Deborah Douglas

“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.”
― Deborah Douglas, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“Hurricane Katrina is easily a metaphor for America's attitude toward Black women: rejected, neglected, and never protected.”
― Deborah Douglas