Erica Chito Childs's article “Looking Behind the Stereotypes of the ‘Angry Black Woman’,” published in Gender and Society in 2005, represents an important empirical contribution to studies of interracial intimacy. Black women's voices are routinely marginalized during analyses of interracial dating, and, worse, their real-life experiences and first-person interpretations are replaced by demeaning, racist stereotypes of angry Black womanhood. Childs recognizes this tradition and acts to interrupt the cycle of Black female marginalization and insult through situating Black women in context and presenting their narratives with little interruption and interpretation.

Response to Hurricane Katrina and public commentary by high-profile individuals has made race a focus in the media and brought racial inequality to the attention of people in the United States. Analyzing responses to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I find that, even after this very public event that brought race to the forefront in the U.S., people relied on the ideologies of meritocracy and color blindness to rationalize inequality. Findings of how the myth of meritocracy is utilized, along with how people argue against it, can be used to keep race at the forefront of the nation's attention while furthering discussions of inequality. The academic community is challenged to keep the voices of alternative ideologies in the spotlight and to use the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to create change.

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.

Few Black women are tenured faculty in academia, and the statistics are quite stunning. The Almanac of the Chronicle of Higher Education (2004–2005) shows that, in 2001, 1% of all faculty at the rank of professor were Black females—only 5% of all females at that rank. The numbers are only slightly better for the rank of associate professor, the only other rank where one is likely to be tenured. Of all faculty at the associate professor level, only 2% are Black women; among women at that rank, only 6% are Black. Of assistant professors, 3% are Black females (7.5% of all female faculty at that rank); Black females comprise 8% of female instructors (4% of all faculty at that rank); and 3% of lecturers (5% of all female lecturers).

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.

“Looking Behind the Stereotypes of the ‘Angry Black Woman’: An Exploration of Black Women's Responses to Interracial Relationships,” published in Gender and Society in August 2005, was an effort to bring those voices routinely marginalized or ignored into the debate on contemporary interracial relationships. In 2004, I was writing Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds (2005), the culmination of years of qualitative research on societal responses to interracial relationships and the opposition that still exists toward Black-White relationships in White and Black communities. In my research, as well as previous research on interracial relationships, couples consisting of Black men and White women would recount stories of “angry Black women” who harassed them, “rolled their eyes” at them, and were constructed as a “problem.” These stories are the ones most often heard because most studies of Black-White couples consisted of more Black-man/White-woman couplings, given that they are more common than are Black-women/White-man couplings. Similarly, numerous quantitative studies posit Black women as the least accepting of interracial unions. For my work, I was also analyzing media and film images of interracial unions using films such as Waiting to Exhale (1995) and Jungle Fever (1991), which depict scenes of a group of Black women lamenting the loss of Black men to interracial dating, among other things. From all of these various academic and popular culture sources, the message was clear that Black women are generally opposed to interracial relationships, but very rarely are their own voices actually heard. Instead, at best, their stories have been retold.

This article explores the suffering and resilience of Black women who were impacted by Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005. It also explores the ways in which the pre-existing national discourse on poverty, race, and gender set the stage for victim blaming and the neglect of poor Black women and children after the storm. African American women in the Gulf Coast region are some of the poorest in the nation. Women in general are more vulnerable in times of natural disaster because they are the primary caretakers of the young and the old. These factors and others meant that poor Black women were among those most severely impacted by Hurricane Katrina. They also had minimal resources to cope with the disaster and its aftermath. However, instead of sympathy and support, some conservative pundits have sought to link the suffering caused by Katrina to the lack of patriarchal Black family structures, which they argue could have helped individuals survive in the crisis. Contrary to these stereotypes, many Black women have not only been resilient and self-reliant, but creative and heroic in the face of crisis. It is their stories that offer hope for the future of New Orleans and our nation.

Kathryn Takara's “A View from the Academic Edge” is a commendable effort to speak to the unique problems confronted by Black women in academia. Many of the concerns raised by the author are elaborations of arguments made by other Black feminist intellectuals, who highlight the ways in which race and gender intersect to produce experiences that alienate and stigmatize Black women in academic settings. Takara relies heavily on these previous works at times, which may lead some to ask exactly what her original contribution to this body of knowledge is supposed to be. While she defines her primary focus as “the institutional features of the academy which help to explain the particularly bad situation of Black females in the academy,” the greatest strength of the essay is its attention to forms of racism and exclusion that are both institutional and interpersonal. Though the author does not explicitly make this distinction herself, the coexistence and interdependence of both institutional racism and habitual, interpersonal race/gender-based exclusion is what motivates her to write this piece, and it is the need to address both of these areas that makes the message of “A View from the Academic Edge” valuable.

Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Central Gulf Coast in August 2005, was undoubtedly one of the worst natural disasters to strike the United States in the age of round-the-clock media journalism. Television coverage of Hurricane Katrina brought to the forefront the costs of disadvantage along racial and class lines. Needless to say, the victims left behind were disproportionately African American, elderly, and impoverished residents of the area. While the focus of media discussions centered around whether African Americans were abandoned by governmental agencies or if they were to blame for not heeding the call to evacuate, there was a complete absence of coverage and discussion of Hispanic and Asian American residents of the area, who are also disproportionately poor and many of whom lacked English skills to navigate the little help available to residents. This essay briefly discusses the few newspaper articles that examined these populations; Hispanic and Asian American journalists wrote almost all of these articles. I then examine how the lack of attention to these populations shapes our common understandings of race and why this may be problematic both in the United States and in a global environment.

In Finding Oprah's Roots (2007), featuring Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s search for answers to questions about Black genealogy, Gates explains that one of Oprah's grandfathers stopped his formal schooling at an early age to work on a plantation so that he could help provide an education and opportunity for his sister instead. The grandfather did this in an attempt to protect his sister so that she could escape rape and other forms of gender oppression from both White men and women. Gates's explanation reflects both the way that gender, sexuality, and race defined life in the old South and their consequences for Black life, Black relationships, and Black destinies. This personal sacrifice, in defense of Black women, was commonplace—not at all particular to Oprah Winfrey's family. In fact, John Gwaltney collected several essays of Black men and women describing similar actions in his book Drylongso (1981).

Hurricane Katrina was a horrible tragedy. Rather than reprising the obvious pitfalls of governmental response or the dire consequences of social inequalities, however, I pose a series of questions. In particular, I seek to highlight the blind spots and silences that the media frenzy generated. These range from the fate of the Native Americans and the complexity of New Orleans' racial history to the explanatory adequacy of the dominant narrative and the unreflective premise of the reconstruction effort. The precarious state of nature and civilization demands a way to think and act beyond short-term palliatives.

I'm writing in response to “Can Public Schools Save America? Culture, Race, Academic Achievement, and the American Dream,” a review essay published in the Du Bois Review (Volume 2, no. 1, 2005, pp. 127–136) by James Anderson, which includes a discussion of my book (co-authored with Nathan Scovronick), The American Dream and the Public Schools (2003). We are, of course, very pleased to have the book reviewed in this journal since it is read by many people with whom we would like to discuss these issues. The review, however, distorts our argument in ways that warrant correction.

I want to start with a story from the period of chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina. I am going to present some data as an entry into a brief discussion of how different publics evaluated the disaster, and the implications for how we think about civil society in the United States.

Contributors.

Contributors.