Sorrow and misery always seem to equalize those who may have taken unequal positions. Despite the waves of Katrina and Rita are considered to have washed the difference between its victims away, they nevertheless proved to have washed down the dust of the illusory equality and uncover the perpetual systematic problems in modern society. In their Abandoned Before the Storms (2006), Avis A. Jones-Deweever and Heidi Hartmann have analyzed so-called America’s persistent divides which have been aggravated by the hurricanes.
The authors state that the impact of the divides by race and color has been taking place within the Gulf region long before the hurricanes. Women of the region have had limited opportunities in terms of education, health care and insurance; the rate of their salary has been catastrophically low. This situation is consonant to that throughout the USA, where women make up 60 per cent of the workers with the lowest salary and have almost no chance to overgrow this line; however, this situation has been the most explicit in the districts affected by the devastation.
It is necessary to consider that in the Gulf region, the overall social problems have been rather exacerbated: the unemployment rate has exceeded that average in the USA by 50 per cent, at the same time about a half of those employed have remained under the line of poverty, which highlights the hopelessness and lack of any prospect dominating in the region; however, this concerns the women of the region to greater extent than the men, which is proved by the figures provided in the article.
However, it is necessary to understand that the rates of salary and unemployment are the consequence in the overall chain, the certain symptoms; instead, it is important to analyze its reason which has become the origin of the division.
It can be concluded after familiarizing with the data provided by the authors that the problem of women’s poverty in the Gulf region is systematic and looks like a vicious circle: low degree attainment and bad health care eliminate the possibility for the women to get a well-paid job and improve their living standard; as well, their children, having been brought up in poverty, also do not get proper education and close the circle. Not surprisingly, the authors state that the problem of poverty has been urgent for the females of several generations.
However, gender is not a single basis for the division considered in the article: the matters of race have also proved to be of a great importance for the population of the Gulf region. When recurring to the statistics of education in the region provided by the authors, it becomes obvious that the divide by race does not yield to that by gender: a number of black females with a college degree is 2.68 times lower than that of the white women; black men get a college degree 3.72 times more seldom than white.
Therefore, these figures are consonant to the data characterizing the race stratification in terms of living standards: while the figures for New Orleans’s white men and women living below the poverty line are 9.6 and 9.2 per cent correspondingly, the value of the same indicator is 25.5 and 32.3 per cent for black men and women correspondingly.
Thus, the tragedy is not only that the devastation has ruined the community’s property and destroyed the whole mode of life; the most dangerous thing is that the region seems to have no power to revive. It is difficult to imagine how much time the region needs at least to approach the previous level.
After considering all said above, the advice given by the authors in the end of the article seems rather reasonable: the region needs investment into females’ earning potential, which implies improvement of situation with education and professional training. Several short-term measures should be also taken: expanding working opportunities and increasing the minimal wages in the region will help to revive after the devastation and to cope with the burning problems.
However, it is necessary to start building a solid fundament for the region’s future prosperity, which implies the improvements in education and health care. Unfortunately, it is impossible to guarantee that such a bad irony will never take place again, and the region suffering from poverty will be not affected by severe challenges of different kinds; instead, it is necessary to be ready for the destiny’s unpleasant surprises and to be fully armed.