IT soon became obvious: in New Orleans, a city where Black people are the majority of the population and make up the great majority of the working class, they also comprised nearly all of the people stranded by the hurricane.

"In two days at the Superdome, I saw four white people among the estimated 23,000 there," comments Los Angeles Times reporter Scott Gold in a September 2 article.

Black politicians, especially Democrats, began to ask whether the lack of preparation and response to the disaster had anything to do with the fact that victims were Black and low-income. Rapper Kanye West made headlines when he said "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" at a televised benefit concert in New York on September 2.

However, there’s no particular conspiracy against African-Americans in New Orleans, even if many of the victims who were left abandoned for days may feel that way. The simple fact is that in the United States, even with the abolishment of legal segregation and the growth of a Black middle class – and even some Black ruling-class figures – following the successful civil rights struggles of the 50s and 60s, African-Americans still suffer from the effects of hundreds of years of slavery, economic discrimination and racism.

That continues to be especially true in the South, where institutional racism was mostly deeply entrenched. In New Orleans, where almost 70% of its half million inhabitants are Black, 27% of the city’s population lives below the poverty line.

Jason DeParle notes in a September 4 New York Times article that "divides in (New Orleans) were evident in things as simple as access to a car. The 35 percent of black households that didn't have one, compared with just 15 percent among whites."

According to census figures cited in The Economist, there were 26,000 Black corporate chief executive officers in 2003, including for companies such as American Express and AOL-Times Warner. At the same time, Black men in the United States on average earn only 72% of what white men earn.

That economic differentiation carries over into other areas of life: African-Americans in that city are three times more likely than whites, Latinos or Asians to die from homicide or HIV/AIDS and twice as likely to be victims of violent crime, according to a study published in July by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles and the LA Urban League.

Affirmative action measures – guaranteeing Black people jobs and schooling that they were routinely kept out of because of discrimination – are under attack now, a generation after many of them were put into place, with some people, even Blacks, claiming they are not "fair," because the individuals who benefit from them might not "deserve" them.

African-Americans are still being deprived of their right to vote 40 years after the federal government passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act as a result of the massive civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. This was most evident during the 2000 presidential elections, when tens of thousands of Black people were deprived of their right to vote in Florida. Some 20,000 people marched in Atlanta, Georgia this past August 6 to demand that key provisions of that law be upheld.

Elvee Green, a Detroit auto worker and member of the United Auto Workers union, told The Militant newspaper that her local organized a bus to get her and co-workers to Atlanta. "I had to be here. They are attacking our unions, they’re sending us to crazy wars, we have to at least keep our right to vote," she said.

Black men are routinely deprived of that right because in many states, ex-convicts are not allowed to vote, and Black men are much more likely than white men to have spent time in jail: 32% of them in Los Angeles, according to the Urban League study, compared to 6% of whites and 17% of Latinos. Those statistics are similar to national ones.

Those figures go hand-in-hand with the fact that Black people are the most frequent victims of police brutality and killings. In Los Angeles, only 21% of Blacks believe the police act fairly most of the time, compared with 46% of Latinos and 60% of whites and Asians, the study notes. Police officers who kill or beat Black people, including minors, often go unpunished.