Looking for Common Ground: Relief Work in Post-Katrina New Orleans as an American Parable of Race and Gender Violence

Dedicated to Shana Griffin, of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and cofounder of the New Orleans Women’s Health & Justice Initiative, who articulated a concern to me long before anyone else, in February 2006, about colonial modes of organizing occurring in the Ninth Ward in post-Katrina New Orleans.

This article provides an interdisciplinary examination of race and gender intersectionality in the context of disaster “recovery” in New Orleans. Based on a case study of a grassroots relief organization, the Common Ground Collective, the findings demonstrate that in the absence of intersectional practice, sexism furthers racism and racism furthers sexism. After a series of sexual assaults were reported by white women volunteers in Common Ground in 2006, participant discourse criminalized the surrounding black community, although almost every accused perpetrator was a nonlocal white man. Contextualizing these events in the broader American history of violence and assistance traditions helps to reveal domestic and global patterns. The challenges Common Ground members faced in producing an antiracist, feminist response to both the assaults and the dominant organizational framing further point to the difficulties of just, intersectional recovery interventions.