Katrina's Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America

14. Race, Vulnerability, and Recovery

As rescue helicopters hover overhead and media cameras roll, a group of young people, all African American, stand on the rooftop of a house, holding a sign, “Help us!” In the storm’s aftermath, families huddle in the shadow of a highway overpass, seeking shelter beneath the road that might have led them, under different circumstances, to safety. In one of Katrina’s more horrific images, a body floats face down in the water—graphic proof of the storm’s wrath, the broken levees, the water’s violent assault on the residents of New Orleans, and the failure of the city, the state, and the nation to protect its people. As shocking as these images of Katrina were, they have also begun to fade from American memory, receding year by year as the region attempts to recover after the physical destruction and psychological trauma. This book is not merely an effort of historical recovery but an analysis of Katrina as a sentinel American event and its continuing reverberations in contemporary politics, culture, and public policy. As the essays in this volume show, the Hurricane Katrina disaster was an indictment of earlier and more silent Katrinas. Together they provide a critique of how policy by increment harms the weakest. They reveal how the persistence of separate and unequal transportation systems, and how the policies and unfulfilled promises of government affect the health and well-being of its citizens. Katrina also revealed a graphic breach in the social fabric—with bodies being discovered into the fall of 2005, and the funereal atmosphere around the iconic American city. With its many houses destroyed by the storm, its citizens dispersed, and its trauma radiating outward, New Orleans remains haunted by the perception that no one really cares and no one would truly want to live there again. But Katrina also signaled resilience for a city whose jazz roots and people evoked pain as well as hope and celebration in spite of the hand they had been dealt. A milestone event in American history, Katrina also opened a new public vista on the 192 14 VVVVVVVVVVV Race, Vulnerability, and Recovery KEITH WAILOO KAREN M. O’NEILL JEFFREY DOWD RACE, VULNERABILITY, AND RECOVERY 193 complexity of race and vulnerability. It offered the U.S. media a new lens for writing about disasters and race; it reframed the question of leadership, preparedness , and security in both private and public sectors; and yet (sadly) it became a force for replicating pre-storm inequalities in housing, labor, and economic opportunity—scattering the city’s former residents far and wide. Looking back and looking ahead, the challenge remains how to translate these new insights on race, trauma, vulnerability, and opportunity in America into policies that address the nation’s everyday Katrinas and that will also mitigate the impact of the next storm, whatever form it takes. As most of us know, recovery poses an epic challenge. After the hurricane, the devastation resulted not only from the forces of nature but from underlying and long-standing sociohistorical forces. Nature alone could not account for the way Katrina’s impact was felt across the region and the nation. President George W. Bush himself pointed to the historical roots of poverty as partially located in racial regimes of America’s past. Yet for Bush, as for most Americans, that is where the discussion of racism in creating the Katrina disaster began and ended. For other Americans, however, Katrina required deeper scrutiny. In this volume, for example, Karen O’Neill analyzes Katrina as a story of environmental justice, viewing the long-standing North-South divide, in which national leaders made accommodations to southern elites and supported hierarchical (and most often racial) power structures, as essential to that story. Similarly, Mia Bay calls attention to the history of racial inequalities in transportation—to “invisible tethers” that have constrained the mobility of black Americans. Bay insists that our society needs to understand its role in shaping transportation inequities and must address how transportation perpetuates long-existing inequalities. More generally, this book argues, reinvention cannot happen without studying Katrina’s imprint—that is, without characterizing accurately the city before Katrina, documenting comprehensively the loss, investigating extensively the tangled nature of vulnerability, and (only then) charting a wise course toward reinvention and a true recovery. As we write nearly five years after the awful event, New Orleans has not returned to “normal,” nor will it. Indeed, it remains unclear what a normal New Orleans will look...