Observer

Greg Peters links to this story about NOLA from Nik Cohn:

Why did B and so many others have to endure those eight days? Was it racism? Of course. None of this could have happened in Boston or Beverly Hills and the politicians who've pretended otherwise are liars. New Orleans, two-thirds black, largely impoverished, has been for years a sinkhole of neglect and racial profiling. Katrina simply exposed to the world what those in the city already knew.

Was it, therefore, simply a matter of white 'haves' abandoning black 'have-nots'? Not quite. In the decades since the civil-rights movement, America has enmeshed itself in a cocoon of self-delusion and double-talk where race is concerned, and many African-Americans, their own fortunes improving, have played along. The black middle-class has distanced itself from those left behind. Chris Rock, the black comedian, jokes that he loves black people - it's niggas he can't stand. For others, it isn't a joke. The people stranded at the Superdome and Convention Centre were pariahs, and the root of their exclusion, deeper even than race, is poverty. They are what's buried below. Everything that the American Dream is supposed to wipe away. They aren't supposed to exist, yet here they are. How, in God's name, to make them disappear?

I've been obsessed by New Orleans and its music since childhood and have lived there, off and on, more than 30 years. For me, it has always been the most seductive city on earth - corrupt, murderous, half-mad, but so intensely alive that its sins could never outweigh its allure.