The Problem Of Social Class

A modern-day study being done about the racial discrimination that was brought upon thousands of families during Hurricane Katrina is now in the limelight and takes a specific look at the way certain people perceive this notion of racism. The arguments that are being considered examine the past reports of Black and White participants regarding racial differences and their perceptions of the racial inequality following Hurricane Katrina. The participants for this investigation were asked whether or not the United States government would have provided aid and responded faster to different socio-economic and racial groups during the hurricane. According to de la Peña et al. (2010), a higher percentage of White participants said that socio-economic status is more important, while Blacks relied on race more. Additionally, more White participants believed that the slow government response effort was not influenced by race and/or socio-economic status of the victims. Although there is a contention between the two races, there is a higher percentage of agreement when concerning discrimination altogether.

Social neglect is one of the causes that are responsible for the deaths in her community. Throughout Ward’s memoir she explains how her community was constantly neglected economically and socially which impacted the citizens. “They gave the violence of New Orleans many names” (4). New Orleans is a symbol for social neglect and represents the process of racism. The city is branded a violent place because of the supposable threats made against White people. All of the blame is automatically put onto black people as they are constantly stereotyped to be responsible for all the problems. All the stereotypes eventually evolve into discrimination as people of color are given unfair advantages, which resulted in racism. The social neglect also affected other individuals socially. “It’s not uncommon for young Black men to drop out here” (26). Social neglect also affected young black men especially since they were never given the hope or

Hurricane Katrina was a devastating disaster that has affected many people in New Orleans. The communication broke down hours after Katrina because of the unexpected fast winds and floods that broke down “3 million phone lines and 1,000 cellular towers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.”( Joch ). Because of the millions of phone lines that were broken down, contacting the government for help was difficult hours after hurricane Katrina. Not only that, the people of New Orleans underestimated the power of Hurricane Katrina causing many to be “ stranded with no food or water” (Narrator, “The Storm”,PBS).

Hurricane Katrina was a devastating disaster that has affected many people in New Orleans as well as the surrounding areas. It had a stunning “death toll of 1300 people and damage over $100 billion ”( Davlasheridze 94 ). The communication were taken down hours after Katrina because of the unexpected fast winds and floods that broke down “3 million phone lines and 1,000 cellular towers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.”( Joch ). Because of the millions of phone lines that were battered, contacting the government for help was difficult hours after hurricane Katrina. Not only that, the people of New Orleans underestimated the power of Hurricane Katrina causing many to be “ stranded with no food or water” ( Narrator, “The Storm”,PBS ).

In December of 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, tearing through the levee systems, and resulting in massive flooding that eventually covered 80% of New Orleans (1), leading to the most significant number of deaths by the storm. As images of Hurricane Katrina were displayed on front pages and television sets across the counry, Katrina became a strategic research site for sociological theory and research of how identity shapes a natural disaster (1). In this essay, I want to explore the fate of New Orleans. How will climate change affect human populations and which human populations will it affect? To do this, I will need to review both scientific and socially scientific papers to understand what the future of New Orleans and southern Louisiana will look like. Though this concept is technically broad for the limitations of this paper, I will review several pieces of literature to begin to gain an understanding of the social and ecological situations at play.

As Hurricane Katrina ravaged the South and drowned large parts of New Orleans this past September, the ugly reality of our nation's continuing problem with class, poverty, and race became apparent. Many Americans began to question the possibility of racism being a deciding factor in the fate of many New Orleans citizens who were black and who lived in the poorest, most low-lying portion of the city, the Ninth Ward. Many, including First Lady Laura Bush, denounce critics who say race played a role in the federal government's slow response to the victims of Katrina. While it is possible that the government's slow response to the disaster was not directly due to racism, there are many unanswered questions suggesting the protection of the city

In this paper I read the Essay that Abe Louise Young wrote about “The Voice of Katrina Part One”. In this Essay at its core is about Hurricane Katrina, which was a massive hurricane that hit in 2005. It caused massive damage and destruction along the Gulf coast from Florida to Texas. Hurricane Katrina will always be remembered for hitting New Orleans, Louisiana, when the levee system failed leaving 80% of the city flooded and destroyed. Hitting the worst parts of New Orleans such as the 9th ward, already being one of the poorest areas in Mississippi. Much of the Essay talks about the people of New Orleans, Abe being a new graduate started Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History and Memory Project, her goal she state’s is to

Hurricane Katrina struck the city of New Orleans, Louisiana on August 29th, 2005. The events that followed would leave the whole nation in shock until this day. One of the major topics of discussion after this disaster was whether or not the government's slow reaction time had anything to do with the fact that New Orleans is sixty-seven percent African American. As helicopters circled a wasteland that was once a major tourist attraction, the racism of the Deep South, thought to be extinct, proved it was only dormant. The same racism against African Americans that could be seen on Bourbon Street in the months prior to the hurricane reared its ugly head once more in Gretna, LA and was pointed out on live television by rapper Kanye West.

