As for the Pew data, Prof. Michael Dawson’s research is more longitudinal, but I don’t have a link to it, as I’ve only seen draft copies of his work. Dawson is a Prof. of Political Sci at U Chicago and considered an expert on race and politics.

Of course it was an issue of economic inequality as well. If you’re familiar with the situation in NOLA, which I am through my work, there’s bias against displaced low-income African-Americans by upper-middle-class African-Americans/Creoles too. It’s not possible to separate race from class. But I stand by the research I’ve seen and my direct experience with working with recovery activists in NOLA and the Gulf Coast that the government’s response was racist (and elitist).

wtf?

And Hillary didn’t say jack about it, until waaaaaaay into campaign season when she has to suck up. (Of course it didn’t work.)

Do you have anything more current than 1 week after the hurricane? The Oct. 19, 2005, poll was done about a month after the one you reference, and it was trending upward with people realizing that economic inequality was one of the problems with the response, with 48 percent of respondents saying that America is divided into haves and have-nots:

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=260

A LOT of people are still pissed about Katrina, and not all of them are black, believe it or not. Not all of them are even Democrats — it sent at least a couple of lifelong Republicans I know personally off into rants about how horrible Bush is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8J9laUNgL4

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/22/142132/498/133/520573

“Which brings me to my final point. There’s been much attention in the press about the fact that those who were left behind in New Orleans were disproportionately poor and African American. I’ve said publicly that I do not subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was racially-based. The ineptitude was colorblind.”

“In addition, blacks and whites draw very different lessons from the tragedy. Seven-in-ten blacks (71%) say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country; a majority of whites (56%) say this was not a particularly important lesson of the disaster. More striking, there is widespread agreement among blacks that the government’s response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm’s victims had been white; fully two-thirds of African Americans express that view. Whites, by an even wider margin (77%-17%), feel this would not have made a difference in the government’s response. ”

Here’s Sen. Obama’s response to Katrina.

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=255

“In addition, blacks and whites draw very different lessons from the tragedy. Seven-in-ten blacks (71%) say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country; a majority of whites (56%) say this was not a particularly important lesson of the disaster. More striking, there is widespread agreement among blacks that the government’s response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm’s victims had been white; fully two-thirds of African Americans express that view. Whites, by an even wider margin (77%-17%), feel this would not have made a difference in the government’s response. ”

Here’s Sen. Obama’s response to Katrina:

http://obama.senate.gov/statement/050906-statement_of_senator_barack_obama_on_hurricane_katrina_relief_efforts/

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/22/12239/7807/243/520455

This is a harbinger of what will happen across the nation soon after Clinton throws in the towel.

A new poll released today in California finds political momentum shifting dramatically toward Barack Obama—and away from both Hillary Clinton and John McCain—in the nation’s most populous state. According to a survey conducted over the past 10 days by the Public Policy Institute of California, 59 percent of likely voters here now have a “favorable” impression of Democrat Obama, while a majority view both of the other candidates unfavorably. In a state whose Democratic primary Clinton won in February, 51 percent of voters now say they have an unfavorable opinion of her; 53 percent of voters feel the same way about Republican McCain.

Obama, meanwhile, seems to be making strides across nearly every constituency. If the general election were held today, 54 percent of Californians say they would vote for him, compared with 37 percent for McCain. That gap has widened by 8 points since March. Obama enjoys the support of more than 80 percent of Democrats here, along with over half (55 percent) of independents. He leads McCain among men and women and is viewed favorably by nearly 70 percent of Latinos—a powerful political group, experts note, not just in California but in several other western states, including Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada.

Given we all haven’t been alive for 300 years, I think its arguable that many of us have a different, broader understanding of the word “race” and our use reflects that.

But our race problem in the US traces back specifically to slavery and the fact that waves of immigrant groups have leapfrogged over African-Americans to become white while the problems of African-Americans remain. In another 30 years, being of Mexican or Guatemalan descent will be pretty much like being of Italian or Irish descent, but African-Americans will still be black, and still be in the exact same social position.

Yes, we have other major racial problems in the US, but they’re not nearly as deeply-seated as the problems between whites and blacks.

As for Katrina, I’d argue it’s a dog whistle because blacks and whites differ dramatically on whether or not they believe race played a role in the government’s response to Katrina (see Pew polls and the opinion research of political scientist/Prof. Michael Dawson, in Chicago) - the majority of African-Americans think it was a racist response and the majority of whites do not think so.

I’d be very curious to see that research if you have a link to it, because all of us white West Coast liberal elites are pretty sure that the Katrina response had a hell of a lot to do with racism. We may not think that it was a planned-out conspiracy, but when you have black people herded into a football stadium and kept prisoner there for a week with very little food or water, even the most dull-witted white person is going to start to think that maybe, possibly, there might be a wee racism problem involved.