http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/200509 ... someofbothBlacks suffering over race or class? Some of both. Tue Sep 13, 6:28 AM ET
It wasn't long after the tortured images of thousands of black men, women and children holed up in the Louisiana Superdome and Morial Convention Center started appearing on TV newscasts that talk of an old conundrum surfaced.
Was it the color of their skin or their place in society that made the suffering among that city's blacks so great? The race or class question pits those who believe that racism is the root cause of much that ails blacks against those who say it is their economic and social condition that is the problem.
More often than not, the answer splits along predictable fault lines. Many liberals - especially blacks - see racism as the culprit. Conservatives, by and large, think it's the lifestyle choices of poor blacks that lock them into the underclass.
I think it's a combination of both. But as with most mixtures, one is more dominant than the other.
Actions of survival
Anyone who saw the television footage of black looters hauling away appliances and TV sets is right to believe that the criminal behavior of some blacks has more to do with the hand life deals them than does the color of their skin.
But to view the mindless acts of a few thugs in the same way as the taking of food and drink by the larger body of blacks misses an important distinction. The vast majority of blacks were simply trying to survive - a struggle that was impacted more by race than by class.
Before Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans' population was 67% black, but a whopping 84% of the city's poor were black. Many whites lived in neighborhoods at the highest elevations. Most blacks lived in the lower-lying areas of the city. According to The New York Times, 35% of black households in New Orleans didn't own a car. In other words, blacks lived in neighborhoods that were hardest hit by the flooding - and were less likely to have an automobile to escape.
In New Orleans, as in much of the rest of this country, race defines class. It was the poor in New Orleans who had the most difficulty evacuating. It was the poor who were forced to resort to looting to feed themselves and their families while being left stranded by the incompetence of government officials. It was the poor who made up the bulk of those who were housed for days in the Superdome and convention center without much food, water, medical help or police protection. And most of the poor in New Orleans are black.
Poverty is the new Jim Crow. It is a subtler - but no less hurtful form of racism. Last year, a quarter of all blacks in this country lived below the poverty level, compared with less than 9% of whites. The South, where the majority of blacks live, is the nation's poorest region. That's not a chance relationship.
Reasons for poverty
"For a variety of well-documented reasons, poverty is disproportionately experienced among minorities," writes Michael Stoll, a UCLA professor for Public Policy, in a paper he will present this week at a "Colors of Poverty" conference sponsored by the University of Michigan.
Stoll says there is a relationship between where people live and their level of poverty. Poverty is higher in central cities than in suburbs. "Location," he says, influences the access people have to "good schools, decent housing, crime-free neighborhoods, productive contacts and other benefits that help shape, determine or constrain access to opportunity."
If that sounds as if Stoll thinks "class" is to blame for what happened to poor blacks in New Orleans, you're wrong. "If you press me, I have to say that race played more of a role in how fast" the government came to the aid of that city's blacks, he told me.
I couldn't agree more.
DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY.
