President Bush says he is willing to be called anything but racist. I suppose when one is fighting for higher approval ratings and is not as isolated as many observers have suggested, he must be prepared to be called, as we say down home, “everything but a child of God.”

In defense of the president, who would, no doubt, note that some of his best friends are black and that he has Latino relatives, he may not be racist in the manner intended by users of the word.

Rapper Kanye West famously said during a Hurricane Katrina telethon: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” For that he was verbally whacked by any number of people and found himself defending his choice of words. That’s the problem with calling someone racist or implying that he or she is – or, for that matter, attributing to anyone any of those other verboten “isms”: You end up with a battle over words instead of a discussion about the substantive issue that might – just might – lead toward a solution.

So the president was able to buy some time in his interview with NBC’s Brian Williams a few days ago by denying that he is racist.

“You can call me anything you want, but do not call me a racist,” he said.

The real question, however, was whether the aftermath of Katrina revealed the extent of racism and ingrained poverty that still exists in this country. It did.

But whether Bush or his aides acted – or failed to act – because of blatant or latent racism is beside the point, which is this: The overwhelming majority of people who suffered the most in the frantic days when Bush and the Federal Emergency Management Agency were, shall we say, confused about the situation, were black.

Most of the poorest people, the people still struggling to get back to the little they did have in New Orleans, the people all but forgotten these many months after Katrina, are black. Issues of race and poverty must be addressed if solutions are to be found.

Likewise, race is a crucial issue involving another Republican from Texas. I am sure that Tom DeLay would probably say that he is no racist, and that might be so. But what I care about is the racist impact of gerrymandering he engineered that had the effect of assuring congressional seats for more white Republicans and diluting the black vote. Even professionals in the Justice Department concluded that before being overruled by political appointees who gave their approval to the districts redrawn to DeLay’s specifications.

Now we’ll have to see what the Supreme Court has to say about that. The new chief justice’s – or perhaps even a new associate justice’s – private views on race are irrelevant. I just want them to apply the law – in this case, the Voting Rights Act.

Figuring out if someone is racist is not what’s important. It is the impact of their actions that speaks volumes.