SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Nation -- New Orleans' complex black community regroups after Katrina

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Nation -- New Orleans' complex black community regroups after Katrina: "As black New Orleanians regroup and put down roots elsewhere – some temporary, some not – many wonder: What will become of one of the nation's most complex African-American cultures?

Pre-Katrina New Orleans was a majority black city. It also was a poor one, and most of the people hardest hit by the storm were both, as early images showed.

But broad descriptions miss the subtleties of race and economics in a place where French, Spanish, Indians and West Africans mixed as far back as the 18th century. This resulted in a rich cultural heritage – think jazz, for starters – and a multiracial, sometimes inequitable society organized along lines of color and class.

Now the city's native sons and daughters, spread nationwide, are speculating on how that culture will change in the wake of the flooding wrought by Katrina and Rita. Some even question whether it will survive at all.

'Once you scatter the people, I don't know that you're going to be able to capture the past,' said Arnold Hirsch, a historian at the University of New Orleans. 'You may come up with something new, you might be able to help the poverty and the problems that became so manifest during the hurricane, and that might be to the good. But it wouldn't be the historical New Orleans.'

Explaining the city means a trip back hundreds of years and a realization: What's 'black' in other parts of the country hasn't necessarily been black in New Orleans."