Katrina Is What Happens When You Segregate People by Race and Class

Aug. 24, 2006— -- Just as the terror of Sept. 11 awakened Americans to our vulnerability to outside threats, the horror of Hurricane Katrina revealed how vulnerable we are to problems of our own making.

With reconstruction in New Orleans barely under way, there is much that needs attention: engineering solutions to wetland and levee failures; insurance reform for the many unprotected property owners; evacuation logistics and comprehensive economic development; and, of course, housing and basic infrastructure planning and construction. These are sizable local undertakings for which New Orleans needs and deserves federal assistance.

The destruction of New Orleans revealed fundamental flaws in the way our social contract excludes protection for large segments of the country's cities -- especially black and poor citizens -- and the city's reconstruction holds national significance.

The stages of catastrophic damage to predominantly black areas of New Orleans proceeded from the unexpected to the unthinkable to the unacceptable. First, there was the breaching of the storm walls and rapid flooding; next, the fatal effects of incompetent evacuation planning, followed by the pure misery of the criminally negligent rescue delays and the wrenching and often random dispersal of displaced human beings to 44 different states.

In the collective memory of many black Americans, the images and the experience elicited flashbacks to slavery. For all Americans, the government's incompetent rescue and recovery was a generation's single most profound spectacle of cumulative black disadvantage. For those trapped in the city's poverty, the storm was a metaphor come true: Unable to escape, the waters destroyed their bodies and homes. Shocked, we promised to launch an overdue national discussion on race and class. Yet for so many, silence, and the state of limbo, continues.

The opportunity need not be lost. First, we must recommit ourselves to an understanding of how urban poverty became the nightmare cousin of the American dream.