Here follows a paragraph from Michael Eric Dyson's upcoming book on Katrina, 'Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina And the Color of Disaster'. Even the title is annoying, but dig this:
The black-white racial paradigm was also pressured by an enduring question among social analysts that was revived in the face of Katrina: is it race or class that determines the fate of poor blacks? Critics came down on either side during the crisis, but in this case, that might equate to six in one hand, half a dozen in the other. It is true that class is often overlooked to explain social reality. Ironically, it is often a subject broached by the acid conservatives who want to avoid confronting race, and who become raging parodies of Marxists in the bargain. They are only concerned about class to deflect race; they have little interest in unpacking the dynamics of class or engaging its deforming influence in the social scene. In this instance, race becomes a marker for class, a proxy, blurring and bending the boundaries that segregate them.
Aside from being a strawman argument, it's also insulting to black conservatives, and shows the basic flaw in Dyson's approach - that we're all crazy and in denial. I'm sure I'm going to have to track through a painful reading if the book blows up, but I'm trying not to. I have to admit that I haven't been by P6 to see the reaction (if any) to this colorizing of the disaster, but I'm very interested to see how new or relevant the complaint might be other than you generic 'America catches cold, blacks get the flu' argument. That is because the de-blackification that is happening to New Orleans (and evidently out of Nagin's hide - more on that later) is happening precisely because the social difference and distance between displaced blacks from NO and their recieving communities is minimal.
So to state the obvious, it is both race and class that determines the fate of poor blacks. But poor blacks are more like poor whites than they are like middle-class blacks, which is why Cosby is so electrifying at all. America is really catching on to this because of the reality of middle class black social capital. Dyson will continue to rant that the rest of the world isn't paying enough attention to color, his problem is that we actually have a better perspective.
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