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The poor black America that welfare expansion created in 1966 is still with us. Poor young blacks have never known anything else. People as old as 50 have only vague memories of life before it. For 30 years this was a world within a world, as is made clear from how often the Katrina refugees mention it is the first time they have ever left New Orleans.

What Katrina stripped bare, then, was not white supremacy, but that culture matters — even if what created the culture was misguided white benevolence. Social scientists neglect that before the 1960s poor blacks knew plenty of economic downturns and plenty more racism.

But before the 1960s the kinds of behaviour so common among the blacks stranded in the Superdome, possibly including multiple rapes, was a fringe phenomenon. Only after the 1960s did it become a community norm.

Wise people tell us that poor blacks in New Orleans went to rack and ruin when low-skill industrial jobs left the city centre, a common argument about cities nationwide. But in cities like Indianapolis where the factories largely stayed close, the same degradation began — starting in the late 1960s.

Wise people tell us that housing projects destroyed poor black communities by concentrating too many poor people in one place. But in city after city, these projects were peaceful places until welfare recipients were allowed to move in in large numbers.

All indications are that the reform of welfare in 1996 is bearing fruit in terms of income and the life conditions of children. Hopefully, legions of poor black people who return to New Orleans will take advantage of the job opportunities that rebuilding a city will offer. But what we should all remember from Katrina is a tragic close-up of a group of people staggering after, first, a hideous natural disaster but, ultimately, an equally hideous sociological disaster of 40 years ago.

John McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

THE RACE ROW

We must ... come to terms with the ugly truth that skin colour, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not
— Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic party

Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race
— Condoleezza Rice

You’d have to go back to slavery, or the burning of black towns, to find a comparable event that has affected black people this way
— Darnell M Hunt, head of African-American studies at UCLA

You see a black family, it (the press) says ‘They’re looting’. You see a white family it says ‘They're looking for food’. George Bush doesn’t care about black people!
— rap singer Kanye West

It wasn’t a racial thing — but poverty disproportionately affects African- Americans in this country. And it happened because they were poor
— Colin Powell

Today I saw 5,000 African-Americans desperate, perishing, dehydrated, babies dying. It looked like Africans in the hull of a slave ship. It was ugly
— the Rev Jesse Jackson

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