Having arrived droopy eyed in the early hours at New Orleans bus terminal, I could instantly smell the Mississippi river whose great confluence ends at the swampy delta that empties into the Gulf. Feasting on jambalaya, I noticed beneath the haze of fresh morning coffee that the cafetaria was unusually full for 4am. In one corner, a poor and destitute elderly woman opened her mouth where she emptied packet after packet of sugar, while twelve young men, all below 30 sat idly, occasionally falling asleep, two or three would sit together beside a single cup of coffee.

They were homeless, and huddling together to keep out of the early morning chill-it is winter even here in the Deep South. Ever watchful of the hot food being served to hungry customers, - these African American men looked on powerlessly-they were too tired to beg. With the colour of the sky turning a salmon-pink and the sight of a thousand palm trees on the horizon I picked up my bag and left for the French quartre, dismissing what I saw as typical of all bus stations at 4am. I did not want to be dogmatic, but throughout the day and indeed my trip down the Mississippi my attention was drawn to a string of similar observations.

The city that is named the 'crescent,' as it twirls around the great Mississippi river - a mass of sludgy brown soup that divides America in two; the former French city has long been dubbed the Paris of the south. However today, New Orleans, as much of southern Louisiana and the coast of Mississippi in the post-Katrina hurricane is having a difficult time. On the bus here I saw hundreds of metal cabins that temporarily house mostly African Americans-they have been there since January 2006 with the smell of human waste thick in the air.

However, the hurricane itself is not the cause of black poverty, it existed before, the hurricane merely worsened the severity of it and added to an existing social injustice in the city. New Orleans with its reputation for high crime and gang warfare has always been the centre of injustice, from the time of human slavery the city was a major port for the export of slave-picked cotton.  Since the defeat of the confederacy and the consequent abolition of chattal slavery, there seems to be today a certain degree of retraction of full rights of citizenship to African Americans.

Two differing worlds have emerged –one; the lush green neighbourhoods of the white middle-classes where colonial houses fit for plantation owners with brass railings are freshly painted white, and two; the camps and ruins beneath which mostly African Americans struggle to exist-many out of work and are guarded by federal troops. The two conflicting worlds leave an uneasy peace, that is temporary like the damp shacks in which these people rest their sleepy heads.

The dire situation and continued suffering of a section of the city's population is a shame to such a great country for whom I have always held the highest respect, particularly as they all seem to be African Americans. But it is not confined to New Orleans, other American cities possess the same injustices, Bronx NY, Detroit, Baltimore. Indeed in a recent survey by Homeless Organisation USA, African Americans accounted for 49% of all homeless in the United States, compared to 35% for Whites. The very fact that Whites who number some 270 million are over tens times the population of Blacks. Coincidence or is this an indication that American poverty has correlations with race? Did the country that became one of the world's first delegatory democracies where every citizen ''is born equal'' lose sight of the wise words of its founding fathers?

I asked several local White residents, if they felt the federal government acted soon enough for Katrina victims and how they felt about the sight of such poverty around them, they seemed to accept it as a way of life-it did not bother them. One well-dressed lady remarked that help was very generous from all over with toys brought for children from as far as Georgia. When I asked her if toys would help ease poverty, she added that the African Americans of the city were work shy and ought to in her opinion ''go flip a burger.'' But surely what's good enough for her gentle lady hands should be good enough for them?

Having accepted the notion that has been said a million times over, that America is a land full of contradictions, I wondered whether what I was witnessing in New Orleans and elsewhere in Louisiana was really an extreme example of poverty or simply a race issue. In this city virtually all the manual workers, the janitors, porters, fast food vendors, taxi drivers and those collecting rubbish on the streets were African Americans. I remembered the occasions when I accompanied dad in the early morning to the wholesale market that those who normally do manual work, work anti social hours and receive the lowest pay, are generally ethnic minorities. But African Americans are hardly an ethnic minority. They are not first generation immigrants; they have lived in North America since the 16th century and form no less than 36% of the population in both Louisiana and neighbouring Mississippi, in cities like New York, Washington, Detroit, and Chicago they number over one million.

The consensus among the White folk I spoke to suggested that under the system of meritocracy that they believe exists everybody is free. But is this Anglo Saxon meritocracy that they promote so eagerly and that works for White middle class America a level playing field? Does its track record give us any confidence? Is it not the case that Whites remain in power, that Whites hold the majority of wealth, and that not a single African American sits in the Senate?

White Americans often overlook the circumstances in which many African Americans find themselves in and the difficulty in climbing the social ladder. By this I am not referring to the effects of the period of slavery, which has naturally left deep scars but to their displacement from states like Mississippi during the former half of the 20th century, their forced segregation even in Northern states not just from institutions of education and government but from small towns that became known as Sundown towns as late as 2002.

Historian James W. Loewen, author of “Sundown Towns, A hidden dimension of American racism” reports that small towns across America from Maine to California placed signs warning African Americans to stay out causing the “Great Retreat”. One such sign he quotes says simply: “Nigger! Don’t let the sun go down on you in…,” Another reads: “ If you can read this Nigger run, if you can’t run anyway.” Residents of these Sundown towns often used intimidation, violence and even murder to expel African Americans.

These actions, which were common enough to increase the number of Sundown towns from that have led to the migration of African Americans who in the 19th century were a mostly rural people to the northern cities of the United States. As you can imagine, being driven from one’s home stigmatised and then curbed from climbing America’s social ladder by racism in their new home, it was going to be not so much a struggle but a miracle to climb out of poverty. Rebuilding one’s life again and again is extremely hard work, that the insistence of American conservatives for people to trust meritocracy that is in the hands of the White middle classes leaves little credibility to the masses who all know the extent of institutionalized racism.

American legislators like our Tories need to realize that social injustice and a failure to extend citizenship to African Americans will not help eradicate poverty or fight criminality. Rather than hand out tougher and tougher sentences that would make more and more Black American men ineligible to find work and vote, attention needs to be drawn to tackling the causes of crime; most notably the reason these people live in poverty in the first place. As Martin Luther King once said: “It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends $500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only $53 annually on the victims of poverty.”