The Associated Press has an article that describes how the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has galvanized, united, and mobilized the Black community in the U.S. like very few events before it. Like watershed moments in the Civil Rights Movement and in recent history, the events surrounding the lack of government response after the hurricane are increasingly being seen as a defining moment for this generation:

To African-Americans, Hurricane Katrina has become a generation-defining catastrophe a disaster with a predominantly black toll, tinged with racism. They’ve rallied to the cause with an unprecedented outpouring of activism and generosity. Blacks who have been touched by the disaster are not only donating money but gathering supplies, taking in friends and relatives, even heading south to help shoulder the burden of their people.

“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,” said Darnell M. Hunt, a sociologist and head of the African American studies department at UCLA. . . . Katrina’s searing images linking nature’s wrath and the nation’s wrongs have fanned the smoldering resentments of the civil rights, Reaganomics and hip-hop eras all at once.

“Something about this is making people remember their own personal injustices,” said author damali ayo, whose book “How to Rent a Negro” takes a satirical look at race relations. . . .

Some 71 percent of blacks say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in America, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Sept. 6-7 among 1,000 Americans; 56 percent of whites feel this was not a particularly important lesson. And while 66 percent of blacks think the government’s response would have been faster if most of the victims had been white, 77 percent of whites disagreed.

As a liberal, I join with the emerging consensus that there are indeed racial and class overtones to the lack of adequate government response to help the victims of the hurricane and agree that these recent events will probably stay in the collective memory of many people of color, not just Blacks, for generations to come.

If there is any good to come out of all of this, it is the possibility that Blacks, the poor, and all others who are outraged at the government’s lackadaisical response will put their anger into action and rather than looting stores or breaking laws, will direct their energy to ousting Bush’s inept and self-serving administration from power in the next election.