(Minkah Makalani – History) In a Fall 2005 undergraduate seminar on Race and Racism, I asked students to discuss their feelings about Hurricane Katrina. One student, a light-skinned, black identified Puerto Rican woman, expressed contempt for the black victims of Katrina, and offered that the hurricane might compel them to transform their cultural practices and value systems so that they might improve their lives.  It is tempting to see in this student’s comments a disjuncture between her own black identity and her anti-black commentary, yet I see this as a startling instance of intraracial color difference.  It is impossible to divorce this student’s light complexion and Latin American background from their sense of the largely dark-skinned black Katrina victims (at least the images we received) as poor, lazy, criminal, and utterly pitiable.  The paper I might write would focus on how color structurally informed Katrina’s impact on black people in New Orleans, but also how it reveals the enduring importance of that city’s complex history of race to contemporary social structures and racial ideologies.  The city’s roots in French colonial structures of race, with people of mixed black-white parentage racialized as mulatto and accorded certain privileges denied blacks, is central to the continued correlation between color and class in New Orleans.  This enduring legacy of race revealed itself in the relative lack of fair-skinned black faces and bodies among those stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center and Super Dome.