As difficult as it may be to believe, some news outlets continue to echo the myth that Katrina was a racist hurricane.

NEW ORLEANS — Mayor Ray Nagin told a crowd gathered at City Hall on Monday for a march honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that New Orleans will be “chocolate” again.

New Orleans proper was more than 60 percent black before Hurricane Katrina displaced about three-quarters of its population, but sparing predominantly white neighborhoods.

Wikipedia:

Casualty statistics, broken down by race and released by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (LDHH), have been cited as evidence that African-Americans were not dispropotionately affected, at least in terms of deaths. According to the LDHH, as of December 16 2005, 48 percent of the identified victims were African American and 41 percent were white.[100] This is a substantially higher proportion of white casualties than New Orleans’s racial makeup would suggest. However, the deceased are not from New Orleans alone, but rather from throughout the southern part of the state, and this greatly reduces the conclusions that can be drawn from the data.

A much more convincing analysis is one conducted by the Los Angeles Times and published on December 24, 2005.[101] Its method was to tabulate bodies retrieved from neighborhoods (excluding those found in hospitals), as they could give clues to socio-economic status. Surprisingly, bodies were spread throughout the city, with the distribution displaying only a “slight bias for economic status.” Upon investigation, it was found that the only other neighborhoods to suffer as complete a distruction as the poor, predominately black Lower 9th Ward, were actually rich, predominately white neighborhoods near Lake Pontchartrain. These neighborhoods were actually lower-lying than the Lower 9th. In addition to the class-based analysis, the study also revealed that “of the bodies formally identified, a disproportionate number are white.” This conclusion came from the fact that of the 380 bodies from New Orleans identified, 33 percent were white, when, according to the study, the white population of New Orleans was only 28 percent. Although necessarily preliminary due to the fact that many people have not yet been identified and bodies are still being found, and while limited to the easily measurable death rate, this study suggests that the brunt of the hurricane was not disproportionately borne by the poor and black. This is perhaps more in line with New Orleans’ previous reputation for high levels of social and racial integration.