I was in fourth grade. I sat down on the step of the door leading into the school from the playground. I was tired, and decided to spend a few minutes of recess alone.

“Look at that,” said one of the teachers.

“I know,” the other teacher nodded. This was my teacher. She added, “There used to be only a few of them like that. Now MOST of them are like that.”

The two women stared at the filthy child who sat on the ground a few feet ahead of them pouring sandy dirt onto her legs.

“How many do you have from the ghetto this year?”

“Fifteen! More than half the class! How about you?”

The child squinted back at them in the afternoon sun.

“Twelve.”

I wondered what the little girl thought of their words. She looked about six or so. I wondered why the teachers continued to stare at her without telling her that she was spoiling her outfit, and the other children might make fun of her. I wondered why neither of them took her to clean up in the bathroom.

Although I was also from the ghetto, I did not play in dirt. But I was older.

Years later I went to college and took courses in social sciences. In Sociology 101 I learned that most people who are born in the ghetto never leave. I also learned that children of low socio-economic families have low self-esteem and have trouble achieving. At this, I raised my hand. “Is this information based on inference or statistics?”

“Statistics,” said the instructor. “The numbers come from studies conducted by people who have gone into low SES homes and found an absence of books. Sometimes there is also a language barrier.”

“I just wondered because I grew up low SES, and I never felt limited in terms of what I could do.”

“Did you have a father in the home?”

“My parents were divorced.”

“Consider yourself lucky. Most people who have backgrounds like that don’t make it this far. Your mother did a good job raising you.”

It had never occurred to me to measure my life by these statistical verdicts.

A few years later, I moved back to my home town. When my son started attending the school where I had gone as a child, I began running into my childhood playmates. Many of the people I remembered from the ghetto had become adults with their own apartments in the tenement building where we grew up, raising a new generation there.

I recognized one of them in the schoolyard after the bell rang. She said, “You look really different.” Looking into her eyes was like looking into a vacuum. She walked away with her son, and I remembered one night that she and I had run around all over the ghetto looking for her parents. Finally, one of them must have arrived home because I remember her going into the dark, empty apartment. Later that night I asked my mother why Tanya’s parents didn’t have furniture.

The night before Hurricane Katrina struck, I watched the cars moving at about five miles per hour, bumper to bumper, out of New Orleans. I pictured myself in a car on the highway with my son at age two, shrieking for freedom from the car seat, as the car crept along in the darkness. Then I tried to picture doing this with five kids…and then… “Who’s NOT there,” I pondered, looking at the headlights. What if you have no car? What if you’re sick? What if you’re old? What if you’re broke?” Perhaps it is because the ghetto still haunts my dreams, and the faces of my childhood haunt my life as an adult, that I cannot forget what it means to live on the outside of mainstream society.

The next day, there they were on the news- the answers to my questions- the faces of the individuals comprising a fringe population that rarely are the focus of the public eye. Many of them spoke about their living nightmares. Quickly, power-suited men and women speculated about this group of people and their problems. It is as though the hurricane blew down the walls of America’s dark closet to reveal a seemingly forgotten people. Is it a racial issue? Yes, if being a minority makes it harder to get the kind of job that takes you into the mainstream and out of the periphery. With or without racial factors, poverty is a legacy.

Hurricane Katrina has us thinking about deprived American citizens, wondering why and how this happened in the land of the free. We are donating, making plans, making promises. We see the faces of children, and we feel an outpouring of compassion.

I cannot help but wonder why this compassion was absent from the inner city school that I attended as a child. In my school, advantaged children ridiculed and isolated the kids from the ghetto. The teachers did not prevent this, but participated. Today, the school is no different. The teachers still make public remarks about how many students in the class are from the ghetto.

A few years ago, I heard one of my son’s friends talking about a classmate. “Oh, that kid? He lives in the ghetto. I’m not allowed to play with him.” Now, at the age of eleven, the boy from the ghetto has ceased playing with my son, and will only associate with “gangstas.”

Where do poor adults come from? Are they unintelligent or unmotivated? Perhaps it is easier to think so than to consider the possibility that they were segregated as children from their comparatively privileged peers. Would America really do this to children? Would it blame them for their parents’ problems?

We are living in a society where parents live in fear that a teacher or doctor will think the wrong thing about a bruise or a scratch. But ask an adult who grew up in the system how she was treated… ask if abuse never happened in the school, or in the institution…

It is time that America got in touch with its own hypocrisy. We’ve all heard jokes about trailer parks and ghettos. Do we justify laughing in the righteous thought of having paid our tax bills? Do we believe, deep down, that beggars can’t be choosers, therefore we do not owe respect to this part of the American caste system? Is it possible that our own ability to thrive could be wounded if we were treated this way?

No amount of money or programs can replace the personal empowerment that comes with being treated as a valuable individual with unique gifts, unlimited opportunities and important contributions to make socially. Children learn at a very young age where their parents stand in the pecking order. They feel resentment toward adults who look down on their parents, and they often admire their parents enough to follow in their footsteps.

Perhaps while we discuss the wrongness of the holocaust with our children, we should address the subject as it pertains to persistent problems in our own back yard. We say we promote tolerance and diversity, but these need to go beyond skin deep.

I remember one enraged young woman in New Orleans screaming behind the reporter, “It’s not about lower class people or higher class people! It’s about PEOPLE!” A few days later, a different reporter was unable to persuade any evacuees to speak into the microphone. The reporter said, “They are embarrassed, oddly enough.”