Plights don't change overnight

Plights don't change overnight
It's been over a week now, and like a lot of folks I've been glued to the coverage of Katrina's aftermath. At this point the political issues are surfacing and it's nuts to me how some folks are saying that this is not a race matter as much as it is a class matter. Man, that's the easy way out of the conversation, it's the quickest way to dodge the tough talk in a sorry attempt to sound PC. But none of us were born yesterday. Clearly, all the poor people, black, white, or other, weren't able to escape New Orleans because they couldn't afford to escape. It was their financial and economic circumstance that caused that part of the tragedy. Class is the culprit not skin color, right? But c'mon, consider broader factors here, step back from the immediate natural disaster and consider the long legacy of race issues in the U.S. that forced "these people" into their class circumstance in the first place. Plights don't change overnight! And I'm not even looking back as far as slavery. Racial discrimination has only been "unlawful" on the books in the recent decades since the 1960s and 70s remember? That's what the Civil Rights movement was all about and that still left plenty to be fixed.

So yes there is a direct correlation between poverty and race. Whoever tries to stand up and divorce this Katrina mess from race issues is ignorant because they are ignoring the obvious historical fact that black folks were forced into their class circumstances JUST BECAUSE THEY WERE BLACK. None of this crap just goes away because it's shameful and embarrassing to admit. What's more shameful and embarrassing is that it's taking this disastrous flood to make the ugliest realities about how we've all been living to rise to the surface.