David Dante Troutt

AFTER THE STORM
Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (2006)
By David Dante Troutt

The hurricane that inundated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August 2005 was devastating in innumerable ways, but to students of race in America President Bush’s call for a national dialogue on race and class seemed suspicious. This collection of essays by some of the country’s most thoughtful minds was offered as a contribution to that discussion, short-lived as it turned out to be. There were at least two sets of profoundly difficult problems set off by this singular historical event: the challenges for people destroyed, disrupted and displaced by Katrina and the challenges for the rest of us to see how much of ourselves was revealed by the disaster. After the Storm attempted to speak constructively primarily to the latter; few of us could claim a direct connection to the losses.

So, the collection speaks to what Katrina revealed about American cities and their suburban surroundings, the racialization of land and risk that so often, particularly in New Orleans, predicts the imbalance of hardships when the big one comes. The essays struggle to put the storm in historical context, revealing that migration is not merely some distant notion in the experience of American blacks; they interrogate the politics or race and power; they wrestle with the need for remedies when the law—both American and international human rights—provide so few. Importantly, and in the long tradition of black intellectual thought in America, they challenge the conventional conceptions of what happened, how it was framed, the lasting meanings such framing intentionally and unintentionally endorsed, and what they may mean for how a culture reads this tragedy in the future. Finally, the essays are constructive yet not afraid to expose the shame and the anger naturally connected to the suffering of so many.