RACIAL APATHY AND HURRICANE KATRINA: The Social Anatomy of Prejudice in the Post-Civil Rights Era

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyrone A. Forman ◽  
Amanda E. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Ignorance ◽  
Post Civil Rights

During the crisis that followed Hurricane Katrina, many Americans expressed surprise at the dramatic levels of racial inequality captured in the images of large numbers of poor Black people left behind in devastated New Orleans. In this article we argue that, to better understand both the parameters of contemporary racial inequality reflected in the hurricane's aftermath and why so many were surprised about the social realities of racial inequality that social scientists have known about for decades, it is essential to recognize the shifting nature of Whites' racial attitudes and understandings. There is widespread evidence that in the post-civil rights era the expression of White racial prejudice has changed. In fact, during the post-civil rights era subtle and indirect forms of prejudice have become more central to the sustenance and perpetuation of racial inequality than are overt forms of prejudice. We draw on both survey and qualitative data to investigate current manifestations of White racial attitudes and prejudices. Our results indicate that racial apathy, indifference towards racial and ethnic inequality, is a relatively new but expanding form of racial prejudice. We further show that Whites' systematic “not knowing” about racial inequality (White ignorance), which was manifest in the reaction to the crises after Hurricane Katrina, is related to this racial indifference. Racial apathy and White ignorance (i.e., not caring and not knowing) are extensions of hegemonic color-blind discourses (i.e., not seeing race). These phenomena serve as pillars of contemporary racial inequality that have until now received little attention. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and the practical implications of our results for understanding racial dynamics in the post-Katrina United States.

“Katrina is the Mother We Will Remember Until the Next Mother”

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-90
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Division

This chapter analyzes representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American literature to argue that the storm served to illustrate the entrenchment of structural racism and the importance of a specifically racialized tradition in African American literature. Adopting the theoretical framework of “slow violence,” the chapter analyzes two novels which depict both the storm and its aftermath: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Kiese Laymon’sLong Division (2013). In the context of the early twenty-first century, these representations of Katrina do not displace the social advancements of African Americans but instead force recognition of the incompleteness not only of specific political battles but also of ongoing race, gender, and class-based narratives, thereby questioning the optimism of a rhetoric of post-Blackness. In particular, the novels establish continuity between Civil Rights Era traumas and struggles and Hurricane Katrina to push against a rhetoric focused on the transcendence of the past.

Movin’ on Up—and Out

2019 ◽  
pp. 94-118
Author(s):  
Courtney R. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black America ◽  
Visual Politics ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Popular Images ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This chapter discusses the visual culture of 1970s Black America, focusing especially on popular culture artifacts such as film, television, and comics, to make sense of the idea of movement in the postsegregationist United States. It attends to the representation of black people in various locations—from the inner city to the suburbs to a historical memory of the plantation slavery, the middle passage, and an African motherland—in visual forms, including Afrocentrist iconography, photography, and fine art. By attending to popular images, an important if not fuller picture of Black visual politics during the post-civil rights era becomes apparent.

Afterword

Neo-Passing ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Elam
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post Civil Rights

The afterword argues that so-called neo-passing narratives distinctively highlight the performative dimension to racial formation and are, moreover, particularly attentive to the social and political consequences of race. This essay argues that the desire for passing to be a phenomenon of the past can be problematic in that it wills away the social insights afforded by cultural and literary narratives of passing in the post–Civil Rights era.

EMBEDDING THE COLOR LINE: The Accumulation of Racial Advantage and the Disaccumulation of Opportunity in Post-Civil Rights America

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Brown ◽  
David Wellman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This article investigates why deeply entrenched racial inequality persists into the post-civil rights era in the United States. It challenges individual-level explanations that assume persistent racial inequality is the result of either White bigotry, which is diminishing, or the failure of Blacks to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. We propose an alternative explanation for durable racial inequality. Contemporary color lines, we argue, result from the cumulative effect of racial discrimination and exclusion, a process in which Whites accumulate racial advantages to the detriment of African Americans and Latinos. These cumulative inequalities are produced and sustained by competition between racial groups to acquire and control jobs and other resources, and by institutional practices and public policies. Individual choice in the form of intentional racism has little to do with the persistence of racial inequality. Our analysis suggests that Americans' current understanding of the concept of equality of opportunity is out of sync with the realities of durable racial inequality, and needs to be revised.

Unruly Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 291-308
Author(s):  
Randolph Hohle
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
State Response ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Outcomes ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This chapter outlines a methodological approach to studying the body and embodiment in political and historical sociology. The advantage of incorporating the body into the study of political and historical sociology is that it captures how the body exerts causal effects on political outcomes. In particular, it will show how embodiment explains (1) the importance of affect on the formation of political knowledge, (2) how bodies produce meanings independent of their original construct and persist after the social group dissolves, and (3) a specific connection point between mobilization and the state response to the social movement. To illustrate, this chapter shows how the racially threatening embodied performance was both vital to the Black Panther Party’s success and served as the focal point for elite white and state actors to mobilize against racial equality in the post–civil rights era.

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