“I still carry New Orleans with me, its beauty and its sorrow,” said Professor Johnnie Hamilton-Mason during a virtual discussion about her research, “Hope Floats: African American Women's Survival Experiences after Katrina.”
Before Hurricane Katrina decimated an area left vulnerable to natural disaster, Hamilton-Mason had visited the city as a tourist. She spoke with appreciation of “its layered histories and fusion of traditions, its food — seasoned well! — and its festivals with spirit and survival laced together.”
In August of 2005, she watched on television as the storm unfolded.
“The devastation it caused revealed the deep fault lines of race, class, and neglect,” she said. “It was a natural disaster, but it wasn’t a neutral event. There were indicators that unfolded over the first days of the hurricane that pointed to a long-standing history of systemic racism, systemic inequality, and profound neglect.”
Neglect as Evidence of Systemic Racism
The area hardest hit by the aftermath of the hurricane was the Ninth Ward, a low-lying area of New Orleans of which 98% of the population was African American or people of the African diaspora.
“They had mostly low-wage jobs and could not afford to evacuate,” said Hamilton-Mason. Three months after the storm, she joined a research team at the University of Texas in Austin, which had begun collecting data about survivors who were relocated to Texas. Some of those survivors came from the Ninth Ward, and reported that the levee had been in “dire condition” before the hurricane, and that this had been common knowledge that the city, state, and federal government had done nothing to address.
Evacuation and Relocation
An estimated 1.5 million people were evacuated from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama as a result of the storm’s damage. Of those evacuees, 40% never returned home. There were nearly 1,400 deaths, and over one million people were displaced.
“This was one of the largest migrations of African Americans since the ‘Great Migration,’” said Hamilton-Mason, drawing a parallel with the millions of African Americans who moved from southern to northern states between the 1910s and 1970s, in an effort to escape pervasive violence and oppression.
“I wanted to focus on the evacuation process: where they were, when they got there,” said Hamilton-Mason, noting that the evacuation had been a last minute effort organized by the mayor and the state of Louisiana. Many of the citizens in the sample data were first moved to the Superdome in New Orleans, and later the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. Some stayed in Houston, and others were moved several days later to Austin, Texas. “There were a lot of routes in their journey, a lot of unknowns about the process of their evacuation.”
In transcripts of interviews (conducted by the University of Texas-Austin Research Collaborative), survivors speak to the impact of intersecting oppressions: having lost their homes due to natural calamity and a lack of government support, they were sent to new areas with conflicting information about where they were going, or no information at all. Hamilton-Mason shared the statement of one survivor who overheard police referring to the group as refugees: “We are not refugees, this is our country. It is not our fault that the levy boards broke, it’s not our fault that we lost everything, but we are just trying to get somewhere safe…”
Hamilton-Mason’s research team analyzed the data and transcripts, looking for common threads. Some survivors were relocated to a development 15 miles from downtown Austin; they couldn’t walk and had to rely on public transportation. Of those that remained in Texas, many of them had been relocated to Houston, a city with a large African American population.
Researching Black Women
Having researched the impacts of stress and coping, Hamilton-Mason also wanted to understand the complex ways that African American women had experienced and survived the catastrophe. In 2008, with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Polly Dickson Faculty Research Award, the Hurricane Katrina Research Collaborative was established. Hamilton-Mason conducted a study with students in the PhD in Social Work program and Master of Social Work program.
Understanding the data itself was a challenging piece of the research. The team struggled to deconstruct the way New Orleanians described what they had endured. The team analyzed and coded transcripts of interviews, some of them over 100 pages long.
“We created a coding scheme, and each member of the team would re-read the transcript.” Hamilton-Mason also visited New Orleans in 2006, 2008, and 2009, to “take pictures and immerse myself in the data.”
In addition to deciphering accents and patterns of speech, the subject matter itself proved challenging. “There was such a proliferation of trauma that the respondents revealed in the transcripts,” she recalled. “There were statements about people who had seen dead bodies in the water. Who had seen people who were trying to escape but couldn’t. People who survived for five days on a balcony, waiting for the water to recede, waiting to be rescued. It was hard to read and think about how to find hope in the context of so much devastation.”
Faith and Trauma
In the early days of data collection, one of Hamilton-Mason’s doctoral candidates who was from New Orleans frequently pointed out the role of spirituality in the midst of the trauma. “She helped us flip the analysis from focusing just on the trauma to focusing on the incredible collectivism that emerged,” said Hamilton-Mason.
From the transcripts, themes related to faith in God were discovered. “It’s an incredible response, and it supports the idea that people of the diaspora are inherently spiritual and religious. There is very little separation between our bodies, our faith, our ancestors, and our belief in a God of some sort.”
Hamilton-Mason’s other research on African culture is based on West African traditions of spirituality, and she saw similar themes prevalent in the survivors’ transcripts. She sees faith as a vital part of “that intersectionality of ethnicities in New Orleans that coalesces around spirit and fun and food and jazz and music. There is something special about the culture. Even if you don’t formally participate in some religious institution, the ‘haints’ and ghosts and ancestors [are still relevant].”
Trauma vs. Resilience
While the resilience of survivors is noteworthy, there were those who tired of this approach to the African American experience.
“Some people argued that we should not acknowledge resilience, having suffered so much intergenerationally over time,” said Hamilton-Mason. “Why is it that we have to go through struggle and pain to create a pathway through resilience? Because we survive. Post-traumatic growth is built on resilience. Not everybody who experiences trauma has post-traumatic growth; it’s a process you can look at over time.”
While resilience, or the ability to “bounce back” from hardship, is an incredible strength, Hamilton-Mason is certain that people are still struggling to address challenges created by Hurricane Katrina.
Looking Back 20 Years Later
Reflecting on this research 20 years after the storm, Hamilton-Mason experiences the same frustration at the hands-off approach the local and federal government had toward New Orleans.
“It’s always bittersweet when you talk about 40% of the population that lived in New Orleans and did not go back. They couldn’t afford to go back.” Since then, the city has replaced a lot of the institutions that existed in pre-storm New Orleans, much of it relating to the culture of that population: public schools have been replaced by charter schools, affordable housing has decreased, leading to an overall increase in gentrification.
Of the many lessons social workers can take from the disaster, Hamilton-Mason hopes to focus on social networks in response to future crises. “We need to connect an individual to a network, because it is so critical to survival,” she said. “You talk about belonging, feeling included, making a family. [In many cases], that collective effort helped them survive.”
While addressing trauma is complex, she encourages social workers to allow the faith of survivors to be a part of the crisis response.
“Let faith be part of the work being done to respond to a crisis,” she said. “The voices of the women of Hope Floats still stay with me, they remind me of survival and endurance and creativity and really, faith. Faith was a big theme of the work that we did, and I would argue that faith is a big theme in addressing this sort of trauma.”