A number of studies on Hurricane Katrina have appeared in publications and books over the past several years. Most were brief glances at some fragment of the disaster and not rich, in-depth portraits of the people affected. Many rode the crest of Katrina's news cycle without investing in continued study. The books in our series The Katrina Bookshelf, by contrast, are the result of a national effort to bring experts together in a collaborative program of research on the human costs of the disaster. The program itself is supported by the Ford, Gates, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage Foundations, and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. This is the most comprehensive social science coverage of a disaster to be found anywhere in the literature. It also presents a deeply human story. The stories told in The Katrina Bookshelf have attracted the attention of scholars and the New York Times.
In December 2016, Neil Gross cited Ron Eyerman's Is This America? Katrina as Cultural Trauma in a New York Times Sunday Review article, titled “Are Americans Experiencing Collective Trauma?,” tying the collective trauma of our unprecedented 2016 election to the loss of identity associated with the aftermath of natural disaster: "We’re all familiar with the notion of psychological trauma—damage to an individual’s psyche caused by an extremely distressing event. But there’s also another kind of trauma: a collective disturbance that happens to a group of people when their world is suddenly upended."
Additionally, Contemporary Sociology recently published a review essay evaluating the impact of three books from The Katrina Bookshelf. In "The Elusive Recovery: Post-Hurricane Katrina Rebuilding During the First Decade, 2005–2015," Kevin Fox Gotham, professor of sociology at Tulane University, highlights the impact The Katrina Bookshelf has had on disaster discourse so far. Using these multiyear studies, he argues for the need to examine not only the discriminatory and problematic implementation of government aid but also the agency of displaced people in adapting to imperfect systems of recovery. Indeed, these studies are vital because "Katrina is still ongoing, still taking shape, still unfolding along the flow of time."
Alice Fothergill and Lori Peek, coauthors of the award-winning Children of Katrina, followed
the lives of seven representative children and teens over several years, and offer an engrossing, long-term study of how children experience disasters and the personal and structural factors that aid or hinder their recovery. Gotham writes that Children of Katrina provides "new empirical and theoretical insights" and "vivid, engaging, and deeply moving accounts of the post-hurricane life experiences." He continues:
Fothergill and Peek’s contribution is to show us that it is not solely age, poverty, race, or hazard exposure but how these risk factors accumulate over time as “if each ‘piece’ of the vulnerability puzzle connects and then is experienced” by the person impacted by the extreme event. Eschewing a fixed and static conception of vulnerability, Fothergill and Peek show that cumulative vulnerability has both temporal and additive components. Vulnerability develops over time as risk factors accumulate. . . . A major contribution is to show that resource depth and resource mobilization act as shields or protections against the damaging effects of disasters.
Steve Kroll-Smith, Vern Baxter, and Pam Jenkins, coauthors of Left to Chance: Hurricane Katrina and the Story of Two New Orleans Neighborhoods, offer "an inside perspective on the disaster," having conducted field interviews in their hometown of New Orleans. Left to Chance examines two African American neighborhoods—working-class Hollygrove and middle-class Pontchartrain Park—to learn how their residents experienced “Miss Katrina” and the long road back to normal life. Gotham writes, "The ethnographic detail and evocative interview quotes make for an impressively researched book that provides a welcome alternative to the many decontextualized and overly broad journalistic exposés that came out during the first few years after Katrina devastated New Orleans." Kroll-Smith, Baxter, and Jenkins have delivered "a powerfully complex and nuanced analysis of how issues of neighborhood rebuilding and exile intersect with government policy." Katrina stripped away the outer surface of our social structure and showed us what lies underneath: a grim look at race, class, and gender in these United States.
