How Whiteness tells the Story of Katrina 10 Years Later
Malcolm Gladwell’s essay on New Orleans ten years after Hurricane Katrina is but one of the many narratives that center whiteness as the protagonist of the city during and after Katrina. The purchase this essay has by virtue of its publication in a nationally renowned news, politics and culture magazine holds lessons not just about how whiteness craves and tells the story of black vulnerability but the fertile reception there is still for this mythic rendition. Whiteness is a default for white people as the referent for intelligence, beauty and objective truth. It operates by naming these explicitly. But it also works, arguably far more impactfully, by implicitly communicating white ideals not as specific but simply the norm, barely uttering it. Gladwell’s essay, “Starting Over,” is an abject lesson in this overt naming and whispering.
Gladwell begins his essay through the perspective of a phenotypically white sociologist, an outsider to the city. Gladwell names this person, qualifies him as an expert sociologist through his pedigreed institution, and includes quotes from this man about his take on being a newcomer to the city after Katrina. Why would the first move to discussing New Orleans be to position a white transplant first? Answer: whiteness. By framing this essay on the effects of Katrina on what is widely known as the Blackest city in the United States, Gladwell basically pulls the same whiteness move that launched Orange is the New Black, and countless other works of fiction and nonfiction. The sociologist here is parallel to white upper class Piper in the TV series; we have to know her first to then know racially minoritized characters. It must have seemed impossible to tell the story of the city through the eyes and perspectives of the city’s thousands of current and former Black residents, residents who emphatically do not use the words “random” and “natural” to describe the breaking of the levees, as Gladwell does. In fact, the only instances in which readers hear from Black New Orleanians, they are filtered through Gladwell’s sampling of research done by social scientists that he takes the time first label as social scientists. It is an egregious erasure through layered annotating.
Gladwell samples from published studies and available data while making sweeping statements about social science that work to erroneously delimit what social science is and benefit inquiries that play fast and loose with how context operates on large and small scales. Several of Gladwell’s statements stand out in this way:
“If a group of poor Americans are stuck in a bad place, then either the place they are stuck in needs to be improved or they need to move to a better place.”
In this statement, Gladwell, purportedly works from the premise of the social science he’s chosen to represent as Science with a capital S. It starts its analysis of generational poverty by erasing the generational, policy-created and durable nature of poverty. While that is itself reason enough to dismiss this statement, which acts as the basic thesis of the essay, it is deeply troubling to continue reading the details of this thesis exploration with the slimmest grasp of U.S. history and its ongoing investment in the investment in attempting to contain and limit Black life. This superficial analysis relies on a claim made early in the essay that it’s not so much national policies (e.g., minimum wage laws, housing policies, healthcare) but just the specific neighborhood you might find yourself in that determines “how you turn out.”
Pardon the blinding flash of the obvious here, but neighborhoods do not spontaneously form themselves. Particularly in an era of unprecedented housing inequality, gentrification, and 2nd and 3rd generations of white flight, such a simplistic claim erases systemic structures of policy, culture, and ideology. It also woefully misses the complex relationship between municipal policies, national policies, and cultural practices. Gladwell facilitates this by consistently using Social Science in big pronouncements. This is the view of systemic vulnerabilization through the lens of whiteness: it begins the story in the current moment, whittles away the structures that have shaped that moment and then poses irresponsible research questions about choice, preference, and better offness. And yet, Gladwell surreptitiously bolsters this as science by noting the scholars he represents through their institutional affiliations and making absolutely false statements such all social scientists seeing “a major move” as a “good thing.” All while ignoring the tradition of equally impactful sociologists, such as W.E.B. duBois, who insisted on reversing the gaze of social science from pathology to structural analysis.
Echoing the choice Gladwell makes to introduce New Orleans after Katrina through the eyes of a white man who is an outsider to the community, Gladwell then introduces the complexity of the education system through experiences of charter personnel. The nation’s first successful private erasure of public schooling is again erased as Gladwell tells the tale of the ways that the adults and children involved in this private charter school worked to reform the school. Gladwell tells the story of education in NOLA through the subtle moves of whiteness. He notes that following Katrina, “all the How Whiteness tells the Story of Katrina 10 Years Later | Decolonizing educational research:
