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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
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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

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References

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