Black faces are indelible image of Katrina

Black faces are indelible image of Katrina: "HOUSTON -- Leonard Parker sat on his cot in the Reliant Astrodome surrounded by thousands of people who'd made the same horrific journey from New Orleans. Parker looked over what seemed to be a sea of brown faces and said, 'I'm not prejudiced or anything, but where are the white people?'

In televised reports and newspaper photographs, the face of the victims of Hurricane Katrina have become the faces at the bottom of America's well -- the poor, black and disabled. And the references to this dispossessed lot as looters or bare-footed refugees in their own homeland has taken the United States to a place it would rather not go -- to the heart of a different storm that has roiled the nation since its birth. It is a storm of race and class.

In Houston, one city has joined another. There are 16,000 New Orleans evacuees at the Reliant Astrodome, 4,000 in the Reliant Center, 4,000 in the Reliant Arena and 950 at the George R. Brown Convention Center. That's nearly 25,000 people who have traded one urban center for another -- and for many, 'urban' is a code word for black. It is mostly black people milling in and around the Astrodome, sitting on the sidewalks, begging for money at the intersections, walking to and fro in the parking lot.

By no means are all the victims of Hurricane Katrina African-American, but the indelible television images of mostly black people living in subhuman conditions for nearly a week have prompted some to ask whether race played a role in how quickly or how not-so-quickly federal and state agencies responded in its aftermath."