Katrina has taken the mask off the face of America, and we do not like what we see.

Catastrophic events have a way of bringing us closer to realities that otherwise remain hidden. That is clearly the only good that comes from Katrina. This has been a monumental tragedy with unimaginable human suffering. We have all seen it on the television screen, and we turn away in disbelief. For me, Katrina represents a convergence of some of the less-benign realities of American life.

After Katrina’s wind and rain subsided, we saw poverty in America in bold relief. Mothers begged for help. Fathers sought their children. All were caught in a world to which they are accustomed, but it is a world that America goes out of its way to deny.

We hide our poverty in the inner cities and disperse it in rural areas. We build roads that take people around the uglier and poorer parts of our cities so that we do not have to confront that reality. Frightening, really, to the point of being delusional.

Katrina laid it all bare, and the question is what are we going to do about it? Cut taxes, especially on the wealthy? Cut Medicaid to support those tax cuts? Or maybe we should continue to underfund the Army Corps of Engineers so that we can dish out billions of dollars of pork to build roads and bridges to nowhere. The frightening thing is that I believe we will, in fact, do all of those on the state and local levels across the nation.

For years, I taught about African-American enslavement, and I struggled to convey how slavery had left a permanent mark on this nation’s soul in the form of institutional racism. It is not an easy concept for a white person to grasp. Simply put, racism is deeply embedded in the institutions of American life – so deeply embedded that we do not easily recognize it. That is why it is so insidious and permanent.

Well, friends, you saw it on the face of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Black people suffered the most because they are the poorest and most marginalized in the country. Race and class converged at the Conference Center in New Orleans. All the data shows that. There are more black teens in jail than there are in colleges. The unemployment rate among African-American men ages 18-25 is multiple times the rate among whites of comparable ages. Inner-city schools are notoriously inferior to their suburban counterparts. It is the way in which we are organized as a society. I just wonder what Martin Luther King would say today as he viewed this disturbing display of persistent American racism, institutionalized throughout the culture of the nation.

The American rationalization springs from one of the central identifying tenets of American life. We believe deeply in individuality, and we hold that individuals are responsible for their situation. People are poor because they are lazy or because they do not try. The belief in America is that if you are a responsible person, you will make it into the much heralded American middle class. I saw some of the most responsible people in the world searching desperately for their spouses and their children. They were black and they were poor. They were not irresponsible. They were men and women of character. They were caught in vicious institutionalized racism and classism that kept them at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy.

I can hear somebody out there saying, “but, if they had really wanted to improve themselves they would have.” It is the old Horatio Alger myth. Let’s just leave the myths behind. Katrina should help us do that. It affords the nation the opportunity to grapple seriously with this demon that troubles our national soul. Crises are opportunities for change.

It should not have taken Katrina to reveal this. Census figures released recently show, once again, an increase in the numbers living in poverty in this nation. As the economy recovers, more people live in poverty – Third World poverty in the richest nation on earth. Shame on us. About 37 million people live in poverty, an increase of 1.1 million since President Bush has been in office.

The face of New Orleans after Katrina can be replicated all over the nation.

We should all be hanging our heads because of what Katrina has made us see. But we should also be looking forward. I am not an engineer, but I hope that what New Orleans has stood for as a cultural Mecca in this nation will be brought back to life. It gave us much, and it still has much to give.

The final shameful demonstration of the embedded nature of racism and classism in American life was the way in which we responded to the crisis. We expected that all had automobiles, telephones and e-mail! How silly.

And the promised help was delayed. Michael Brown and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are taking the blame. They are the scapegoats.

The real villains were racism and classism. Does anybody really believe that a similar delayed response would have occurred if it had been White Plains, New Rochelle or the Silicon Valley?

Jim Carignan is a retired educator who lives in Harpswell. His e-mail address is [email protected].