The situation in New Orleans is obviously pretty terrible. The claims that the feeble response by the US state are because the people in NO are black misses the mark though I think. The reason the response is feeble is because they are poor.
This wouldn’t even have been considered worth commenting on until recently - “poor treated like crap. In other news, Caesar crosses the Rubicon”. It’s only worth mentioning now really because it is one of the large unresolved tensions in American (and therefore Western) thought.
In the US there is a strong belief that there is equality of opportunity, and that anyone, if they try hard enough, can achieve their potential. This is regarded by many as an ethical statement - that not only do you “achieve your potential” but that you get what you deserve.
The corrollary to this is obviously that the poor, having not tried hard, are also getting what they deserve. In a real sense, they are (as the Victorians put it) the undeserving poor. This concept is very deeply entrenched in US thinking. It’s a very old idea - it’s one that was so embedded in Western Christianity, that when the idea of the “deserving poor” was mooted, it was itself radical.
That observers have accused the US state of racism in failing to respond shows just how ingrained this is. Abandoning an entire city because the residents are poor is OK, but because they are black it is not.
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