48 Public Administration Review • December 2007 • Special Issue Does racism ever shape the way public administrators make decisions? Te story of Hurricane Katrina is an opportunity to consider this neglected question. Discrimi- natory government policies and processes over decades ensured that African Americans were disproportionately harmed by the storm and its aftermath. In contrast to the literature on bureaucratic discretion, when the crisis came, administrators at all levels chose to take refuge in regulations rather than act creatively to save lives and reduce misery. Images of desperate black New Orleanians juxtaposed with massive government failures raise, even for skeptical observers, issues of race and racism that must no longer be ignored. Te essay urges that we explore the extent to which “masked” racism affects the practice of public administration. Te Impartial Administration of Justice is the Foundation of Liberty. —Inscription on the Orleans Parish Courthouse You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals … so many of these people … are so poor and they are so black. —Wolf Blitzer, CNN, September 1, 2005 I t is impossible to explain the past fully. Te mean- ing of an event exceeds the possible causes we might want to assign to it. “Reckoning with con- sequences” is an inadequate means of coming to terms with a catastrophe (Arendt 1958, 300). Understand- ing, if it comes at all, will come from “dissolving the known into the unknown”: making the event strange enough, through reflection, to see it with new eyes (Arendt 1953, 382). Tinking in public administration relies heavily on reckoning with consequences. Such thought patterns are typical in emergency management, disaster plan- ning, and risk assessment, as in other areas of gover- nance. Te goals of reducing risk and increasing the effectiveness of government’s response to disasters cannot be faulted. But means–ends calculations fall short in the face of actual events. It is now clear that a significant hurricane strike on New Orleans was not unforeseen. Te specter of “Te Big One” had loomed large for years among elected officials and administrators. Hurricane-related disaster plans from the federal government took up several feet of shelf space in state and local offices. “Nobody ever actually reads them,” commented the emergency director for Plaquemines Parish (Cooper and Block 2006, 5). In the aftermath, policy analysts have deemed Hur- ricane Katrina a “low probability, high consequence event”: not totally unanticipated but difficult, in the abstract, to justify spending huge sums to reduce or mitigate its effects (Von Winterfeldt 2006). Te storm may not have been unpredicted, but the real event overwhelmed the operations of modern reason, both before and after. Following Arendt, in order to come to terms with Katrina we must turn, for a moment, from reason to understanding. To make the Katrina story at least temporarily strange, this essay focuses on a neglected factor in public administration: the significance of race. Te interpretation builds on Alexander (1997) and Witt (2006). Both argue that public administra- tion scholarship avoids the issue of race, and they explore the consequences of that avoidance. 1 Alexa- nder notes the heavy reliance on law, professional norms, and prevailing community sentiment to pro- mote responsible administrative action. She points out that scholarly discussions ignore the possibility that any of these guides might be tainted with racist values, assumptions, or practices. Witt argues that, although it is ignored in the literature, race is a “tragic harbin- ger” that continues to shape public administration in theory and practice (2006, 37). Te responsibility issue that Alexander discusses is one facet of a larger stream of work on administrative Camilla Stivers Cleveland State University “So Poor and So Black”: Hurricane Katrina, Public Administration, and the Issue of Race Camilla Stivers is a Professor and Distinguished Scholar of Public Administration in the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University. She is the author of Governance in Dark Times: Practical Philosophy for Public Service (forthcoming from Georgetown University Press) and several other books. She is a former associate editor of Public Administration Review and spent 20 years working as a practicing administrator in the nonprofit sector. E-mail: camilla@urban.csuohio.edu Part I—The Setting: Roots of Administrative Failure