Come Hell or High Water: Michael Eric Dyson on Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster

From democracy now

"MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: Well, I think that what we saw revealed in Hurricane Katrina was a spectacle of disaster, disaster colored by race, by class, by poverty, issues that the administration and the American people to a frightening degree have neglected, but this administration's ineptitude, its inexperience, its ignorance, combined with its chronic cronyism, led to the sight of mostly poor black people on television -- but we know it was more broad than that -- being left to their own devices, and that was only a metaphor, unfortunately, of the way in which they had been left behind long ago by administrations, black and white, which had refused to combat the chronic forms of health care that they were lacking, the poverty that they endured, 134,000 people in New Orleans were without cars. They weren’t stuck -- They weren't stupid or stubborn; they were stuck. And so, I think that this hurricane washed to the fore what we all knew was there." (more)