Katrina, race, and class

Jason DeParle gives his assessment of the true story of the destruction of the Gulf coast -- the race card. His editorial in the New York Times doesn't wait for any scholarly analysis or dispassionate research for his conclusions to meet the Paper of Record's standards for publication, either:

THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time. What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment. The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a Conradian turn. In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

If the opening paragraph of this screed didn't cause the editors at the New York Times to spike this column, they have apparently given up any pretense of editorial standards at the Gray Lady. "If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample"? Since when does that ever apply? Perhaps the Times can abandon its polling contracts in the next election and simply scan for TV coverage of political events to determine racial demographics in politics, too. What utter rubbish, and unfortunately for the Times and its readers, this intellectually famished assumption forms the basis of the entire editorial.