News-Record.com

An e-mail advisory to News & Record staffers yesterday noted that our style is to call people displaced by Hurricane Katrina evacuees rather than refugees.

Apparently, there's been a nationwide debate about the correct terminology.

Jesse Jackson says, "It is racist to call American citizens refugees."

I can't figure that one out.

President Bush adds, "The people we are talking about are not refugees, they are Americans."

Say what?

OK, the United Nations defines a refugee as someone who flees across an international border to escape violence or persecution.

But the U.N., naturally, is concerned with events of international significance.

Webster's New World College Dictionary says a refugee is "a person who flees from home or country to seek refuge elsewhere, as in a time of war or of political or religious persecution."

"As in a time of war or of political or religious persecution" does not limit the definition to those circumstances.

Wars and other events produce refugees who never cross an international border, so it's wrong to suggest Americans can't be refugees within their own country.

Race has absolutely nothing to do with any definition of the word, so Jackson is all wet on this one.

An evacuee, meanwhile, is "a person evacuated from an area of danger," according to Webster's. That clearly fits the people who have been removed from devastated areas.

The word "refugee" adds an important dimension, however. That is the element of seeking refuge, a place of safety. Therefore, I see nothing wrong with using the word to describe the people who no longer have homes in Gulf Coast communities.