The Hurricane Katrina Disaster

The events that are described by this article would come as no surprise to Max Weber and Karl Marx. Max Weber believed that in a capitalist society, an individual's future chances were the direct result of their placement in his three-component theory of stratification. This theory held that an individual's social class (their economic relationship to the market), their status class (social relationships such as honor, prestige, and religion) and their party class (political affiliation) determined their placement in society and their relationship to the ruling class. The depths of poverty revealed by Katrina in New Orleans are a clear example of the poor black citizens' of New Orleans placement in this stratification. These people are at the very bottom of all three classes: they are either unemployed or hold low wage jobs; they are outside the cultural ma

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"This is an important moment,'' said William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who has written extensively on race and poverty. Were it not for the natural disaster, "the tendency would be to question why 'those people' don't get their act together. The tendency would be to focus on individual shortcomings,'' Wilson said. "Katrina was an outside force everyone understands. There was great sympathy for the victims. (Americans) don't usually have the same feelings of sympathy or empathy if you just focus on the conditions of poverty in urban areas.'' As another storm barrels toward the Gulf Coast, there are already signs of lessons learned. Hundreds of buses have evacuated residents of Galveston, Texas, too poor to afford their own cars or transportation, a precautionary measure New Orleans didn't take. Yet it remains a question whether New Orleans' calamity will become a turning point in the nation's attitude toward its urban poor, or another fleeting moment of concern. Riots in Detroit, Newark and Watts in the 1960s and the post-Rodney King riots in 1992 prompted a similar outcry to remake the inner city, but little action. "One can always hope, but I worry this will be a repeat of
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Approximate Word count = 1793
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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