Charleston
Race, Water, and the Coming Storm
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An unflinching look at a beautiful, endangered, tourist-pummeled, and history-filled American city.
At least thirteen million Americans will have to move away from American coasts in the coming decades, as rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms put lives at risk and cause billions of dollars in damages. In Charleston, South Carolina, denial, boosterism, widespread development, and public complacency about racial issues compound; the city, like our country, has no plan to protect its most vulnerable. In these pages, Susan Crawford tells the story of a city that has played a central role in America's painful racial history for centuries and now, as the waters rise, stands at the intersection of climate and race.
Unbeknownst to the seven million mostly white tourists who visit the charming streets of the lower peninsula each year, the Holy City is in a deeply precarious position. Weaving science, narrative history, and the family stories of Black Charlestonians, Charleston chronicles the tumultuous recent past in the life of the city—from protests to hurricanes—while revealing the escalating risk in its future. A bellwether for other towns and cities, Charleston is emblematic of vast portions of the American coast, with a future of inundation juxtaposed against little planning to ensure a thriving future for all residents.
In Charleston, we meet Rev. Joseph Darby, a well-regarded Black minister with a powerful voice across the city and region who has an acute sense of the city's shortcomings when it comes to matters of race and water. We also hear from Michelle Mapp, one of the city's most promising Black leaders, and Quinetha Frasier, a charismatic young Black entrepreneur with Gullah-Geechee roots who fears her people’s displacement. And there is Jacob Lindsey, a young white city planner charged with running the city’s ten-year “comprehensive plan” efforts who ends up working for a private developer. These and others give voice to the extraordinary risks the city is facing.
The city of Charleston, with its explosive gentrification over the last thirty years, crystallizes a human tendency to value development above all else. At the same time, Charleston stands for our need to change our ways—and the need to build higher, drier, more densely-connected places where all citizens can live safely.
Illuminating and vividly rendered, Charleston is a clarion call and filled with characters who will stay in the reader’s mind long after the final page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Orleans is not the only beautiful and historic Southern city loved by tourists, but plagued by racial tensions and at risk from rising waters, according to this impassioned cri de coeur. While Charleston, S.C., has not experienced as devastating an environmental disaster as Hurricane Katrina, Harvard Law School professor Crawford (Captive Audience) contends that Charleston's recent expansion across marshes and sea islands renders it exceptionally vulnerable to climate change. The danger is not evenly distributed among the city's inhabitants, however; the poorest Charlestonians, many of whom are African American, occupy parts of the city most at risk of destruction. But that outcome is not inevitable, according to Crawford, who profiles local activists including minister Joseph Darby; entrepreneur David White, whose nonprofit provides laundry services to people without homes on the city's flood-prone East Side; and community development advocate Michelle Mapp, who works to "help prevent eviction and displacement of low-income and Black households." Crawford persuasively links the precarious position of the city's Black neighborhoods to other "legacies of slavery and racism," including segregated schools and a lack of affordable housing for low- and middle-income families. By turns heartbreaking and hopeful, this is an eye-opening look behind Charleston's genteel facade.
Customer Reviews
Sobering book but also fairly soulless towards Charleston
Obviously a well-researched and very sobering book about a range of issues related to both the history and the future of Charleston, and also the increasing consequences of the environmental choices many of us are making (and also that have been imposed upon us). But I think it is a weakness of the book that it is so unflinchingly heartless in its approach to Charleston.
It often seems like Ms. Crawford is operating from the assumption that Charleston invented slavery, racism, excessive tourism and environmentally sensitive development on fragile ground, etc. Blaming the city for the most abhorrent legacy in American history is like singling out a few snowflakes in a blizzard and blaming them for spoiling the driveway. Someone might remind her that all of those slave ships weren’t owned by South Carolinians, but by Bostonians, New Yorkers, Rhode Islanders and owners in Connecticut. There is no one city or region that corners the market on racism in the US. It is a national scourge.
For all of the skill in her adroit reporting, there is an inherent supercficiatlity in her approach to the city. Her perspective often seems that of a tourist who has parachuted in for a relatively short time and has passed judgment on a people and a culture without truly understanding its depth and complexity. One has to wonder why she chose to spend so much time to focus on a book about a city she seems to despise so much.