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."βJames 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
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