Leading African American scholars use post-hurricane
Louisiana as a window into twenty-first-century black
America.
"Race has become a subtext for just
about every contentious decision [New Orleans]
faces."—James Dao, The New York Times, January
22, 2006
In one emblematic photograph, a bloated body
floats facedown on the left while, to the right, a woman
stands on an overpass, oblivious. Both the body and the
distracted survivor are black.
With more than a
thousand dead, entire neighborhoods destroyed, and a
diaspora of tens of thousands of poor, mostly black, and
previously invisible people suddenly in view, Hurricane
Katrina presents issues of race, space, class, and politics
in high relief.
In a book of visceral and scholarly
critique, analysis, and prescription, published on the first
anniversary of the storm, a dozen prominent black
intellectuals face the difficult questions about poverty,
housing, governmental decision-making, crime, community
development, and political participation that Katrina
raised.
Determined to offer insights about renewal,
their contributions help the nation to understand what
happened in the Gulf region, what is likely to happen in the
recovery and redevelopment effort to come, and what these
events tell us about poverty and inequality in contemporary
America.
Contributors include: Adolph Reed, Sheryll
Cashin, Clement Price, Cheryl Harris, Devon Carbado,
Katheryn Russell-Brown, Adrien Wing, Anthony Farley, John
Valery White
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy