In 1991, I became a statistic. One wintry night, as I left a meeting and walked into the parking lot of an inner-city library in Jacksonville, I was mugged.

The guy who mugged me -- who had initially greeted me with a smile before chasing me down and slamming me to the ground when I screamed and tried to run when he demanded my purse – wasn’t playing. As I lay on my back, he pulled what appeared to be a shotgun from underneath his coat. I gave him the purse -- and gave in to months of paranoia whenever I found myself walking on the streets towards a brother who, for all I knew, was sizing me up as a mark and not just as a passerby.

Shame forced me to unlearn that behavior.

I was ashamed because I had allowed my fear to force me to become part of the same racist machinery that uses the worse behavior of a few black people as a guide to dealing with, or reacting to, the rest of the race. My one encounter with a criminal had turned me into the urban equivalent of the white woman who clutches her purse and waits for the next elevator rather than share the ride with a black man. And I did not want to be that person; a person who helps to feed the belief that all black people see opportunities for criminality everywhere.

I just wish that Eddie Compass, the former chief of police of New Orleans, and its mayor, Ray Nagin, had been guided by the same conscientiousness.

During those desperate days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and floodwaters kept its poorest and blackest denizens pinned up in the Louisiana Superdome and the Ernest Morial Convention Center, images of black people leaving stores with food, supplies and electronics ate up almost as much air time as did the scenes of people clamoring for help.

But it wasn’t long before the images of a few blacks stealing plasma televisions and DVD’s morphed into imaginings of black gangs using the disaster as an opportunity to act out their every pathological whim. Both Compass and Nagin told Oprah Winfrey that armed gangs were menacing people in the Superdome, killing people in the Superdome. Babies were being raped. The bodies of the slain were piling up.

Now, a month later, it seems that most of the nightmarish stories weren’t true. Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana’s medical incident commander for Hurricane Katrina, told The New York Times that of the 80 or so bodies that have been autopsied so far, only six or seven were the result of homicides. And Compass, who was filmed crying about the babies being raped, told the Times that no official reports of rapes or sexual assault have been made – and he admitted that his statements were based on secondhand reports. The Times also interviewed scores of evacuees, and found that while many provided firsthand eyewitness accounts, many others passed along rumors that they had simply accepted as fact.

I can understand how the news media, in the crush to compete with each other and to get information about a biblical-scale disaster to a panting public, could have gotten it wrong.

Problem is, they got much of their information from Compass and Nagin. And those two should have been the last folks to add grist to rumor mills – rumors that compounded the Katrina tragedy.

The image of feral, gun-wielding blacks filled the popular imagination to the point where services either never reached the people, or reached them too late. According to the Times, a team of paramedics was barred from entering Slidell, a suburb of New Orleans, for nearly 10 hours based on a state troopers report than armed marauders had commandeered boats. The “marauders” turned out to be two men escaping their flooded streets.

But for black people, the damage resonates deeper. It resonates deeper because the image of black people turning on each other, instead of to each other, in the turmoil of a hurricane just feeds the racist attitudes of many whites, and the self-hatred of many blacks. And I believe that Nagin and Compass, perhaps from being jaded from working in a city that has a high crime rate, may have succumbed to exaggeration in order to speed up the response. But statements that led folks to believe that babies were being raped en masse, as well as other atrocities, should have been met with skepticism. And their willingness to believe the worse about black people lent legitimacy to stories that could cause the specter of stereotype to haunt many black New Orleans residents for years to come.

So just as I found the courage to not overreact when a lone brother walks toward me, I hope that blacks like Compass and Nagin find the courage to fight the urge to believe the worse about black people. Because in spite of what happened to me 14 years ago, I know that not every black man I encounter on the streets sees me as a target for a mugging.

Just like I know that the majority of black people in New Orleans didn’t see Katrina as an opportunity to rape and kill.