Thursday, on the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, President Barack Obama stood in New Orleans and said the city has not fully recovered because there is still underlying racial and economic inequality.

Although he recognized at least some improvement and recovery in the decade since the disaster, Obama said, "Our work here won't be done when almost 40% of children still live in poverty in this city. That's not a finished job. That's not a full recovery."

He also chided New Orleans for being among America's cities that pays blacks half of what white people make, a figure, CNN points out, that is "well above the national average."

Obama said that though Katrina "started out as a natural disaster," it "became a man-made one; a failure of government to look out for its own citizens."

The president continued:

What that storm laid bare was another tragedy -- one that had been brewing for decades. New Orleans had long been plagued by structural inequality that left too many people, especially poor people, especially people of color, without good jobs or affordable health care or decent housing. Too many kids grew up surrounded by violent crime, cycling through substandard schools where few had a shot to break out of poverty. And so like a body weakened already, undernourished already when the storm hit, there were no resources to fall back on.

CNN also points out that when Obama spoke on the fifth anniversary of Katrina, "he scarcely mentioned the issues of racial disparity that plagued the city," but in his second term, "the president has become more open about addressing issues of race."

Obama, CNN notes, sounded Thursday more like he did back in 2007, when he called George W. Bush's administration "colorblind in its incompetence," saying, "All the hurricane did was make bare what we ignore each and every day, which is that there are whole sets of communities that are impoverished, that don't have meaningful opportunity, that don't have hope and they are forgotten."

In his speech, Obama spoke of many in the African-American community that were displaced from the city, never to return. He conjured up the famous song by Louis Armstrong that says, "Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?" Surprisingly, he didn't sing the lyric.

Source: CNN