Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Central Gulf Coast in August 2005,
was undoubtedly one of the worst natural disasters to strike the United
States in the age of round-the-clock media journalism. Television coverage
of Hurricane Katrina brought to the forefront the costs of disadvantage
along racial and class lines. Needless to say, the victims left behind
were disproportionately African American, elderly, and impoverished
residents of the area. While the focus of media discussions centered
around whether African Americans were abandoned by governmental agencies
or if they were to blame for not heeding the call to evacuate, there was a
complete absence of coverage and discussion of Hispanic and Asian American
residents of the area, who are also disproportionately poor and many of
whom lacked English skills to navigate the little help available to
residents. This essay briefly discusses the few newspaper articles that
examined these populations; Hispanic and Asian American journalists wrote
almost all of these articles. I then examine how the lack of attention to
these populations shapes our common understandings of race and why this
may be problematic both in the United States and in a global
environment.