Katrina begets racial and environmental agitators.(Correction, Please!)

ITEM: A January 18 article on the Black Entertainment Television website (www.bet.com) reported: "Concerned environmentalists say that unless the United States gets real about the threat of global warning, African Americans and other people of color can expect a repeat of disasters like [Hurricane] Katrina."

Some environmentalists, read the account, "say global warming impacts minorities and the disadvantaged harder than other groups." Nia Robinson, a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative (EJCC), maintained that Katrina "showed that racism is alive and well in America." CORRECTION: Equating the response to Katrina to racism has been a recurrent theme among demagogues despite the evidence to the contrary. Tedious racial firebrand Jesse Jackson, for example, maintained that the post-storm New Orleans scene "looked like Africans in the hull of a slave ship." Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean did his part to whip up a reaction: "We must come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not." The radical Guardian in London gleefully charged that the storm had "laid bare the ugly truth about America's racial divide."

Such allegations have been rampant--and wrong. A study by Knight Ridder Newspapers, which got considerably less attention than the alarmist statements above, found that blacks and those with lower incomes were not, in fact, represented disproportionately among victims. An analysis of the dead by race showed: "African-Americans outnumbered whites 51 percent to 44 percent. In the area overall, African-Americans outnumber whites 61 percent to 36 percent."

Blacks made up 67.2 percent of the New Orleans population before the storm, pointed out syndicated columnist John Leo, and they "account for 50.9 percent of the city victims so far identified by race. It was New Orleans' Caucasians who died way out of proportion to their numbers--28 percent of the population, 45.6 percent of the city's known Katrina deaths by race."

In a column in the Boston Globe, Cathy Young suggested that one reason "we saw so many black survivors on the news was that most white-populated areas the hurricane hit--St. Bernard Parish near New Orleans, the cities of Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi--received relatively little media attention."

Perhaps the saddest part of all this is that it is deemed politically advantageous to fault an act of nature for not striking Americans according to appropriate racial distribution patterns.

Nevertheless, rebuilding policies may well react to the rants of instigators who are ...