Katherine Browne's Standing in the Need investigates "how the vocabulary of race infuses people’s narrations of the disaster." She has written an eloquent, detailed account of an extended African American family’s grueling eight-year recovery from Katrina,
demonstrating how greater cultural understanding would enable disaster recovery organizations to better serve affected communities. "Drawing on the post-storm experience of the St. Bernard family, Browne suggests that recovery agencies could reduce suffering and speed healing by learning about the history, culture, and distinctive customs and needs of disaster-impacted communities. The provision of places to gather, places to cook big meals, and places to care for children could assist in repairing frayed cultural bonds and offer a roadmap for recovery," Gotham notes.
Gotham’s Contemporary Sociology review concludes that: "Taking stock of the contributions these books offer leaves one with a sense of admiration for the nuanced and sophisticated nature of Katrina research and the hope that scholars can bring this developing scholarship to bear on public debates and current urban planning processes and practices."
How does America respond to disaster? It is crucial to be honest about our shortcomings so that we may learn from them and be ready for the next time. When seen through a social science lens, Katrina reveals the real human costs of disaster and helps us prepare for future challenges.
Publishing in Spring 2018, Steve Kroll-Smith’s Recovering Inequality draws comparisons between Katrina and another historically disastrous event in American history, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Kroll-Smith writes, "totalizing urban disasters, like those that occurred in San Francisco and New Orleans, provide an uncommon occasion to inspect the dynamics of social inequality inherent in . . . America's essential dilemma: class and race inequality cloaked in the language of human parity." This appraisal of the kind of society we once were and the kind we have become, and will perhaps inform the society we will be when the next disaster strikes.
In Fall 2018, Kai Erikson's and Lori Peek’s forthcoming The Lessons of Katrina will provide a brief overview of why we need to study disasters and then deliver a treatise on the specific lessons we can learn from a wide-reaching and ongoing trauma like Katrina.
In 2005 Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast and precipitated the flooding of New Orleans. It was a towering catastrophe by any standard. Some 1,800 persons were killed outright. More than a million were forced to relocate, many for the remainder of their lives. A city of five hundred thousand was nearly emptied of life. The storm stripped away the surface of our social structure and showed us what lies beneath—a grim look at race, class, and gender in these United States.
It is crucial to get this story straight so that we may learn from it and be ready for that stark inevitability, the next time. When seen through a social science lens, Katrina informs us of the real human costs of a disaster and helps prepare us for the blows that we know are lurking just over the horizon. The Katrina Bookshelf is the result of a national effort to bring experts together in a collaborative program of research on the human costs of the disaster. The program was supported by the Ford, Gates, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage Foundations and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. This is the most comprehensive social science coverage of a disaster to be found anywhere in the literature. It is also a deeply human story.
The Katrina Bookshelf will contain ten volumes to be published through the year 2017. To highlight the important work contained within each work published thus far, we asked our authors to comment on what they hope we as a nation will take away from marking the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Below are important, evidence-based lessons gleaned from years of research.
Housing
Disasters of the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina reveal the deep-seated, taken-for-granted inequities that structure our everyday lives. Typically, the actions of both government and business elites in the response and recovery after a disaster reproduce and even enhance those inequities.
In the immediate chaos and sense of urgency after a massive disaster, new resources—monetary as well as human—rush in, and the regulations and processes for spending public funds that normally require responsible oversight and accountability are washed away. Priorities are set and programs implemented that most often leave out the voices, experiences, and needs of the most vulnerable—single mothers and their children, low-moderate income people, renters, the aged, the disabled, people of color—while benefitting the already privileged.
To achieve true recovery for everyone, not just gains for a few, we must include vulnerable populations and their advocates in our decision making. Listening to the stories and observing the experiences of more than 500 displaced persons and dozens of first responders, service providers, community organizers, government officials, and residents, for example, our research group, 12 scholars in 13 different receiving communities across the country, found that the central need both in the disaster area and in the diaspora was for housing. In addition to the immediate need for safe, temporary housing, people needed long-term, affordable housing that enabled them to live in community and provided transportation to employment and access to social services, health care, and schools.
