Weathering the Storm Together (Torn Apart by Race, Gender, and Class)

This genre-bending piece blurs the line between a primary document and a secondary document, a folktale and academic scholarship. It provides a first-hand account from when the author, then a professor at Tulane, first learned of a potential hurricane, through evacuation, homelessness, and the reoccupation of New Orleans—what she refers to as a newly constituted “city of men.” Using the analytical lens of gender and feminist theory, the author attempts to make sense of her own experience of Katrina, while situating the hurricane within a larger historical framework. Ultimately, the story, however, is about how the author, a white woman, and her evacuation companion, an older black man, struggled to find ways to communicate and express their grief, anger, and fears across the chasm of race, gender, and class.