![]() It was the compounded effects of the intersection of race and class inequalities, however, that was brought most visibly to the fore by the national and international media in the days following Katrina. Similarly, the elderly and disabled faced some of the most severe horrors of Katrina, again in part because they constitute a disproportionately high percentage of those who are impoverished, and because too many were simply left to die in the face of rushing water due to the difficulties in rescuing them. Women, many of whom were primary caregivers for their children, were vastly over-represented among those in New Orleans’ shelters, reflecting not only the gendered norms of family relations, but the glaring statistical fact that women in America are more likely to live below the poverty line. Storms and natural disasters such as Katrina always hit marginal groups in society harder than they do other segments. The political roots of race and class inequality in New Orleans In particular, we hope that new attention will be paid to the role of American political institutions in structuring and perpetuating contemporary racial, economic, regional, and gendered inequities. While it is therefore unlikely that public policies in the aftermath of Katrina will resolve these disparities, perhaps the inequalities laid bare by the hurricane will provide a longer-term wake-up call to those who wish to actively build a more fair and meaningful democracy in the United States. But the disparities exposed by Katrina have deep-seated, historical and institutional roots. Were Katrina simply an accident of geography and ecology, we could perhaps be sanguine that its effects might be resolved. ![]() From the voting rights violations of 2000, to the vast disparities in drug laws that have resulted in the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of young African-American and Latino men, to the continued widening of racial and wealth gaps when it comes to finances, education, and health services, the last two decades alone have provided a series of examples that demonstrate the vast inequalities of our democratic system, particularly as they are manifested along racial lines. ![]() Katrina did not create these inequities it simply added an important reminder that they are deeply embedded and constitutive of American political, economic, and social life. has not resolved fundamental domestic disparities and inadequacies. The hurricane made clear, however, that the U.S. Katrina hit the Gulf Coast just as America prepared to mark the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and consequently, the fourth anniversary of the American government’s quest to bring American-style freedom and democracy to other nations. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities.” In the words of New York Times columnist David Brooks, storms like hurricane Katrina “wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. Instead, the consequences of such catastrophes replicate and exacerbate the effects of extant inequalities, and often bring into stark relief the importance of political institutions, processes, ideologies, and norms. Hurricanes may not single out victims by their race, class, or gender, but neither do such disasters occur in historical, political, social, or economic vacuums. In the public imagination, natural disasters do not discriminate, but are instead “equal opportunity” calamities.
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