A friend in France called me the other day outraged by the portrayal of black Americans as savages on his television.

I could only offer this explanation.

In my experience, many people outside America believe that there are no longer any significant economic and social disparities between black Americans and white Americans, mostly because they are unaware of racial statistics and consume narrow samples of black culture typified by “The Cosby Show,” Oprah Winfrey, professional sports, actors, and musicians, and the current and previous secretaries of state. The reality, of course, is that the black masses are faring so poorly compared to these successful cases – and to white people – that most black Americans are extremely dissatisfied with their collective status, and more educated blacks demonstrate the deepest pessimism.

It’s no wonder the Katrina fallout has become a black thing.

“If these people hadn’t been poor and black, they wouldn’t have been left in New Orleans in the first place,” said Rep. William Jefferson, a black Democratic congressman who represents most of New Orleans. “It’s an indictment of our whole society, that at the bottom of the rungs all the time are poor African-Americans.”

After the 1927 Mississippi River flood that devastated New Orleans, thousands of black men were forced to perform slave labor repairing levees. About 330,000 blacks lost their homes and in many cases were not allowed to reclaim their land.

In the late 1930s, after another hurricane, white officials rounded up black citizens at gunpoint and used them as human sandbags in New Orleans. That occurred on the heels of America’s entry into World War II, which ironically was fought to save the world from bigotry.

The legal and social tradition of mistreating blacks started with American slavery and has continued uninterrupted ever since. It is why Malcolm X argued that the United Nations should intervene to protect black Americans. It is why blacks burned major cities in 1968 after the assassination of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Katrina has brought this scandalous reality into fresh focus, and this time the whole world is watching.

New Orleans is a city of nearly 500,000 residents, two-thirds of them black. Twenty-eight percent of the city’s residents live below the poverty line.

Since news reports indicate that the people who remained in the city were mostly poor, and virtually all of the people who have been photographed or taped are black, we are entitled to ask: Why are all of the poor people living in the city of New Orleans black?

The answer implicates the unfinished business from America’s centuries of slavery. America practiced slavery for longer than it has been banned, and it was fundamentally determinative of the country’s social order. Until the 1960s, nearly all black people inside America were products of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Once captured, uprooted, processed, deported from Africa, and sold in America, slaves were not allowed to marry, were not allowed to learn to read, and were not allowed to own property. Fourteen decades after slavery was outlawed, nearly all of our major cities’ worst areas remain full of bad-off blacks marginalized in ways similar to their slave-American ancestors. New Orleans is typical in this respect.

It’s a wonder poor people did not evacuate before the storm. Go where, to whom, and how? They were cooperative and orderly in accepting the city’s invitation into the 96,000-seat Superdome before the downpour started. But instead of serving as a sanctuary, it gradually morphed into a dark rape room and death trap.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson called President Bush’s response “incompetent,” his Friday tour of certain areas “ceremonial.”

“There’s a historical indifference to the pain of poor people and black people,” he observed.

Mr. Jackson arrived in the New Orleans disaster zone to help rescue 450 students trapped at Xavier University, one of the post-slavery colleges founded for blacks. Mr. Jackson said 120,000 people in New Orleans make less than $8,000 a year. Walking among the people and speaking to reporters, he grew outraged.

“Today,” he explained later, “when I saw 5,000 African-Americans on the I-10 causeway, desperate, perishing, dehydrated, babies dying, it looked like Africans in the hold of a slave ship, it was so ugly.”

Mr. Watson is the executive editor of the New York Amsterdam News.