For a change, I'd like to talk about something uncontroversial: Why George W. Bush is an unbridled racist.

Put the pen down, holster your scathing e-mail and let me explain. In the last week while most of the media has been wondering if Dick Cheney is actually a bloodthirsty maniac who hunts men for sport like those guys in Hostel, the quiet drama of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina continues to unfold, further unraveling the myth that anyone in the Bush administration gave an airborne sh*t about the people drowning in their own living rooms in New Orleans.

Michael "Brownie" Brown recently told the Associated Press that despite becoming the poster-boy-fall-guy for Katrina, the federal response (which had all the effectiveness of a drunken frat boy trying to hot wire a space shuttle) was more than just his fault alone and more than Bush's fault for appointing a supreme dumbass like him in the first place.

Yet, in the furor over the government's ill-managed response, the primary lesson of Katrina has been buried by some really superb finger-pointing - a lesson that involves race in America.

In an interview with Brian Williams, G-Dubs said you can call him anything but don't call him a racist. That offends him. I'll take that to mean he's cool with me calling him an incompetent, war-mongering, homophobic, gastro-intestinal tumor on the colon of the world. But I'm also going to go ahead and call him a racist, as well.

It's cool, though. I'll freely admit that I'm a racist, too.

Actually, you holding this newspaper right now, you're also a racist.

To a degree, we're all a bunch of racists - white, black, brown, yellow, red or mauve. Engrained in all of us - as much as we don't want to admit it and as much as people don't want to talk about it - is fear. We all carry an inherent fear of the "other," of those who don't look like us, whose skin is different, whose eyes are different, whose features aren't what we saw from our cribs as infants. The difference between Bush and the rest of us is that most of us let that inherent fear dictate federal policy.

Look, I'm white. I'm not particularly happy about it, and I'm certainly not proud of it, but back in '83 when my parents had that threesome, that's just the way things turned out. Maybe if the set-up had gone differently, I would have mocha-colored skin and my dad would be a guy named "JC Money" (to this day, my mom still has me call him "Uncle Money"). The point is, we all are what we all are, and the sooner we start acknowledging this and stop pretending like we live in a colorblind society where the intricacies of race stopped being a problem when Ronald Reagan was elected president, the better.

Still there exists this breed of candy-ass white people you'll find all over the federal government (not to mention Miami's campus), who think that if we just don't talk about the raging inequities wrought by the U.S.'s past (think slave-labor, Native American genocide, brutally repressive violence and American apartheid) on society today, then they won't exist.

Well, New Orleans is proof that this line of thought will only lead us down darker roads, and here I'm not only talking about the failed response to Katrina, but by the reconstruction going on as I write this. The social and racial inequities that played such a large role in the disaster in New Orleans continue to go unaddressed.

Although G-dubs may loudly proclaim that he is no racist, his actions speak differently. For instance, have you seen who is rebuilding New Orleans? It's basically a list of Bush campaign donors. You know what some of these companies are doing instead of hiring unemployed Louisianians? They're packing undocumented Mexican workers into trucks where they sleep on the floor between shifts of back-breaking labor that earns them less every day than what you and I spend on our Attaché meal plans at Bell Tower. Right now there are $300 million worth of trailers sinking into the mud of the Mississippi Delta while thousands upon thousands remain homeless. And has anyone within the administration, or even the Republican party, for a second suggested that perhaps it might be a good idea to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans in order to help those who not only had nothing, but then had the nothing they owned washed away by Katrina?

So with all this on our plate - with all these considerations up for debate in America - what sparks controversy, discussion and outrage? It was New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin declaring that he wanted New Orleans to remain "chocolate." Forget social policy, did you hear what he said? Let's go after that motherf*****.

So we're all a bunch of racists. Some, however, are a little worse than others. Though Bush may have never uttered the "n" word in his life, his actions speak to an inherent prejudice that runs far deeper, a prejudice that can keep his conscience clean as the rich make a killing off tragedy.