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Hurricane Katrina clearly demonstrated that there are two Americas which Detroiters, metro Detroiters, and many suburban cities bordering on urban centers around the nation share. Each has been bound by an unbreakable bond between racial myths and actual facts.

The racially charged rumors that circulated throughout the nation's black communities concerning what many black New Orleans evacuees had been whispering during those first desperate days in the aftermath Hurricane Katrina devastation were clear and convincing to many black Americans. Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson had heard it too: that the massive levee breaks that caused the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were the result of some government conspiracy. The racial fiction was being bandied about as fact.

Although clearly false, there were the racial inciters who I will label the pimps of racial persecution who openly engaged in the practice of encouraging this and other similar claims. They circled like vultures looking for the carcass of any perceived failed attempt by government to widen the fissure between races. The pimps of racial persecution took dead aim at Hurricane Katrina victims. The aftermath had all of the correct ingredients for a menu of perceived racial injustice.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin clearly alluded to the perception that the tens of thousands of his residents who could not escape the flood were black, poor and throwaway victims of federal government inaction. Nagin worked the fiction because the facts did not feed this race dividing scenario. He worked the myth and the persecution pimps responded in kind.

Enter stage left the two reverends riding to the rescue, Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson. The myth of a racist boogeyman is the type of equality they wanted to sell. They in fact and in practice became the soldiers of hate and the provocateurs of bigotry.

The myth became fact and the obvious anguish and horror which confronted the hundreds of thousands of evacuees; tens of thousands of them being black, worked well for the rescuing reverends. They dealt the nation The Race Card and myth won over fact.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, not to be outdone added a new dimension to the phrase "Pimp My Ride". You see the ride that he was pushing sat squarely on the backs of poor blacks who were flooded out of their homes and saw their lives literally washed away. He claimed that there was a deliberate conspiracy to allow the black residents' neighborhoods to be flooded by a malicious act to damage the levees after Hurricane Katrina. He didn't need facts when a myth will do him and his cause better.

We have our own version of a Hurricane Katrina rumor mill and it has been a racial storm based again upon myth, conjecture, and firmly held impressions which over time have crystallized into hate.

Some old timers in Detroit remember the controversy former Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard stirred when he asked Dearborn city employees, in 1948 on Election Day, to distribute leaflets that read, "Keep Negroes out of Dearborn. Protect your Home and Mine!" Black Detroiters believed the wall of division and myth began then.

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