Prior to Katrina, New Orleans focused on a “levees only” to uphold a tight flood infrastructure system. However, Katrina was a force too powerful and destroyed these levees, affecting the communities around them. In terms of culture and race, the population of the lower socioeconomic class were pushed into poverty and driven out of their homes; to further illustrate, African Americans were a class that became the most exposed to high levels of risk and was depicted as criminals on press. On Yahoo News, two pictures have two different connotations. One says “White People ‘FIND’” and the other says “Black People ‘LOOT.’” The mainstream press coverage then views stranded whites as good citizens.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in late August of 2005, it not only destroyed the city, but unraveled the ties that held the society together. Tens of thousands of people were forced out of their homes, bound to find a means of survival on their own. Relationships they had previously formed, social constants they had grown accustomed to were thrown out of the window, and laws became irrelevant. Within a matter of days, everything they had known was destroyed, and it became the survival of the fittest and the wealthiest. While this broken society brought out the inner hero in some people, it brought out the chaos and lawlessness in others. Some embraced selflessness and saved hundreds of people, while others turned to looting, shooting,

Past research demonstrates a large racial divide in support of issues with clear racial overtones and we examine the possibility of a racial divide in reactions to Katrina using data from a national telephone survey of white and black Americans. Some find that there is a large different in racial sympthanys for the victims of Hurrican Katrina, how fast the government responded to urgency of attention for the victims, and support for proposed solutions to mend hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, verifying the racial nature of the disaster. Blacks viewed the hurricane victims more positively than did whites, drew a sharper distinction and held more sympathetic feelings for those stranded than evacuated from New Orleans, and were substantially more supportive of government efforts to improve the situation of hurricane victims and rebuild New Orleans. This racial gap is as large as any observed in recent polls, holds up even after controlling for education, income and other possible racial differences, and documents more fully differences that were hinted at in public opinion polls reported at the time of the disaster.

It is pretty poignant, yet honest to say that the hurricane Katrina has long derived an almost obsessional attention from Natasha writer. In “Beyond Katrina: A meditation of the Mississippi Gulf Coast”, Tretheway has purposely pictured the devastation scenario from witnesses’ narratives; hence her story could speak for many stories of people who are less visible, whom we cannot see struggling against the aftermath - the stories we may not know about how tenacious the return of Gulf Coast communities was from those tremendous sufferings they miserably faced up to.

The idea of race has been constructed over hundreds of years, with numerous cultural implications arising from this construction. Since Johann Fredrich Blumenbach’s racial hierarchy, the inventor of a “…modern racial classification" (Gould 1994:66), the idea of race as a scientific truth justified slavery, colonisation and other existing racial structures. We see these racial hierarchies with notions of white superiority affecting events around the globe everyday; regardless of the fact that race has been proven as a flawed biological concept, with racial categories a result of ‘pseudo science’. The events following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 are evidence of the racist attitudes that linger in our society, institutionally and in everyday life – racism is more than simply individual attitudes, and is embedded in the social structures of society.

The opinion of New Orleans residents regarding how Hurricane Katrina was handled by the government also depends on the resident’s race, class, and gender. Many of the poor urban residents in New Orleans that were the most devastated by Hurricane Katrina were African American (Pardee, 2014). These residents felt that they were forgotten by their government and left to die because they did

In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina vigorously tore apart the U.S. Gulf Coast Region killing at least 1500 people, ranking at the third deadliest hurricane in United States history. Author of Survival and Death in New Orleans, Patrick Sharkey (2007), looked specifically at data on New Orleans residents that perished during Katrina in an attempt to look at the communities that were most affected by this unfortunate disaster. The storm took the largest toll on the elderly population and by African Americans, who he argued were overrepresented in comparison to whites. The toll was not only physical but mentally damaging as well, due to the overwhelming amount of loss to their homes, family members, pets, and childhood neighborhoods in which