Diverse-City Storm of "isms" BY SHAY STEWART-BOULEY

Although the events aren’t specific to Maine, much less Portland, there’s no way I can avoid addressing Hurricane Katrina and how class and race figure into it, given what this column is all about.

People of color see the lack of immediate response as further proof that the Bush regime (oops, "administration") doesn’t give a damn about black folks. I think a lot of white people wanted to object to that (and many did, early on), but it’s hard to deny that race and class mattered here. There were an awful lot of poor, black people at the Superdome and Convention Center in New Orleans. And they were stranded without help longer than the tsunami victims earlier this year in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

I’m amazed that media professionals and others were shocked to find that race and class still matter. I mean, just because we’ve had a black secretary of state since Bush came to office doesn’t mean that things are equal. The notion that hard work alone will move you up in this world and that failure to move up means you’re lazy is a fairy tale. If you don’t have bootstraps to begin with, how do you pull yourself up by them?

I took my first and only trip to New Orleans a number of years ago and was stunned to see the sheer poverty, almost all of it among people as black or blacker than I. The scale of racial poverty there is way beyond anything I ever saw growing up in Chicago. Plus, I was staying at a top-notch hotel and got treated like crap while the whites around me were treated like royalty, so you can imagine I don’t equate the city with equal opportunity for all races.

But many folks, particularly whites, love to go to New Orleans for jazz, hurricanes (the kind you drink, not the kind that wipe out cities), jambalaya, and other enticements, while ignoring poverty just barely outside the tourist areas. Then again, as a general rule, white people often don’t notice people of color. Many times in life, "close" colleagues from places I’ve worked have seen me on the street on off-hours and looked right at me with no recognition. Black people of privilege often suffer from the same ailment. So, I’m not surprised that governmental officials, including a black mayor, just didn’t see the folks getting left behind until the bodies, living and dead, started piling up.

I realize that in writing this my tone makes it sound as if things will always be dire as hell and that there is no chance for lasting change between folks. No, not true at all. But it requires a willingness to get real and get raw.

We have to face the fact that big, bad "isms" have not gone anyplace; they are just better hidden. How else do you explain a failure to get food and water to people in our own country, when we can get it halfway around the world in no time flat?

How can you say you are not racist or classist when in fact your world is filled with people who look just like you? Hell, I see it with black people, too. I have relatives in Chicago who stick to their mostly black neighborhoods and friends and family, and think that I’m rich because I live in an old Victorian house out here (which isn’t hard to do when it costs less to buy a house like that here than to buy a two-bedroom apartment in many parts of Chicago).

I was happy to hear that over 600 Mainers expressed a willingness to take in Gulf Coast families knowing that there was a good chance that some of them might be folks of color. I just wish it would happen more often in the absence of a disaster.

Shay Stewart-Bouley can be reached at shaybouley@msn.com