A sunburned Aaron Hazebolton sits forlornly in front of a pile of rubble on Beach Boulevard in Biloxi. The heap of steel and wood is all that's left of his house. And since officials have been scarce since the hurricane, he is guarding his rubble pile himself -- and searching through it for anything of value left un-destroyed by Katrina. So far though, a couple of old screwdrivers are about all he has been able to find.

He has lost everything. And as for rebuilding -- as many of his neighbors are planning to do -- "I haven't given it much thought yet," Hazebolton says. For now, he is just trying to survive. But he has managed to find the time for a small act of patriotism; the Stars and Stripes flutters in the light wind above his pile of rubble.

It is a gesture of pride in the flag -- in the United States of America. Of course, that's not something that goes without saying in Biloxi during these difficult days following one of the most devastating natural disasters in the history of the country. The mistakes made by the federal government during the evacuation, the search and rescue operation, and now the salvage undertaking are simply too great for that.

In Biloxi alone, hundreds of black families are living amid the ruins. At sunset they sit in front of their half-destroyed houses, on patched together verandas or in jerry-rigged wooden huts without water and without power. Even a week after the storm, the streets of Biloxi are still blocked by boats that Katrina tossed violently onto shore. In the poorest section of the city, on Division Street, the only indication that officials have passed through are the red crosses sprayed onto house walls -- the undertaker was here.

One week after Katrina, a new dimension of the catastrophe is coming to the fore. Along with generating devastating floodwaters, the hurricane also managed to lay bare an ugly social reality in New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama -- a reality that has now been broadcast across the globe: It is the weakest of the American society, the poor, the black, the old and the sick, who have been hit the hardest. First came the natural disaster, and then came the disastrous official response which in many cases has amounted to too little help or even none at all.

Storms, of course, know no race or class distinctions and Katrina -- which hammered a region roughly the size of Great Britain -- destroyed rickety houses in the slums just as it took out expensive villas, including that of the Mississippi's Republican senator, Trent Lott. But many, including the Congressional Black Caucus, were quick to point out that some groups in American society suffered more than others. Criticism against what has been perceived as a slow federal response both before and after the storm -- and against US President George W. Bush himself -- likewise continues to make the rounds.

And at first glance, the criticism is justified. Amid the destruction of Katrina, the places with the highest death toll also tend to be those places where the residents were unable to follow an evacuation order that assumed mobility. These residents also have something else in common: Most of them are black. And now, it is also turning out that these areas are the last to receive help. In Motts Point, the suddenly unemployed port workers -- black and white -- have been sitting for days without electricity, water, telephones or fuel in small huts on Highway 90 waiting for help. At the same time, their neighbors from Pascagoula have long since piloted their gas-guzzling luxury cars back to their homes to inspect the damage and begin the process of rebuilding.

In Biloxi, the casinos are for the moment only using their own workers to begin the clean up in their heavily damaged premises -- while at the same time, hungry black families are begging for jobs. Crudely painted signs such as "We Want to Work" and "Work for Cash" lean up against the heavily damaged houses in the neighborhood.

It's as though Katrina has delivered a violent lesson about the social make-up of the United States. A lot of what has happened, says the Rev. Calvin Butts of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, has to do with race and class. It's a message being echoed by conservative columnists as well. "The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned," wrote New York Times editorialist David Brooks.

How this could have happened in a democracy which sees itself as a model for the rest of the world but has now become the subject of a bitter debate? In the center of the whirlwind stands a US president who, in his speech following the recent death of US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, seemed to show more compassion than during his tour last week through the Gulf Coast.

Many have been quick to accuse him of racism. "George Bush doesn't care about black people," said rap star Kanye West at a benefit concert over the weekend. Bernadette Washington, who managed to escape the hell of New Orleans, said, "It's as if we blacks are condemned."

Yet while Bush may be in the frying pan, Michael Brown, director of FEMA is in the fire. Former US Senator Carol Moseley Braun has blasted relief efforts and has joined others in saying that if the victims had been primarily white, aid would have moved a lot faster. "This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets left behind in this society - in a literal way," Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks told the New York Times.

It is, perhaps, a macabre coincidence that the US Census Bureau released its most recent statistics on poverty in America just one day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. The poverty rate rose from 12.5 percent in 2003 to 12.7 percent in 2004 with the number of those living beneath the poverty line rising by 1.1 million to a total of 37 million. Of those, one in four is black and one in five Hispanic. Only 8.6 percent are white.

The meteorological and human disaster created by Katrina has triggered a political earthquake in Washington, regardless of who takes the blame in the end. "It's all about appearances at the moment," said former Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman -- who on Sunday was still unsure of the whereabouts of 10 family members in New Orleans. "Survivors are convinced that it was racism." And if it wasn't racism, then it was very clearly severe incompetence. And a lot is reminiscent of the clumsy response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks: Bush's delayed reaction; bureaucratic chaos; the impression that the federal government had little compassion for the victims. "Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance," wrote Frank Rich in the New York Times.

The Democrats have, for the time being at least, largely kept out of the raging debate -- first because it seems not, for the moment, to need any partisan fuel to keep it burning, and second because it is, for the party, a no-win situation. They definitely don't want to be seen as making political hay out of a national tragedy. So far, only Senator Mary Landrieu -- whose father was once mayor of New Orleans -- has gone on the offensive, even going so far as to say she would "punch" anyone "including the president" who publicly questions the local response to the tragedy.

Bush's approval ratings had reached a low point even before Katrina hit, and now he seems to have fully realized the political problems he is facing. His schedule was completely freed up and on Tuesday was planning to tour the region once more -- this time, one presumes, the jokes will be kept to a minimum. But one can't help the impression that this quick change of course has less to do with alleviating the suffering of the hurricane victims than it does with Bush's own political existence and the success or failure of his political agenda.

From Louisiana to Alabama, recent days have witnessed thousands of scenes of moving solidarity, between poor and rich and between whites and blacks. "United We Stand" is to be read on a wall in devastated downtown Gulfport -- the rallying call of unity and one heard likewise after the attacks of Sept. 11.

National Guard soldiers fresh from the horrors of Iraq labor to the point of heat exhaustion to provide black hurricane victims with food and water. White cops try to comfort black refugees. Carnival Cruise Lines have turned luxurious floating hotels into emergency housing and millionaires have been wiring millions to the accounts of aid organizations.