CVK

(Thanks to Michelle and Lin for sending along these stories!) Everyone’s been talking about the “looting” vs. “finding” controversy, where blacks were labeled by the media as looting food, while whites simply “find” it. Salon.com ran a great article by Aaron Kinney, with official reactions from AP and AFP, the two news outlets that put out the offending captions.

Oh, and guess what Condee has been doing all this time? Shopping for shoes at Ferragamo. That’s right. And when an angry shopper confronted her on her bad timing, she actually had her PHYSICALLY REMOVED from the store.

Salon.com also ran another great piece by Joan Walsh about how the horror in New Orleans has exposed the nation’s dirty secrets of race and poverty:

As if to make sure we didn’t miss the ironies, the same week as Katrina came news that the poverty rate has climbed again, the fourth straight year under President Bush…

Then came Katrina, and we’re forced to pay attention. We’re forced to look at New Orleans, to really see it — one of the nation’s great party cities and also one of its poorest. If you go for Mardi Gras or the annual Jazz Heritage Festival, really if you go any old time, you know its majority black population is mostly hidden from white tourists. Beyond the gorgeous French Quarter and Garden District it’s long been a crime-plagued, gang-ridden, corruption-befouled city. But as long as you stuck to Fodor’s, you didn’t have to care.

Now you do. Before Katrina, we were warned of coffins floating out of cemeteries, but instead we got poor black people flushed out of slums, and to some people they’re apparently just as scary. But they’re not going back any time soon. They’re our responsibility now. They always were; we just ignored it.