Post Confirms Race of Hurricane Victims

In Convention Center Left a Five-Day Legacy of Chaos and Violence by Wil Haygood and Ann Scott Tyson, real news is broken in the lede:

NEW ORLEANS For five eternal-seeming days, as many as 20,000 people, most of them black, waited to be rescued, not just from the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina but from the nightmarish place where they had sought refuge.

Or perhaps this was fairly well known? That's what I get for getting most of my news from the radio.

There are at least three points in this story where our attention is directed at race. One, you just saw. Two is an absolutely heartbreaking photo of a black woman trying to help a frail, elderly woman in the chaos (and God bless you for that, Sarah Johnson). Three is the anger expressed when a local SWAT team came not to impose order but to rescue an officer's wife:

When the SWAT team entered at 11 a.m., the Jefferson Parish officer called out his wife's name. She heard him, and along with the relative rushed to his side. The SWAT team put the women in the middle of the team, then backed out the door.

Once it became clear that the SWAT team had come with the single goal of rescuing two white women, anger exploded.

"Racists!" one man cried out.

"Some people were upset we weren't rescuing them," said Ganthier. "It's hard to leave people behind like that, but we were aiding an officer."

If I were black and been trapped in that hell and witnessed that little vignette, I'd probably be yelling about racism myself. 

And I'd not be the only person to notice racism there:

John's sister Susie said he saw shocking acts of violence amid fierce racial tension in the Superdome.

"It's turned into a black against white thing," she said.

That's the Herald-Sun, an Aussie paper, reporting on white evacuees at the convention center being harassed by black racists. Which oddly enough exist; black folks turn out to belong to exactly the same species as white ones. That could be such a neat science story! Just not in the Post. They've got to reserve room for not running anything about the Air America funding scandal.