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Few Americans watching news reports of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding in New Orleans in August and September of 2005 could have overlooked the fact that most of the victims were black. Many African American residents of the city were poor, and it was poverty that caused many of them to left behaind as the flood waters rose. Govenment inaction prompted hip-hop artist Kanye West to voice a common opinion on national TV, "George Bush doesn't care about Black people." Indeed, the disaster started a national debate on racism, citizenship, and poverty, a debate that continues into the Obama era.
Media are important to understanding race in America. Television news reports of flooding in New Orleans were quick to criticize government inaction and sympathize with black victim, but media also reinforced negative stereotypes by reporting stories of African Americans committing acts of violence, most of them unconfirmed, almost all untrue. As Michael Eric Dyson argues in his book Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster(2006), this was not merely because of rumor and poor communications. The reports showed just what white Americans were capable of believing about blacks. One widely circulated pair of news photos showing white and black victims illustrates the difference.Whereas a black youth pictured carrying food was a called "looter", a white couple were just "finding" what they needed to stay alive. Also controversial was the continual reference to the black victims as "refugees" rather than "residents" or "citizens", and the suggestion that blacks were too lazy to leave the city after hurricane warnings. In contrast, Spike Lees' documentary When the Levees Broke (2006) gives white, black, and Hispanic citizens of New Orleans a voice, letting them tell their own stories.
With the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008, many Americans believed that the goals of the Civil Rights era had been realized. Certainly, American films have played a role in celebrating the progress of African Americans, including King(1978), Malcolm X(1992), and Mississippi Burning (1988). Hairspray (1988) trate the integration of black and white youth thorugh music, while Glory Road (2006) is about a winning integrated college basketball team in Texas in the 1960s. But Dyson's bookand Lee's film slow the problems of being black and poor in America, and remaind us that much still needs to be done, in education, housing, and employment across America. Yet even the prominent and the powerful among African Americans are not spared. In July of 2009, a city councilman in California sent emails containing racist jokes about the Obamas to city leadres, and admitted that the found nothing wrong with what he had done. In Massachusetts in the same month, a white police officer arrested a famous African American university professor outside his home on suspicion of burglary, raising charges of racial profiling and bringing the intervention of president Obama himself. Racism remains an everyday reality for all Americans. That seems to be the message of Crash (2005). Set in cotemporary Los Angeles, with black, white, Asian and Hispanic people of all economic classes, the film shows stereotypes and racial prejudice tobe the basis of people's suspicious, even hostile relations.