Recovery for everyone depends on developing housing policy that provides faster and more effective rebuilding assistance to rental property owners –especially to those with fewer than 6 units, prioritizes consolidating kin/community networks, includes incentives for rebuilders to hire returning residents, and offers access to employment and community services.
At a more structural/political level, we must uncouple disaster-resource prioritization, allocation, and distribution processes from unchecked control by government/corporate elites. And we must include significant input from the least powerful yet most affected people in local communities and require transparency and long-term accountability in the use of public funds.
— Lynn Weber
Evacuation, Displacement, and Prolonged Recovery
I think one of the most important lessons of Katrina is related to the enduring nature of the disruption that this terrible disaster caused. “Evacuation” suggests the movement of persons from a threatened location to a temporary safe haven. That was, indeed, the experience of many residents who had to leave New Orleans but were able find safe haven, locate secure shelter, and establish a sense of routine relatively quickly.
But for tens of thousands of other survivors, Katrina’s aftermath was radically different and the disruption in their lives is ongoing. These individuals and households often made several moves in the weeks, months, and years following Katrina. They were the survivors who often bounced from a shelter, to a family member’s home, back to a shelter, to a trailer, to a motel, to temporary housing, to different temporary housing, to a homeless shelter, back to temporary housing… and on, and on, and on.
Those who experienced the most instability were also the ones who were often living in the most precarious circumstances before the storm. For them, Katrina has come to represent the disaster with no end. There is no thinking of it as a discrete event, bounded in time and space. Instead, this is the ongoing disaster that continues to ripple through their lives.
Anyone who has visited New Orleans and the rest of the battered Gulf Coast in the years since the storm would likely acknowledge that much progress has been made in restoring particular places that were badly damaged. Just as that work of rebuilding the physical infrastructure is ongoing, however, I would argue that we also need to continue to restore the lives of the people who were most affected. So on this tenth anniversary of Katrina, my hope is that we continue to focus on and invest in those most affected by the storm—both those who have returned to their former homes as well as those who permanently relocated elsewhere. If we do this, and we do it right, we will need to continue dedicating time, care, and resources to the systems that help people function effectively and live happier, healthier, more prosperous lives.
— Lori Peek
Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora
Through an extensive research network, Displaced features the work of 12 scholars who interviewed 562 displaced adults and children; 104 first responders, service providers, and community organizers; and 101 other residents in the communities where Katrina survivors landed.
Lynn Weber is Professor of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, has for thirty years been a leader in developing the field of intersectionality—examining the nexus between race, class, gender, and other dimensions of social inequality. Her current work focuses on revealing inequalities in the process of recovery from disaster and in health outcomes.
Lori Peek is associate professor of Sociology and co-director of the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University. She is author of the award-winning book Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11, co-author of Children of Katrina, and co-editor of Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora.
Race
I think Katrina was a national disgrace, but one that also presented an opportunity. As many in the mass media pointed out at the time, Katrina exposed the dark side of the United States, its poverty and historically and institutionally-rooted racism to full public view. Katrina made public what Michael Harrington famously called 'the other America'.
Amid all the suffering and hand-wringing there was the possibility to refocus a national political agenda to acknowledge and to deal with these two foundational issues in a nation that prides itself on its moral goodness, as well as its wealth and ingenuity. That opportunity was never taken and while New Orleans, the site of so much attention during the storm, may have recovered to a degree and its flood protection system strengthened, the poverty and racism remain in place.
This is a national issue, not merely a regional one and it is this issue that I would hope the current commemorations and discussion would tackle. There is a direct line to be drawn from Katrina to the current Black Lives Matter movement and with this mass movement, a new opportunity.
— Ron Eyerman
Cultural Communication
Katrina swept away the contents of every home in St. Bernard Parish, the worst hit area, where 67,000 structures were damaged or destroyed including all of those belonging to the 300-plus members of the Johnson-Fernandez family. Now, ten years later, we wonder: what does such unexpected loss and suffering have to teach us?
