When former first lady Barbara Bush broke her characteristic public silence, she diminished the humanity of survivors. In discussing evacuees in Texas, she told the radio program Marketplace, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,” she said, “so this is working very well for them.”
Except it wasn’t working, especially for Black women, many of whom were heads of their households. More women than men lived in poverty before Katrina. Women are prone to gender-based violence when they are vulnerable. The disaster response was simply humiliating. In a 2006 article, Ransby recounted that a middle-aged Black woman on CNN who was “dirty, desperate and crying…looked into the camera and said to the viewers, ‘We do not live like this.’ She repeated it over and over again.”
City leaders who banked on remaking a demographically different kind of city did Black women no favors, either. They failed to include in recovery planning the Black women who lived in “the Bricks,” the Big Four public housing complexes. Public housing was demolished and replaced with mixed-income developments.
The city lost more than half of its population after the hurricane, falling to 230,172 residents in 2006 from 484,674, according to the Data Center. In the metro area, many of these lost residents were African American women and girls, whose numbers dropped to 37 percent from 47 percent, according to a 2010 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Poverty levels fell, but that doesn’t prove poverty dropped for Black girls and women who lived there before Katrina.
The disaster response that stranded thousands or made people feel occupied more than protected by police and military failed to take into account the Black women’s work of holding themselves together. These women were doing what author and commentator Avis Jones-DeWeever described as easing “the hunger and thirst of babies and toddlers left in their care in the sweltering heat and the inhumane conditions associated with post-disaster survival.” In the wake of the storm, women, Black and white, cared for the elderly and infirm, “yet, women’s service and suffering were all but invisible as are their continuing struggles to this day.”
The lexicon must make room for white patriarchy’s specific way of disregarding the humanity of Black women in literal physical spaces like New Orleans during and after Katrina, and in the narratives and policy making that either created a pathway home or left them stranded. Every step of the Katrina response “depresenced” Black women, forced them to bear the weight of natural disaster while carrying the cellular memory of trauma one can imagine will pass through bloodlines like so many others.
Unlike erasure, which requires one’s presence to be recognized so it can be obliterated, depresencing never acknowledges presence at all. When deployed, people just look right through Black women as if they weren’t there.
As violent and silent as depresencing is, there’s an antidote. The response to Hurricane Katrina was not the first time the U.S. government abandoned Black women, and it would not be the last. Black women resisted by showing up in the story of their lives, by loving, learning, and leading—despite the systemic barriers and humiliations designed to make them small enough to practically disappear. But Black women did not disappear, and they will not disappear because we know something established power does not: we are something.
2009–2014
THE SHELBY RULING
Karine Jean-Pierre
“Every time I vote,” Oprah Winfrey said on a 2004 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show dedicated to voting, “I cast my vote for Otis Moss, Sr., who walked eighteen miles in one day to have the chance to do it. That’s why I vote.”
Oprah invokes the story of Otis Moss, Sr., frequently when she talks about voting. It’s a story she heard in her twenties from his son, Cleveland’s Rev. Otis Moss, and one she says she’ll never forget. It’s one I’ll never forget, either.
Otis Moss, Sr., grew up without the right to vote. His family were sharecroppers in the racist Jim Crow era, in a “democracy” that still denied millions of Black and Brown people the right to vote. But one day that changed. The Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, thanks to the civil rights movement, and for the first time ever, Otis by law had the right to vote. And on the day of the first-ever election where he could actually cast a ballot, where he could actually have his voice counted, he put on his best suit and walked six miles to the nearest polling station. He didn’t have any other form of transportation. But when he got to the polling station and tried to cast his vote, the people working there told him he couldn’t vote at that polling station. He had to go to another one.
Still in his best suit, Otis walked another five or six miles to that other polling station. But by the time he got there, the people working there told him it was too late, the polls had closed. He walked home, another six miles, defeated. In total, Otis Moss, Sr., walked eighteen miles that day, all for the chance to vote. All for the chance to exercise a right that was legally his.
Otis Moss, Sr., died before the next election. In all his years, not once did he get to vote. Not once did the United States of America, a supposed democracy that depends on free and fair elections, allow him to vote. Not once.
That story, a story of Jim Crow and how laws may change but may not change everything, that’s the story Oprah takes with her when she votes. I want to quickly tell you another story, a story of a man not unlike Otis Moss, Sr.
Eddie Lee Holloway, Jr., was a fifty-eight-year-old Black man who moved to Wisconsin from Illinois. He was ready to vote: he had his expired Illinois photo ID, his birth certificate, and his Social Security card, so he could get the Wisconsin ID he needed to vote. But when he went to the DMV in Milwaukee, they rejected his application. It turned out that on his birth certificate, due to a clerical error, his name was written as “Eddie Junior Holloway,” not “Eddie Holloway Junior.”
Eddie didn’t give up, however. He made seven more trips to different agencies and offices to try to get his paperwork together, all so he could vote. Like Otis, he was determined. He spent over $200 trying to get everything in order. But even after all these attempts, he still wasn’t able to get the identification he needed to be able to vote in Wisconsin. Eventually, Eddie was so dejected he moved back to Illinois. He was never able to vote in Wisconsin.
Both Eddie and Otis were denied the right to vote even though the law said they were entitled to it. Both men were victims of a centuries-long effort in the United States to deny Black people the right to vote. But Eddie, unlike Otis, wasn’t a sharecropper living under Jim Crow. Eddie was a Black man trying to vote in Wisconsin in the 2016 presidential election. Not in 1946. Not in 1956. In 2016. Since Otis’s attempt to vote, the United States has sent people to the moon, created electric cars, launched the Internet, and elected the first Black president. But if, like Eddie, you’re voting as a Black or Brown person, it can sometimes feel like nothing has changed at all.