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In this hard-hitting book, the Lower Ninth Ward - ground zero for Hurricane Katrina - becomes a microcosm of what happens when white actors venture into black spaces for humanitarian aid.
Through vivid vignettes, Harvey exposes how blacks are often hindered in their efforts to rebuild their neighborhoods by seemingly progressive ideas and color-blind urban narratives.
Addressing the failure of disaster and environmental studies to see black communities as agents, the book demonstrates what critical disaster studies can offer for understandings of race, the environment and diversity.
This is a key contribution to debates on race, including the limitations of ‘white allies’ in places like Ferguson, Missouri and in the Black Lives Matter Movement.
"Daina Cheyenne Harvey recounts the drama of reconstruction in New Orleans after the 2005 Katrina disaster and illuminates how white paternalism, privatization and good intentions combined to reproduce a highly unequal city. Disaster and Diversity is required reading, a stern reminder that sympathy and charity are inadequate to the social and ecological challenges of our times. The most dispossessed New Orleanians deserve solidarity, investment and real power." Cedric G. Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago
"Daina Cheyenne Harvey offers a remarkably reflexive, candid, and polemic ethnographic recounting of the unintended consequences of the uninvited, if well-intended, influx of white saviors and volunteers in the Lower Ninth Ward in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, from the vantage point of the long-term residents of the predominantly Black community fighting to rebuild at their own terms. Disaster and Diversity demonstrates how to recognize and put into practice Black imaginaries and ecologies by de-centering whiteness and white cognitive hegemony." Yuki Kato, Georgetown University
"Harvey’s novel approach to Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath— analyzing from the perspective of the Lower Ninth Ward’s Black residents the burdens and possibilities of white migration and influence in the storied neighborhood—upends dominant diversity logics and centers Black people in the narrative of the Lower Ninth’s vast and often violent transformation." Danielle Purifoy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
1. Introduction: “We’re Seeing People We Didn’t Know Existed”
2. The Promises of Diversity: “Where’d All You White People Come From?”
3. The Perils of Diversity
4. Getting Dirty: Race and Risk in the Lower Ninth Ward
5. Disasters of Tomorrow: Against a White Cognitive Hegemony