Assault Rifles, Separated Families, and Murder in Their Eyes: Unasked Questions after Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

This essay critiques the trauma literature that includes African Americans who endured Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. It is concerned with possible dissonance between scholars' and subjects' agendas. Drawing on narratives from the the Saddest Days Oral History Project that Penner directed in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, she explores divergences between the most urgent traumatic concerns of her study's narrators and the dominant questions of Katrina mental health literature. Her focus is the survivors' perceptions of rescuers' intentions, a primary consideration in the assessment of potentially traumatizing events. The mental-health specialists, with minor exceptions, correctly predicted an overall surge in traumatic and depressive symptoms for Hurricane Katrina survivors. They were less effective in identifying causation, specifying type, and appreciating major differences between social groups and communities. For almost all of the African American narrators trapped in the city after the storm, the trauma of Katrina was experienced as the product of human beings, mainly armed law enforcement personnel and soldiers, brandishing assault rifles, acting disdainfully, and separating families. The event was made cataclysmic not by the winds or the floodwaters but by their descent into a militarized zone in which narrators seemed singled out for persecution because of their race/ethnicity (and gender). The traumatizing events that were omitted from the structured interview protocols, in particular the impact of the militarized response, have had the deepest impact on survivors' identity and ability to trust others.