Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T02:22:45.687Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

UNEARTHING IGNORANCE: Hurricane Katrina and the Re-Envisioning of the Urban Black Poor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2006

Alford A. Young
Alford A. Young
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay explores some social ramifications of two portraits of low-income African American New Orleanians that proliferated throughout the country since the arrival of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. The dissemination of these portraits reveals much about America's cultural understandings of African Americans and urban poverty. Some recent ethnographic and qualitative-methodological work has striven to create new depictions of this constituency, but a divide persists between general-public readings of the African American urban poor and those of liberal-minded field researchers who have studied this population. This essay concludes with some reflection on issues concerning the potential for this research to bridge the divide, given the power of mainstream media outlets to construct and promote certain images of disadvantaged and disenfranchised social groups relative to the social power of academic scholarship to achieve the same end.

Keywords

PovertyAfrican AmericansUnderclassPerceptions
Type
STATE OF THE DISCOURSE
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 203 - 213
Copyright
© 2006 W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

ABC News (2005). Katrina Aftermath Raises Questions of Race, September 2. 〈http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/print?id=1089382)〉 (accessed May 17, 2006).
Anderson, Elijah (1990). Streetwise: Race, class, and change in an urban community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Anderson, Elijah (1999). Code of the streets. New York: W.W. Norton.
Aponte, Robert (1990). Definitions of the underclass: A critical analysis. In Herbert Gans (Ed.), Sociology in America, pp. 117–137. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Auletta, Ken (1982). The Underclass. New York: Random House.
BBC (2005). New Orleans violence “overstated,” September 29. 〈http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4292114.stm〉 (accessed May 17, 2006).
Billson, Janet Mancini (1996). Pathways to Manhood: Young Black Males' Struggle for Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
CNN (2005). Gallery: Katrina brings destruction, August 30. 〈http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/29/hurricane.katrina/index.html〉 (accessed May 19, 2006).
Daily Kos (2005). Put the Niggers in the Superdome: Part II, August 30. 〈http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2005/8/30/20833/9811/346#346〉 (accessed May 17, 2006).
Gans, Herbert (1995). The War against the Poor: The Underclass and Anti-poverty Policy. New York: Basic Books.
Glasgow, Douglas G. (1981). The Black Underclass: Poverty, Unemployment and Entrapment of Ghetto Youth. New York: Random House, Inc.
Gregory, Steven (1998). Black corona. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hannerz, Ulf (1969). Soulside. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Hochschild, Jennifer (1995). Facing up to the American Dream. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jackson, John L., Jr. (2001). Harlemworld: Doing race and class in contemporary black America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRef
Katz, Michael B. (1989a). The Underclass Debate: Views from History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Katz, Michael B. (1989b). The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. New York: Pantheon.
Lemann, Nicholas (1986). The Origins of the Underclass. Atlantic Monthly, 257(June): 31–61.Google Scholar
Liebow, Eliot (1967). Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. Boston, MA: Little Brown.
Majors, Richard G. and Janet Billson (1992). Cool Pose. New York: Lexington Books.
Newman, Katherine S. (1999). No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. New York: Alfred Knopf and the Russell Sage Foundation.
Patillo-McCoy, Mary (1999). Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Newsweek (2005). Special Report. September 19, pp. 26–38; 40–53.
Rainwater, Lee (1970). Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum. Hawthorne, New York: Aldine Publishing Company.
Schulz, David (1969). Coming up Black: Patterns of Ghetto Socialization. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Venkatesh, Sudhir Alladi (2000). American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, William Julius (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Young, Alford A., Jr. (2004). The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.