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By Kenyon DeVault
Palo Alto, California
Humanities, Media and
Cultural Studies
Editor's Note: Professor Leola Johnson teaches Blackness in the Media, which during the fall semester looked exclusively at how the media covered Hurricane Katrina. Below is an excerpt from Kenyon DeVault's final paper that was presented at an all-campus symposium.
The repercussions of Hurricane Katrina are still being felt in American culture. The media pride themselves on their coverage of the hurricane and for their refusal to accept the administration's excuses for the failings of the disaster relief. However, the media are generally uncritical of themselves, remaining silent on the implications of the images they produce. In particular, a special edition of National Geographic, published a few weeks after the hurricane, portrayed African Americans like people from a third-world country, bereft of social and cultural context.
 Pictures showed wailing persons being airlifted out of the city, crowds shoving for shelter and scrambling for supplies, women wailing in overcrowded and filthy streets. The effect was quite literally otherworldly, resembling more a post-apocalyptic film like Mad Max than typical scenes of the urban American South. While the photos did not only depict black subjects (white people were in about a third of them), they depicted the black subjects exclusively out of context of their 'normal' lives. Several photos of white people depicted them in the process of reconstruction, digging through rubble, policing the streets, and, in one image, ignoring the chaos around them and returning to the previous pastime of sitting out on the veranda. While blackness was portrayed in the midst of turmoil and trauma, whiteness was represented as the agent of renewal and recovery.
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