Charleston : Race, Water and the Coming Storm

An unflinching look at Charleston, a beautiful, endangered port city, founded by English settlers in 1669 as a hub of the sugar and slave trades, which now, as the waters rise, stands at the intersection of climate and race.

Unknown to the happy, mostly white visitors who hop from one restaurant to another on the charming streets of the Charleston peninsula, or to readers of the glossy magazines in which the city is named a top destination year after year, rapidly rising sea levels and increasingly devastating storms are mere years away from rendering the city uninhabitable. If this precarity is hidden, it is because the city and the state have a strong interest in keeping up appearances. And because the city''s Black and lower-income residents will bear the brunt of the storm. Susan Crawford shows how the city must quickly reimagine its future before rising waters stymie its ability to act at all. Along the way, its inhabitants will need to confront and right historic wrongs. This evocative and profoundly important book crystallises human tendencies to value profit and property above all else, and explains that Charleston, like scores of other global coastal cities, urgently needs to chart a new future for its citizens in the light of the changes ahead.