Before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, nearly 70 percent of the city’s population was black. After the hurricane, that figure must be in the high 90s. Indeed, if a person were to walk out of the wilderness today and see for the first time the images coming out of New Orleans—pictures of the dead, the raped, the hungry, the stranded, the refugees—that person would immediately think that the disaster was unfolding in Lagos (which is in Nigeria), or Monrovia (Liberia), or Nairobi (Kenya). But these images do not come from Africa, but an American city; and not just some little old sleepy town in the South, but a major and world-famous metropolis.

After learning the facts, this person, who has just walked out of the wilderness, would ask himself the question that’s perplexing every thinking person on this planet: How is it possible that a rich city in the richest country in the world can be transformed, in a matter of days, into a third-world city?

No one is more astonished than mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.

“You mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through,” Nagin said in a radio interview, the transcript of which was posted on CNN.com, “a place that is so unique when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody’s eyes light up—you mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can’t figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on, man.”

All it took was just one storm—a hurricane that didn’t even score a direct hit!—to expose not only how unprepared New Orleans and the nation was, but to completely expose America’s social and racial realties. Now we know what New Orleans was really about. The jazz, the spicy foods, the sensual bars, the famous streets were all a thin cover for a class system that had no middle ground. As in any Third World country, there exists in America an extreme division between those who are rich and those who are poor. And those who are poor in New Orleans are predominantly black. And they are the ones who couldn’t afford to get out.

New Orleans’s economic base is—or was—tourism, and those who have the worst jobs in the hospitality industry are—or were—African Americans.

“While the vast majority of those cleaning and servicing hotels are black, not a single major hotel in New Orleans is black-owned,” reports the Hospitality, Hotels, and Restaurants Organizing Council (HHROC), a group representing three hotel unions in New Orleans. The same report estimates that 42 percent of blacks in New Orleans live below the poverty line; the national average for African Americans is 22 percent. The furious hurricane came and went, and the whole world can now see naked American poverty—without the jazz, the carnivals, and the Super Bowl games—and know that the poverty in the heart of this red state was no different from poverty in Bombay, India.

charles@thestranger.com