Talking about race and class in America has never been easy. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina provides an opportunity to renew the American conversation on this subject—a challenging agenda for our society today. “It’s very hard to pierce through the public consciousness and to do a sustained public education campaign in the absence of some great conflict,” President Clinton observed when launching his Panel on Race. Hurricane Katrina pierced public consciousness in ways that, however painful and disturbing, provide an opening for dialogues central to democratic citizenship. This curriculum, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and created by educators from Teachers College, Columbia University, takes the HBO Documentary Film Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, as both impetus, touchstone and text for democratic dialogues in schools, colleges, and community organizations. The images and voices in Lee’s film, some from news coverage of the hurricane, may be hard to reconcile with many Americans’ ideas of their nation. These voices and images compel us to ask: “What kind of country are we? What kind of country do we want to be?”
The national experience of Hurricane Katrina was, like that of September 11th, a visceral one. Round-the-clock news coverage kept an unbelieving American public tied to television sets. All that we have learned about this tragedy since it occurred has confirmed what many Americans concluded after watching live coverage of the storm: the meteorological event, however terrible, was not the heart of the story. TV viewers in the US (and elsewhere) saw the inability of US public officials and organizations to recognize and take responsibility for an impending disaster; revelations of previously ignored American calamities; and an unconscionable failure to provide victims of the storm’s fury with real remedies for their plight.
