When Katrina hit the Big Easy she destroyed its levees, flooded its streets, killed hundreds and forced many more into exile. Now she is blowing a storm through its politics.

By Harry Mount

For the first time in a generation, New Orleans, its racial mix as steamy as the local bayous, seems likely to elect a white mayor when it goes to the polls today.

Before the hurricane struck at the end of last August, the city was two-thirds black. Today, with many of its poor still scattered across the South, white and black are evenly split.

On one level, a white man’s arrival at City Hall as mayor, the first since 1978, would matter little. America is now “colour blind” in a way unthinkable even then – and certainly in the turbulent 1950s and 60s.

But, on another, it would confirm the worst fears of blacks still here: that “ethnic cleansing” has worked and their home, the birthplace of jazz at the mouth of the Mississippi, is back in the hands of whites.

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