Race issue haunts President Bush in his response to Katrina

U.S. President George Bush sent his highest-ranking black official, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, to visit the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast Sunday.

Her visit came in the midst of ongoing accusations that race has played a role in the U.S. government's slowness to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, who are largely poor and black.

Dr. Jeff Johnson, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine said the images of the black poor struggling in the New Orleans chaos should be a "powerful wake up call."

"The message is that these people are in some sense abandoned, and that's why they're so angry," he said, "but that abandonment occured not just around this storm. They've been abandoned by our society in the last decade. That's something as a society we have to acknowledge and grapple with."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said racial injustice and indifference to black suffering was at the root of the federal government's disaster response.

Black members of Congress also denounced the slow federal response to the storm.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md said "We cannot allow it to be said by history that the difference between those who lived and those who died in the great storm and flood of 2005 was nothing more than poverty, age or skin colour. "It would be unconscionable to stand by and do nothing," he said.

Rep. Diane Watson, a black Democrat from California said "Shame, shame on America. We were put to the test and we have failed."

Black rapper Kanye West accused President Bush of racism. "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Larry E. Davis, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Centre on Race and Social Problems said the images of the disaster are an embarrassment to this nation.

"It suggests that the residuals of a racist legacy are still very much intact," he said. "It's as though you are looking at a picture of an African country."

There has been an outpouring of donations in the U.S. to help the victims of hurricane Katrina. David Billings of The People's Institute, a New Orleans based organization that has been focused on racism for the past 25 years said it would have been much greater if the images from Hurricane Katrina did not show black faces.

"I do think the nation would be responding differently if they were white elderly and white babies actually dying on the street and being covered with newspapers and shrouds and being left there," Billings said.

Condoleeza Rice defended President Bush against charges that the government's response to the hurricane crisis showed racial insensitivity.

"How can that be the case? Americans don't want to see Americans suffer," Rice said. "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race."