Abstract
The role that dominant cultural themes play in our understanding of danger becomes clearer as we look back on Katrina and the public discourse that followed it. A natural catastrophe, the discourse that followed it emphasized the Bush administration’s lack of preparedness for catastrophe and the role that FEMA played. Some brief consideration was given to the racial injustices Katrina exposed, but these themes soon disappeared from the mainstream media, which themselves became complicit in a subtle form of racism. In a broader sense, the role that a messianic vision of America— even on the part of some on the left—may have played in both the lack of preparation and the rescue efforts following the storm was neglected.
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Notes
For a discussion of the two problems of evil, see William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 1–15.
Jonathan Freedland, “The Levee Will Break,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/07/hurricanekatrina.usa9 (last accessed September 7, 2005).
See, for instance, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002520986_katmyth26.html (last accessed September 25, 2005).
Jaime Yassin, “Demonizing the Victims of Katrina,” http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2793 (last accessed November/December 2005).
See Derrick Jackson, “Road Racism,” Boston Globe, January 8, 2003.
This point and the subsequent discussion of slavery are indebted to Peter Kolchin’s American Slavery: 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003).
Robert Marcus ed., American Firsthand: Readings from Settlement to Reconstruction, (New York City: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2004), p. 311.
James Morone, Hellfire Nation; The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
The classic statement on this is Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941, 1964), volume I.
Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 82.
Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 212–213.
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), xiii and 118.
E. J. Dionne, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 185–186.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html?scp=2& sq=Rosa%20Parks&st=cse.
Cornel West, Observer, Sunday, September 11, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/11/hurricanekatrina.comment.
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© 2011 John Buell
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Buell, J. (2011). Katrina, Rosa Parks, and the Color of Good and Evil. In: Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339231_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339231_3
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