BBC NEWS | Americas | Hurricane prompts awkward questions

BBC NEWS | Americas | Hurricane prompts awkward questions: "Images from the stricken city of New Orleans show that many of those suffering in its streets and shelters are mainly black and poor.

The plight of those stranded amid the filth and the dead has highlighted a side of the city most tourists did not see - one in which two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter live in poverty.

Anger is mounting among African-American leaders that this section was left behind when others fled."....

"Television is creating a sympathetic image of white people fleeing, and black people caught up in a shoplifting orgy," Lawrence Aaron wrote in New Jersey's Record.

But some hope that the aftermath of the hurricane will force people to confront the issue of inequality.

"Most cities have a hidden, or not always talked about, poor population, black and white, and most of the time we look past them," Spencer Crew , the chief of a Cincinnati civil rights centre, told the New York Times.

"This is a moment in time when we can't look past them. Their plight is coming to the forefront now," he said."