Disturbing evacuee tale from NPR correspondent Farai Chideya (via BoingBoing) :

My Uncle Israel Chideya was missing for a while, lost in the maelstrom of post-Katrina evacuations from New Orleans. Well, we found him. He is good…and mad.

Here’s just a snippet of what he told me.

He had bought a multi-unit apartment complex in the french quarter. He didn’t evauate for the hurricane, but did once the levee broke and the floodwaters started rising. He and twenty thousand other folks ended up at the convention center, and he spent five datys in the place where (like the Superdome) children were raped, people were murdered, and even the elderly were harassed. “Elderly people from nursing homes were dumped at the Convention Center in their diapers.”

. . .

Uncle Israel took two elderly couples under his wing. One couple was blind. He shephereded them through the evacuation. They were taken by bus to Baton Rouge, then loaded onto military transport planes at the airport.

They werent told where they were going, but ended up in San Antonio, Texas. They were taken to the coliseum and the American Center, all of the evacuees. My uncle was worried about a repeat of the Convention Center fiasco. And then he noticed something. “All of a sudden we don’t see any white people,” he said. All of the white evacuees had mysteriously disappeared.

He asked a volunteering priest what had happened. The priest told him that local hotels were being paid to take evacuees. The white evacuees were told about the hotels. The black ones, says my uncle, were not.

Sick.