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      *“Young and the Restless” star Victoria Rowell called a BET camera crew over to a get-together at the Calif. home of Sheryl Lee Ralph Sunday to film a handful of children shouting, “We are not refugees!” presumably for a clip to run during Friday’s “S.O.S. (Saving Ourselves)” telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief.

      We hear the word most often applied to displaced citizens fleeing war-torn areas in Africa and Third World countries.  No one could have imagined that the noun, in its loosest definition according to Mr. Webster, would ever apply to our own citizens, more specifically, the predominantly black and poor population of New Orleans who were told to flee their homes and take refuge inside the Superdome, the Convention Center and other locations.     

      Like Rowell, many African Americans are livid over the media’s use of the term “refugee” to describe the displaced citizens in the Gulf States, believing that if the faces of those suffering in the Superdome and other shelters across New Orleans were white, the word would have never been uttered during coverage. Compounding the frustration were the infamous “looting” vs. “finding food” photo captions that appeared to expose an undeniable racial double standard in media coverage of the hurricane.

      “They aren’t refugees like from some Third World country, these are Americans!” cried a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, a sentiment that has been echoed by Jesse Jackson, Mark Morial and other black leaders. Yet such a statement suggests that the word itself is somehow dirty and disgraceful.

      At its core, the anti-“refugee” sentiment spits directly in the faces of those millions of uprooted African and Third World men, women and children, whom the press, the United Nations and the world have regularly referred to as refugees without a peep of protest from anyone. Are Africans in refugee camps in Liberia and Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo stripped of their dignity by the refugee label, as Al Sharpton has suggested American blacks have been lately? If the word – as defined – is an insult for our own displaced people, then shouldn’t it be an insult for every displaced person?

      That argument aside, the “refugee” outrage among our folk seems less about the definition of the word itself, and more about the word coming from the mouths and pages of white media organizations.

      “Refugee,” in this sense, is like the N-word. The N-word – whether our more conservative kinfolk want to admit it or not – changes connotations depending on the race of the person spewing it; the R-word seems to change its connotation depending on the race of the person receiving it.  Where the N-word is rooted in racism and has somehow splintered off into a black-on-black term of endearment, “refugee” only sprouted a racist undertone when used to describe the predominantly black and poor evacuees; as race has never been a part of the word’s definition, nor a source of African American outrage when applied to the millions of displaced black and brown people throughout the world. 

      While a number of media outlets – including the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, National Public Radio and the Tulsa (Okla.) Daily World – have decided curtail use of the word from its Hurricane Katrina coverage, the Associated Press says it will continue to use the term, as will the New York Times, whose spokeswoman Catherine Mathis told Journal-isms: “Webster's defines a refugee as a person fleeing 'home or country' in search of refuge, and it certainly does justice to the suffering legions driven from their homes by Katrina."

      Bottom line, the word “refugee” is not inherently racist and it is the most powerful term in our English language, in this writer’s opinion, to describe the cataclysmic criminal activity perpetrated by our own federal government in its failure to mobilize rescue efforts for six days following the tragedy.  Yes, our own black people, thousands of tax-paying American citizens whose homes were destroyed, indeed became refugees in our own back yard, and it is a disgrace.

      But because of the race and class issue inextricably tied to Katrina and its subsequent coverage by the media, The New York Times and AP shouldn’t be surprised if Kanye West goes on the BET telethon this weekend and says: “The Associated Press and The New York Times don’t care about black people!”