Black victims spark US race debate
Afp, Washington
The horrifying television images of the ravages wrought by Hurricane Katrina have sparked a thorny race debate in the United States as it becomes clear that most of its victims are black. The inescapable fact that African Americans are the hardest hit by the biblical-scale disaster has prompted suspicions of racial discrimination by the authorities in the widely criticised rescue operation. "If these people hadn't been poor and black, they wouldn't have been left in New Orleans in the first place," said Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson, stressing that most of the victims were unable to flee because they did not have cars or cash to pay for hotels. "In New Orleans, the poorest and most desperate people are black people, and there are no two ways around that. And, so, consequently the response time and all of the rest of it -- I don't know if it has anything to do with the fact that people are black," Jefferson told MSNBC television. New Orleans is a city of around 1.4 million people, 67.3 percent of whom are black and 30 percent of whom live below the poverty line. Nationally, 13 percent of Americans are black and 12.7 percent of them live in poverty. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the most powerful black woman in the country, weighed in on the mounting debate, denying that discrimination had played any part in the handling of the catastrophe. "I really do believe that people know that Americans don't want Americans to suffer," she told a press conference Friday. "That Americans would somehow in a colour-affected way decide who to help and who not to help -- I just don't believe it. Americans are generous to each other," she said adding that emotions in the country were running high. Meanwhile, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson Friday fired off a fierce attack on President George W. Bush over Hurricane Katrina and claimed black people were being locked out of top relief roles. Jackson raised the sensitive issue of race, simmering below the surface in New Orleans, even before the hurricane tragedy, pointing out that many of those trapped in the city by the storm were poor and black. "There is a historical indifference to the pain of poor people, and black people ... we seem to adjust more easily to black pain."
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