Although political science provides many useful tools for analyzing
the effects of natural and social catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina
and its aftermath, the scenes of devastation and inequality in New Orleans
suggest an urgent need to adjust our lenses and reorient our research in
ways that will help us to uncover and unpack the roots of this national
travesty. Treated merely as exceptions to the “normal”
functioning of society, dramatic events such as Katrina ought instead to
serve as crucial reminders to scholars and the public that the quest for
racial equality is only a work in progress. New Orleans, we argue, was not
exceptional; it was the product of broader and very typical elements of
American democracy—its ideology, attitudes, and institutions. At the
dawn of the century after “the century of the
color-line,” the hurricane and its aftermath highlight salient
features of inequality in the United States that demand broader inquiry
and that should be incorporated into the analytic frameworks through which
American politics is commonly studied and understood. To this end, we
suggest several ways in which the study of racial and other forms of
inequality might inform the study of U.S. politics writ large, as well as
offer a few ideas about ways in which the study of race might be
re-politicized. To bring race back into the study of politics, we argue
for greater attention to the ways that race intersects with other forms of
inequality, greater attention to political institutions as they embody and
reproduce these inequalities, and a return to the study of power,
particularly its role in the maintenance of ascriptive hierarchies.
