Come Hell or High Water by Micheal Eric Dyson

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Come Hell or High Water by Micheal Eric Dyson Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Micheal Eric Dyson poses a challenge to America’s political culture and structure. The winds of Hurricane Katrina completely exposed the dark side of America's race and class in contemporary. Michael Eric Dyson’s thunderous and thorough analysis reveals that decades of government policies and errors in racial treatment even long before Katrina hit. The initial chapter, “Unnatural Disasters” describes the concentrated levels of poverty in the Gulf States in general and New Orleans in particular. Rather than place the blame at the feet of the poor, the author demonstrates how federal and local governments aided in cutting off persons from decent housing, economic and educational opportunities with legalized segregation and planned metropolitan expansion that sought to ensconce the poor in the shadows of southern society. This intensified the poverty as a whole to the point where it then became the highest ranked poverty are in the nation. Dyson points out that this nation’s willful ignorance and naivety concerning its poorer and disproportionately darker citizens is disturbingly sad and dissapointing. The second and third chapters, “Does George W. Bush Care About Black People?” and “The Politics of Disaster,” focus directly on toward the “rhythms, relations, and rules of race” that informed the federal government’s response to Katrina, or lack thereof, and the anemic structuring of FEMA that has been embattled by a history of what the author refers to as “a combination of cronyism, politicization, inexperience and incompetence” respectively. According to Dyson, Katrina uncovered a culture of “passive indifference” to the problems plaguing poor black folk that as a matter of consequence is indistinguishable from “active malice.”

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