The gaping racial divide in the United States was laid bare by Hurricane Katrina, but many social policy experts say the disaster is unlikely to prompt any sustained effort to combat black urban poverty.

In the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans it became obvious that the overwhelming majority of people trapped in the drowned city, waiting desperately for help or succumbing to the storm, were poor blacks.

"It was pretty stark looking at the pictures and the data. Black people in New Orleans and elsewhere live together in the most fragile neighbourhoods and it's not an accident -it's the result of decades of segregation and discrimination," said Myron Orfield, a law professor at the

University of Minnesota and former state legislator.

Some see the tragedy as the latest manifestation of America's "original sin" -- its treatment of the descendants of the millions of Africans brought here as slaves.

That legacy is reflected in a thousand different ways. For example: in 1998, the average life expectancy at birth was 71.3 years for blacks and 77.3 years for whites. Infant mortality for blacks was more than double the white rate.

A report in June for the Alternative Schools Network found that in 2002 one in every four black men in the United States was permanently unemployed, a rate double that of white men and 70 percent higher than among Asian and Hispanic men. In the course of their lives, black males have a one in three chance of

spending time behind bars.

Blacks are routinely charged higher interest rates than whites for mortgages and car loans. A recent Vanderbilt University study found black customers paid an additional $972 over the life of an auto loan.

In New Orleans, a city that was more than two-thirds black, over 30 percent of the population lived below the poverty level. When it came time to evacuate, hundreds of thousands of blacks had no cars and could not leave.

The tragedy, said Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, showed "how little inner-city African Americans have to fall back on. They could not load up their families in a van, fill it up with $100 of gasoline, throw some bottled water in the back and check into a hotel with a credit card.