... Thugs tried to steal boats from rescue workers, whereupon most of them with boats went home. Many rescue workers were shot at... City officials seem to have let everyone out of jail... 200 city police quit in the middle of the crisis. Such events would tend to slow down rescue workers, whatever the principal race of the flood victims.

cynthia melrose - 9/4/2005

The "other" are the black people who had prepared not only a successful evacuation but a comfortable shelter for themselves and their family.
If "70%" of the population is black (approx. 350,000) then that would mean over 200,000 black people are stranded, drowning, or dead somewhere in New Orleans, that is, of course, if you leave out the "others."
There is alot of evidence that proves that not all black people see their existence as an object of white pity, or as one of the desperate ones.

Arnold Shcherban - 9/4/2005

Does such a thing as a proof of racism exist for the ones like Mr. Hughes?
What should it be, sir: the official announcement of the federal goverment
that the truly criminal negligence and long delay of the help happened on
the reason of the race of those folks
who didn't receive it?
Alas, I doubt that even then you would
acknowledge the one.

Lawrence Brooks Hughes - 9/4/2005

Racism, racism, racism! I don't see any racism in the New Orleans disaster. There was no discrimination against people by race.

The problem, perhaps, was our 18th century protections against government. Could the President pick up the phone while watching TV, and order 1,500 paratroopers, each carrying a case of bottle water, to descend on the superdome? No. That's illegal.

Could anybody get there promply other than the military? No. Only TV crews with vans and generators and anchors and directors and a private stock of food and water for themselves, and probably a few loaded shotguns, as well.