Customer Reviews

What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation

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This book is notable in that some of it was written by those who lived through Katrina, mostly social justice activists. In that, it gives unique perspectives not found elsewhere. The parts that are not voices from the ground often speak very intelligently to the connections between race and the disaster, even if they do not benefit from a first-hand understanding.

However what is really missing is a historical understanding of the city and what got us to this point of vulnerability. Katrina isn't surprising given the history of New Orleans and was not an isolated event. It is the culmination of decades of decline and disregard, particularly an abandonment by the federal government, developments which are hardly unique to New Orleans. The introduction by Kalamu Ya Salaam (the best part of the book) begins to describe this, but sadly many of the other writers, while writing eloquently about race, miss some of the larger dimensions of other structural changes.