Post-flood city wrestles with race issue

Twelve months after Hurricane Katrina blasted through the levees that had kept New Orleans from becoming a rotting appendage of Lake Ponchartrain, the city is dealing with the stench of another problem, experts say.

New Orleans is in a struggle over how it will be rebuilt - and whether the poor and working-class African-Americans who made up a large part of its pre-flood population will ever be able to return.
It is not the kind of racism that once gripped the United States - the racism of lynching and disenfranchisement.
Racist graffiti and stickers have been spotted, but "you don't have white people point-blank calling black people 'niggers'. You don't have overt, straight-up racism going on," Ted Quant, director of the Twomey Center for Peace through Justice at Loyola University, says.
"Some people celebrated the elimination of blacks from the community," said Mr Quant, who is black.

Locked out?
Race, class, money and power are inextricably linked in the US, and the flooding of New Orleans is proving a textbook example of how they intersect.
"In the wake of the flood, a small group of powerful business leaders and developers - the old blue-blood elite - took it upon themselves to plan the city into the next 20-30 years," says Lance Hill, executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University.
The problem was that "virtually no African-Americans" had returned to the city when those plans were being formed, says Mr Hill, who describes himself as a white liberal. Click here to read more