America has failed its blacks

George Bush was reaffirming his commitment to the rebuilding of New Orleans while a few kilometres away, a small black boy pleaded for help. He was perhaps 10 or 11 years old and he was speaking in the rebuilt Convention Centre where a year ago 20,000 people, mostly poor and black, were left to their own devices for four days, without food or water.

This boy was one of the speakers at an interfaith service to mark the anniversary of the flooding of New Orleans and his prayer was a simple and poignant one: God, get the politicians to help make us safe by giving our young men hope so they don't continue to kill each other.

Bush did in fact talk about the need for New Orleans to solve its crime problem in his speech, but he did not really address the young boy's plea, which was for help - beyond more police and harsher jail sentences and a sterner war on drugs - to save the lives of many of the city's young black men who, more likely than not, will either be dead or in jail by their mid-20s.

There was virtually no reporting of the boy's plea in any of the major newspapers or by the television news services, despite the fact that the anniversary of hurricane Katrina and Bush's visit to the wrecked Gulf Coast and, more specifically, to the still devastated city of New Orleans, was extensively covered.

This seemed strange, because the boy's short speech and prayer, offered through tears, was moving. Perhaps he was ignored because he raised a problem that most Americans would prefer not to confront: that the richest country in the history of mankind has almost 40 million people living in poverty and that about a third of those are black.

When New Orleans drowned, the images of suffering of the city's poor and black residents shocked and, it seemed, shamed Americans. George Bush, three weeks after Katrina, came to the city and acknowledged that poverty and race in America were connected. There was, he said, "deep and persistent poverty" in the United States and that black poverty has its roots in "a history of racial discrimination which cuts off generations from the opportunity of America".

In the weeks that followed, there was, for the first time in many years, a public discussion about poverty and race in the US media. Most of that discussion was about how for decades these issues had been ignored, swept under the carpet, and that if anything good could come from the disaster, perhaps it would be a renewed focus on America's still troubled race relations.

Then, within a few weeks of the flooding of New Orleans, it was all promptly forgotten. There were no major investigations by any newspapers or current affairs programs of poverty and its connection with race. Neither Bush nor his Republican Party colleagues in Congress proposed a single program that might alleviate black poverty. For that matter, neither did the Democrats.

A day after Bush left New Orleans last week, the US Census Bureau released a report that showed that poverty in America had risen again in 2005, for the fifth year in a row - every year of the Bush Administration. Some 37 million Americans - about 13 per cent of the population - lived below the official poverty line, which is a household income of $US19,000 ($A24,800) for a family of four.

Of America's 40 million black population, a quarter live in poverty compared with about 20 per cent at the end of the Clinton Administration. That's a million more African Americans who have lost the battle to become "stakeholders" in Bush's stakeholder society, which he reckons he's creating by relentlessly cutting taxes, especially for the wealthy.

Americans, it seems, were surprised by the suffering they witnessed in New Orleans They had no idea that there were areas of America where people lived in conditions that were as bad if not worse than in many Third World countries. And yet virtually every American city has its equivalent of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans - black and poor and crime ridden, in which social structures, especially the family, have virtually disintegrated. In the inner-city ghettos of America's cities, most births are outside marriage, most families are single-parent and men between 18 and 25 are about as likely to end up in jail as they are to get a job.

Americans were so shocked and surprised by what they saw in New Orleans because, despite the historic changes wrought by the civil rights movement in the 1960s that ended state-sanctioned segregation and discrimination, America remains a segregated society.

According to Census Bureau figures, only about 5 per cent of Americans live in "mixed" neighbourhoods. In the main, whites and blacks self-segregate. What has happened to black America mirrors what has happened in America generally in the past few decades: there has been growing wealth and growing poverty. The great achievement since the 1960s has been the rise of a black middle class. The great failure has been growing poverty and hopelessness in those inner-city ghettos.

But the growing black middle class has chosen to live in predominantly black middle-class neighbourhoods and send their children to black middle-class schools. The history of racial discrimination has not yet been lived down; blacks, even middle-class blacks, prefer to "live with their own" than risk being subjected to racism.

What this means is that white and black Americans have little real contact with each other and, just as important, the black middle class is about as removed from the hopelessness and social disintegration of inner-city blacks as is white America.

Nothing changed after the drowning of New Orleans. And nothing is likely to change. It seems that most Americans agree with Ronald Reagan who, referring to the war on poverty launched by Lyndon Johnson in the '60s, said there has been a war on poverty and that poverty has won.

Michael Gawenda is United States correspondent.