Abstract
This gripping edited volume provides an in-depth analysis of the experiences of New Orleanians displaced by Gulf Coast-wrecking Katrina in August 2005. The rich, qualitative studies in Displaced explore the processes at play in communities that received evacuees after the storm and the agency of survivors who mobilized their social networks, near and far, in the ongoing process of recovery. This book resulted from a unique collaboration among scholars who were part of the ASA’s SSRC Research Network on Persons Displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Half of the book’s contributors were themselves displaced by Katrina and others were actively involved in Katrina recovery efforts. The result of their dedication to engaged community research is a strong, cohesive, feminist collection with a refreshing focus on women’s first-hand accounts, deft analysis of the importance of social context, and a careful and consistent exploration of the hierarchies of race, class, gender, age, and citizenship and the role they played in making this storm a social disaster. In a beautiful foreword, Bonnie Thornton Dill explains that this book is about the “truths that arise as people recount and share their lived experiences of having their home and family moorings blown away, flooded out, and scattered across the country; truths that are revealed as people are trying to resettle in new communities or return to the old ones” (p. ix).
This volume is the most comprehensive overview of displaced persons’ experiences of Katrina to date. It contains an impressive number of interviews—”562 with displaced persons; 104 with first responders, service providers, and community organizers; and 101 with other residents in the receiving communities” (p. 4). Most of the studies began immediately after the storm in 2005. The majority of the respondents are African American women and as a result the book is an important corrective to the stereotypical media portrayal of African American women as helpless victims.
The book is organized into three main sections with a helpful introduction by editors Lynn Weber and Lori Peek that provides an overview of common themes and maps and charts identifying the location and selected characteristics of New Orleans and the receiving communities in Colorado, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia. The first section of the book exposes us to the organization of relief efforts in twelve cities with very different social contexts. The combination of in-depth interview material and demographic comparisons between the receiving cities and New Orleans in each chapter forces us to consider how rates of poverty, racial composition, availability of affordable housing and public transportation, education levels, and other factors affected the experiences of the evacuees. The authors highlight that many survivors had never left New Orleans previous to that storm, and a forced evacuation to an unknown place heightened their sense of displacement. Despite the early, warm community welcomes for Katrina evacuees and some perceived advantages in their new communities including quality schools and offers of free housing, displaced individuals also experienced common problems related to inaccessible or unaffordable public transportation, health care, housing, jobs, and social services. Because “place matters” (p. 30) and clearly affects the experiences of internally displaced people, it needs to be addressed in future disaster planning. This section also introduces some particularly useful concepts including “the basement of extreme poverty,” “Katrina fatigue,” and the feeling of “permanent temporariness” expressed by children in the Louisiana diaspora.
Section II of the book delves into the social networks that interviewees relied on and mobilized to survive the hurricane and to negotiate its aftermath. We meet, among many others, Miss Joanne who opens up her duplex to fifty-four friends and family during and after the storm, Garifuna immigrant groups who negotiate a long history of displacement and barriers associated with citizenship status and language, and older women who re-make their lives in a FEMA trailer park. We also witness the role of religion and “church homes” in navigating displacement. This section does an excellent job of highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of close network ties. On the one hand, we see that when everyone you know is impacted by the storm, resources are tight or non-existent and it is difficult to give or receive sustained support. On the other hand, close networks provide emotional support that strangers and non-profit or government agencies cannot replace. A focus on “community” as resource helps us to see not only how networks provide access to food, shelter, jobs, health care, but also to (often gendered) emotional and spiritual care as well.
Overall, the organization of the book follows a clear path from “receiving communities” to “social networks,” with each chapter making unique contributions, building on common themes. While the concluding chapter, which comprises the third section of the book, provides a case study of a social movement organization that raises important questions about how to achieve social change during and after disasters, there lacks an additional chapter on policy implications. While there are many lessons to be learned from this book about creating “enhanced social justice for Katrina survivors and survivors of future social disasters” (p. xii), a more direct compilation of these suggestions would have been useful. One of the most important policy implications of this book is the light it sheds on the “less visible women-centered networks of care” that were “essential survival resources for the most vulnerable” and “key connections through which survivors identified themselves and measured the success or failure of their recovery” (p. 167). Weber and Peek’s volume promises a reflective discussion of the methodological challenges of white, middle-class women interviewing African American poor and working-class women, but there is more to be learned from these authors’ experiences and it is obvious that the brief early chapter on the experiences of “the research network” could have been expanded to address these issues more explicitly.
Displaced will be an invaluable resource in undergraduate and graduate classrooms and required reading for scholars interested in intersectional inequalities, community development, social networks, and disaster. Its intentional privileging of black, working-class and poor women’s experiences is unique and productive. A teacher in Peggy Orenstein’s book Schoolgirls, explains why she starts with a project on sexual harassment in her middle school classroom as a way to address women’s history more broadly by quoting Peggy McIntosh. She says, “…if you start your Civil War class with Diary of a Slave Girl you’ll get to Abraham Lincoln. …But if you start with Lincoln, you’ll never get to Slave Girl” (p. 265). I think this is a lesson for sociologists studying Katrina. By keeping African American, poor and working-class women’s experiences central in this book, we are able to see Katrina as a “social disaster” based on our society’s hierarchical relations of gender, race, and class. If we do not start with these women’s experiences, then their race, gender, and class privilege slip out of the analysis and we are much more likely to find ourselves talking about a “natural” disaster and planning recovery efforts that do not take into account these fundamental social inequalities and the real people affected by them.