File: powell final for Darby 798 Created on: 3/15/2009 12:55:00 PM Last Printed: 4/3/2009 10:11:00 AM DENVER UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 86.Obama banker, we mediate these exchanges through ATM machines and supermarkets. At a deeper level, we know that the neighborhood we live in may be more important than the house we live in.62 We know that where we live will impact the schools our children go to, our safety, and our access to not just jobs, but also to people and both material and social wealth. A middle-income person living in a poor neighborhood is not similarly situated to a middle-income person living in a middle-income neighborhood. The importance of institutional arrangements and the interactions within these structures for the distribution of opportunity in our society is only increasing. Universal programs often operate on the unstated assumptions that are sensitive to the particular conditions of the more favored group. Thus, the Social Security Act, a quintessentially universal program, began with a conception of a recipient that was a working, white male. The development of a policy or program with an ostensibly universal norm that favors or disfavors a particular group is likely to be an unconscious and unintentional process, but no less harmful. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, there was a great deal of confusion. Were we not already in a largely colorblind society, where if race mattered at all, it mattered only very little? Why then were so many Blacks stranded? I received several calls from media outlets asking me if I thought President Bush was racist. It is not that we do not know that there is still persistent racial inequality in our society, but we have a story line that allows us to justify and explain this fact when it rudely intrudes into our otherwise public stance that race does not matter. We tell each other stories about the culture of poverty and the lack of personal and collective responsibility in racially marginal communities. We talk about segregation from opportunity in terms of choice, of people just wanting to live with their own. We become armchair sociologists, uninterested and unconcerned with the facts and even less aware of institutional arrangements and the work they do. What made Hurricane Katrina particularly difficult is that these stories of institutional racialization were less available. We never asked why Blacks in New Orleans are so segregated and so poor. We never asked how they came to be in harm’s way. We never asked why the disinvestment in their communities and lives had been extended to those shameful levels. We never asked ourselves why a universal evacuation plan required cars when many Blacks were carless. We assumed. And if there was some unjustified racial play at work, we looked for the conscious racist. The final problem for the post-racial position is what I would call a legal and policy limitation. Once a race-blind position is adopted, it be62. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn et al., Do Neighborhoods Influence Child and Adolescent Development?, 99:2 AM. J. SOC. 353 (1993). Tama Leventhal & Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Moving to Opportunity: An Experimental Study of the Neighborhood Effects on Mental Health, 93:9 AM. J. PUB. HEALTH 1576 (2003).