The worst national disaster in United States history also
showcased the dire consequences of localism as the cultural and
legal successor to de jure segregation. Long before Hurricanes
Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast, New Orleans’ status
as an exceptional city had been lost to Americanizing trends.
Its resistance to the conventional racial binary was overcome
after Reconstruction; its unique densities and accommodation of
the physical landscape were transformed into sprawling divisions
by technology and suburbanization. From the Brown decision
forward, New Orleans and the metropolitan area around it
developed much like the rest of the nation. Localist tendencies
combined with legal protections for local autonomy—as
exemplified and supported by several key decisions of the Burger
Court—to re-segregate the region. A decade before Katrina, New
Orleans, like most central cities, was financially incapable of
deconcentrating neighborhoods of persistent poverty and
politically powerless to wrest a more eq