Politics & Power Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol isn’t describing a natural disaster so much as indicting a social arrangement that treated one as inevitable. By stacking clauses - “least help,” “rescued last or not at all” - he turns bureaucracy into a moral timeline: who gets saved first is who counts first. The line reads like a prosecutor’s brief, but its power comes from the phrasing that refuses euphemism. “Overwhelmingly people of color” is blunt, almost clinical, and then he lands the real accusation: these Americans were “largely hidden from the mainstream of society.” Hidden isn’t accidental; it’s the product of segregation, poverty, and a media ecosystem that can go years without looking directly at the people it’s supposedly serving.

The specific intent is to reframe Katrina away from the comforting story of a city overwhelmed by weather and toward the uncomfortable story of a nation comfortable with abandonment. Kozol’s subtext is that the government response didn’t merely fail; it revealed what had already been decided about whose lives are administratively urgent. The mention of “mainstream” is doing double duty: it calls out policy neglect and cultural neglect, the way certain neighborhoods, accents, and skin tones are treated as peripheral until tragedy forces them onto television screens.

Context matters here: post-Katrina, images of mostly Black residents stranded at the Superdome and on rooftops collided with official language about “looting” and “refugees,” exposing racialized assumptions in real time. Kozol, long associated with documenting structural inequality, uses Katrina as a clarifying event - not an exception, but a high-definition snapshot of a hierarchy that usually stays just out of frame.