NEW YORK - What do you call people who have been driven from their homes with only the clothes on their backs, unsure if they will ever be able to return, and forced to build a new life in a strange place?

News organizations are struggling for the right word.

Many, including The Associated Press, have used "refugee" to describe those displaced by the wrath of Hurricane Katrina.

But the choice has stirred anger among some readers and other critics, particularly in the black community. They have argued that "refugee" somehow implies that the displaced storm victims, many of whom are black, are second-class citizens — or not even Americans.

"It is racist to call American citizens refugees," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, visiting the Houston Astrodome on Monday. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have expressed similar sentiments.

Others have countered that the terms "evacuees" or even "displaced" are too clinical and not sufficiently dramatic to convey the dire situation that confronts many of Katrina's survivors.

What a waste of time. Really. What kind of a person, finding themselves bereft of all their wordly belongings and stuck in a stinking and disorganized shelter, is worried about what term journalists use for people in their position?

On a related note, anyone else wondering why the AP is willing to discuss with its readers its choice in terminology for disaster victims but won't budge an inch when you try to get them to refer to extreme Islamic head-chopping suicide bombers as "terrorists?"