In his article "Katrina Thrusts Race and Poverty Onto National Stage," Mark Sandalow explores how the devastating hurricane that smashed into the U.S. Gulf Coast in September revealed the social fault lines that divide America. Sandalow describes how Hurricane Katrina "ripped away barriers that kept one city's poor out of sight and, for most people, out of mind." He questions how America will react to the unprecedented crisis: whether the government will address the underlying causes of the poverty, or whether, like the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, once the crisis passes people will forget about this division.
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 mainstream of middle America and are typically not evangelical Christians; and they are overwhelmingly either Democrats, who are out of favor these days, or non-participants in the political process. Additionally, Weber would have noted that the slow government reaction to the Katrina crisis showed the over-bureaucratization of the government entities, such as FEMA, that are set up to handle these situations. In Weber's analysis, as bureaucracies mature they tend...