IF WE FORGET or Turn Away...

Michael Eric Dyson concludes his book Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster with the following warning:

The only way Katrina can be kept from becoming a passing moment of self-reflection along the national path to even more carnage is if we continue to tell the truth about poverty, race, class, environment, government, the media, and our culture. Memory warfare pits us against the forces of cultural, racial, and class amnesia.... If we forget, then poor people of color become little more than fodder for the imperial imagination of a nation that has exploited them and thrown them away. God forbid we count ourselves in that number (p. 212).