Matt Lauer Actually Broaches the Subject

"These people often fall through the cracks . . . ."

Matt Lauer just asked Tim Russert about whether the Katrina-New Orleans disaster will serve as a wake-up call to Americans about the lack of a safety net for the poor. He also pointed out that most of the people stranded in New Orleans are both poor and black. So the issues of class and race are starting to get some attention, finally.

Late Update: The last sentence in the post refers to the rest of the post, which was written in a hurry before work. The point here is that the issues of race and class were largely absent from the first few days of reporting on this story. Of course race and class have been broached before, on previous issues (does CL think I live in a cave, or does he like to wrestle with strawmen a little too much??) , but not on this issue, until today, really. That's my sense, and the sense of some other people with whom I've spoken.

BTW, I don't mean to suggest that the suffering is caused by poverty or racism. What I mean here is that (1) poverty has a direct correlation to how much life's vicissitudes affect you. If you have a big SUV, or even a '91 CRV that runs, you can get the hell out while the getting is good. If you don't have a car, or your car breaks down in the evacuation, you can't get out. In this country, you are on your own, and if you're poor, you don't own much.

Race and poverty are connected. I spend a fair amount of time in the South, and I would argue that D.C. is really a Southern town. There are poor white people--in fact, I'm related to many poor white people, and I am a proud descendant of generations of such folks. But you can't get around in D.C. without noticing that the poor people you see, on a daily basis, including the working poor, are not white. Indeed, they are mostly black.

So when I watch poor, black people on tv in desperate straits, but not much mention that, hey, these are poor black people, it seems to me that part of the story is being left out. Maybe the images capture this. But the talking heads have enough camera time to broach the subject, or to make the point, which lauer was making, I think, that poor people tend to get hit harder when bad things happen, and that, in the U.S. of A., even in 2005, race is related to poverty.