Book Review: ‘Charleston,’ by Susan Crawford

Book Review: ‘Charleston,’ by Susan Crawford - The New York Times

Supported by
Continue reading the main story Nonfiction

The Unequal Racial Burdens of Rising Seas

In “Charleston,” a case study of climate change and government negligence in the South Carolina city, Susan Crawford makes clear the disproportionate costs borne by communities of color in the coastal United States.

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

CHARLESTON: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm, by Susan Crawford

All true climate-change stories are about the abuse of power. Knowing this, Susan Crawford makes a plea for climate justice in “Charleston,” her sweeping case study of the South Carolina city. Her premise is that this imperiled place is a bellwether for the rest of the coastal United States, where government at every level is failing to prepare for the catastrophic effects of sea level rise and increasingly severe storms, which are threatening lives and causing billions of dollars in damage.

It’s a purposefully unsettling premise. Charleston’s woeful lack of planning for the displacement by flooding of its Black and low-income residents — while the city acts to protect high-value real estate and recklessly develop where it should not be building — is hardly unique in the land of the dollar. What is unique about Charleston, in Crawford’s view, is the misalliance between its reputation for charming hospitality and the burden of risk allotted to its poorest residents. Even for readers who already know whose lives matter in this calculus, and whose don’t, Charleston’s story is instructive.

At least 13 million Americans are expected to have to move away from the nation’s coasts in the decades to come. Reading this book reminded me that my family and I will likely number among them. (The first thing I did after finishing it was check with my husband about our flood insurance status.) Crawford is not the only writer to predict that our mass migration will be forced, frenzied and, above all, unfair — unless we plan as a nation for managed retreat, right now.

“Charleston” joins a platoon of important books published in the last few years that, each in its own way, have sounded the same alarm, some tilting more toward realpolitik. These include Jeff Goodell’s “ The Water Will Come,” Elizabeth Rush’s “ Rising,” Gilbert M. Gaul’s “ The Geography of Risk,” Orrin H. Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey’s “Sea Level Rise” and John Englander’s “Moving to Higher Ground.” One hopes these works will have a cumulative impact on local, state and federal policy in their shared concern that the most vulnerable among us don’t get left behind as the waters rise.

Crawford’s book stands apart from its predecessors because of its sustained focus on one threatened city. (In that sense, it shares something with the also excellent “More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas,” edited by Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett.) Charleston is a fascinating and haunted locale, and Crawford is gifted at sketching its grossness and grace. It’s located in South Carolina Lowcountry. Its historic peninsula is flanked by two rivers and surrounded by outer boroughs, all of which lie low and flat. More than a third of its homes sit on land that is less than 10 feet above sea level. Much of the city was built not on solid ground but on fill: trash, oyster shells, human waste, graves, loose dirt plopped over centuries atop marshland. People who live there have gotten so used to high-tide flooding on sunny days that they now check the tide charts before getting into their cars.

Crawford doesn’t go as far into the dystopian future as she could have. Her reason for picking Charleston as a site of scrutiny is that it sits so squarely at the intersection of climate change and race. We do learn in these pages about what life will be like in Charleston by 2050 when damaging flooding is projected to happen 10 times as often as it did last year, particularly for its Black residents. But just as important, we go deep into the marl of history.

Like a tour guide walking us back in time and across town, Crawford shows us the ways in which legacies of slavery and racism have shaped Charleston’s response to the present. A professor at Harvard Law School, where she teaches courses on climate adaptation and public leadership, Crawford was previously President Barack Obama’s special assistant for science, technology and innovation policy. She excels at writing about political cowardice. She uses maps effectively throughout. She has the good sense, as an outsider, to introduce us to locals and pass them the mic. In fact, she’s organized many of the book’s chapters by neighborhood, pairing them with profiles of and sophisticated analyses by Black Charlestonians from that part of town.

We hear the voices of the Rev. Joseph Darby, a minister with a lot to say about the city’s overlapping problems of race and water, as well as about its “raging politeness”; Michelle Mapp, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. who formerly directed the local housing trust; Quinetha Frasier, a young entrepreneur with Gullah Geechee roots and well grounded fears about the displacement of her people; Charlton Singleton, a jazz trumpeter who mourns the loss of the city’s historically Black communities to gentrification; and Mika Gadsden, a founder of the Charleston Activist Network who’s running for mayor on the following platform: “We deserve a Charleston that affirms love for all its people through policy and practice.”

Crawford’s own perspective is delightfully pointed: “The place has an amnesiac, ahistorical quality that is highly attractive to white celebrants, who drowsily pad along its pretty streets before tucking into their next big meal; they are enjoying the suggestion of moneyed graciousness around them, not thinking too hard about where that money came from.” The Holy City may be a top tourist destination, but Crawford makes it clear we’re not here to relax. We’re here to do some tough reckoning with what compounded denial, boosterism, widespread development, segregation, gentrification, white supremacy and public complacency have wrought.

For centuries, Charleston has played a starring role in the nation’s tortured racial history: first as a major slave port, then as a central domestic slave market, then as the spot where the Civil War started, at which point the ratio of Black people to white in the state was around 3 to 1. Charleston’s economy was developed on the backs of the enslaved who worked in the rice paddies and picked the indigo and filled the soggy edges of the peninsula with trash and rubble and offal so the city could grow. Which it did in spades, most remarkably in the three decades following Hurricane Hugo in 1989, when the local mayor harnessed national attention plus public funding to develop the peninsula and spread outward, over marshes and sea islands — a process that involved annexing suburbs, attracting retirees, gentrifying rampantly and transforming a majority Black city into a majority white one.

Discrimination persisted into the current era, during which, after the massacre at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2015, long-simmering tensions boiled into protest that finally brought down the Confederate flag at the state capitol. But if you’ve gone through centuries of second-class citizenship and generations of flooding without being heard or helped to get to higher ground by the city you built, as the toxic sludge pulls at your ankles, you must ask yourself, is this progress?

For white and wealthy residents, Charleston’s quandary is a real estate issue. But whether to sell now or stay is a question that its poor may not have the luxury of posing. For these citizens — renters and public-housing residents — the issue is a moral one. As the historian Annette Gordon-Reed asks in her foreword to the book, “Will the government authorities be able to rise above historical patterns and take action on behalf of the marginalized people in the city?”

Crawford wouldn’t have written this book if she thought the answer was no. Her vision for Charleston involves revising, resettling, rewilding and redrawing the metropolitan map. She’s not alone in imagining that the city, and by extension the nation, has the potential to get this transition right. Toward the end of her book, she quotes Michelle Mapp, who’s not giving up: “If Charleston can change, the South can change. If the South can change, America can change.” But so much depends upon who’s seated at the table of power.

Emily Raboteau’s books include “Searching for Zion,” which received an American Book Award for nonfiction, and “Lessons for Survival,” forthcoming next year.

CHARLESTON: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm | By Susan Crawford |Illustrated | 371 pp. | Pegasus Books | $28.95