O outro lado da América...

Photo: Barbara Davidson/AP

Molly Weems, 6, and Larry Devone, no relation to one another,

at an emergency shelter in Biloxi, Mississippi.

« (...) White Americans, who regarded New Orleans as a kind of playground, a place to enjoy the carnal pleasures of music, food, drink and more, have learned things about that city - and therefore their society - that they would probably have preferred not to know. They have discovered that it was mainly white folks who lived on the higher, safer ground, while poorer, black families had to huddle in the cheaper, low-lying housing - that race, in other words, determined who got hit.
They have also learned that 35% of black households in the area did not have a car. Or that the staff and guests of the Hyatt hotel were evacuated first, while the rest, the mainly poor and black, were at the back of the queue. Or that 28% of the people of New Orleans live in poverty and that 84% of those are black. Or that some people in that city were so poor, they did not have the money even to catch a bus out of town - that race, in other words, determined who got left behind.
Most Americans want to believe that kind of inequality belongs in the past, in the school textbooks. But Katrina has shaken them from that delusion. (...) » in Guardian Unlimited, em 5 de Setembro de 2005 (click em cima)