As someone who attended Tulane and has lived in New Orleans for the past six years, Katrina and the aftermath have been devastating to me personally. On a much smaller scale, the media portrayal of New Orleans as a bitterly racist town has been painful to watch.
In fact, New Orleans is one of the most racially integrated cities in the country.
The people of my city are Cajuns, Creoles, Europeans. French, in many bastardized forms, is still spoken in the Garden District. Our food is a fusion of the Deep South, the bayou, and the best of Paris. I've eaten collard greens and fried catfish at Dunbar's on Sunday afternoon while sitting next to the local gospel choir. I've drank Abita beer at Mrs. Mae's while shooting pool with a clarinet player from Preservation Hall.
We mix with white, black, and everything in between at the grocery store, the bars, the parks and the concerts. At night, we go home to the same neighborhoods -- don't let the news coverage fool you. White and black live side by side in most of New Orleans proper. Certainly, there are pockets (such as the 9th Ward and certain housing projects, or Metairie, in the alternative) that are almost exclusively one race, but most, like the historic Uptown neighborhoods, are a jumble of colors and ethnic backgrounds. Sure, there's some racism like you'll find in every other city in this country, but this is truly the melting pot of America.
No, this is not a city divided by race, but by class. Most of the jobs in New Orleans proper are in the service industry field, and without a college education, that's about as far as you can go. The public schools have been piss poor for ages ... in short, this is not a place where you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps (which is a disgrace in a town that features some of the finest Universities and historically black colleges in the world).
The cycle is vicious -- live poor, die poor. The way New Orleans is set up, with wealth and poverty living side by side, contributes to much of the crime and class tension that is so widely being reported as racism.
In short, call the problem what it is -- a devastating, brutal reflection of class discrimination in America. Don't take the easy way out, and paint one of the most cosmopolitan cities in this country as a band of hayseed racists.