Katrina’s victims

'œThe white people got out,' said Jason DeParle in The New York Times. But tens of thousands of blacks didn't. 'œWhat a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee.' Hurricane Katrina also laid bare the broken illusion that in 21st-century America, race no longer matters. When orders came to evacuate the Big Easy, middle-class and affluent whites simply hopped into their SUVs, bought $700 plane tickets, or bribed their way out. But the poor, living in the city's lowest-lying districts, had no cars, and had already exhausted their monthly subsistence checks. No one arranged to bus them to safety, so they had little choice but to stay and hope for the best. It was the Titanic all over again, said Frank Rich, also in the Times. While first-class passengers crammed the lifeboats, those in steerage faced the 'œhorrifying spectacle of every man, woman, and child for himself.'

The TV pictures told the grim story, said Lynne Duke and Teresa Wiltz in The Washington Post. The parade of Katrina's victims that filled the screen was nearly all black, poor, and desperate: a young man 'œwith a wild look on his face,' racing through soggy streets clutching a load of looted clothes; a teenage girl weeping disconsolately, holding a baby in her arms; massive groups of stranded souls, huddled under highway overpasses or sprawled in the Superdome, 'œreduced to an animal-like state of waiting and starving and begging for help.' The TV anchors called these people 'œrefugees, as if they were foreigners in their own land.' In a very real way, poor blacks remain outsiders in this country'”as even mainstream America may now recognize.

But why do so many blacks remain so poor, in New Orleans and other cities? asked Rich Lowry in National Review. The answer is simple enough: The breakdown of the African-American family. About 60 percent of births in New Orleans are out of wedlock. Stripped of the economic and emotional support that only a two-parent family can provide, far too many black children grow up without the basic tools they need to escape poverty. In the national soul-searching to come, conservatives and liberals should strike a bargain: The right should agree to more government spending on urban problems, but only if the left faces up to the blight of out-of-wedlock births and broken families. Blaming this catastrophe on simple 'œracism' won't change a thing.

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