Situating Katrina

Last night, I began mourning the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath with my first viewing of the documentary Trouble the Water. The documentary, which focuses on a couple in their struggle for survival during and after the monstrous storm landed in New Orleans and Mississippi, highlighted both the unnaturalness of the Katrina disaster (i.e. the culpability of years of neoliberal economic policy and the racist and classist disregard for human life exhibited by the United States Government in the aftermath) and the beauty of survival that so many residents of the Gulf Coast exhibited in their struggle to live to tell the story. I have no biological family in New Orleans. But after Katrina, I am kindred with many of the people there.

This film, with all of its intensity, has pushed me to situate Katrina and her legacy in my own development as a young organizer, scholar, and activist. While personal narratives are often derided in discussions of the political, I have come to see them as integral to understanding the reasons why people develop radical and revolutionary consciousnesses and commitments. Personal narratives are the ways that individuals tell other individuals about their problems. It is in the telling and hearing of these (often intense) personal stories that people come to understand their plights outside of their individual situations. Personal narratives are integral for community knowledge production and ultimately organized resistance. So bear with me.

New Orleans and the tragedy of Katrina and her aftermath have been central in the development of my political consciousnesses. Situated just on the cusp of my transition from American Citizen to person committed to the fundamental transformation of this beast from the belly outward, Hurricane Katrina came to help me define my relation to the Nation State, to Capitalism, and to white supremacy. It was as at the moment that the truth about Katrina and her aftermath started to leach out slowly from the survivors that I began to truly understand my position as a Black man from a poor family, who was born and raised in the rural South.

Katrina’s violent winds and churning storm surges were no match for an ailing infrastructure. Levees that hadn’t been touched in over twenty years, despite warnings from local, state, and federal agencies about the unsoundness of the entire NOLA levee system, were bound to break with the advance of a powerful storm. How could all of these levels of government systematically ignore the imminent reality of such a disaster? How could the levees be so weak, in such a powerful country? Later, questions about the rebuilding of the French Quarter and malls and the destruction of intact Public Housing Developments would again refocus my attention on New Orleans. How could the city justify rebuilding the French Quarter, where few people live, and ignore the Lower Ninth Ward, where many people lived, for years? At the particular junctures that I was in my development, questions about Katrina led me to question further the conditions that I saw daily in my hometown of Tappahannock. How come the roads in my own hometown were always in disrepair? How come our school had had no major renovation projects since the 1970’s? How come there were people in my community who live without running water or electricity in the Twenty-first Century? Katrina made me question the very nature of my relationship with the U.S. and with capitalism.

And then there were reports of the “looters, thieves, and irresponsible mothers!” The images of people who look like members of my own family scrounging to find basic supplies for survival in the destroyed city being labeled as looters, I.e. people ‘unworthy’ of rescue or water, was perhaps one of the most jarring images that I had ever witnessed. Of course, I faintly remember the Rodney King beating, but never had I recalled such poignant images of racism in the media (at least before I started thinking about the images of ‘black pathology’ we are inundated with daily). How the FUCK could people surviving the destruction of their city by the historical forces of a neoliberal economy, poverty, and white supremacy, be labeled thieves? How was it that these racist images seemed to ‘justify’ the primary causes of the disaster (i.e. neoliberal economy, white supremacy, etc. etc.) These images in particular smacked me into the harsh reality of being Black and poor and Southern in America. Despite the culpability of capitalism (particularly under the neoliberal regime) and white supremacy in ordering my/our daily existences, we were to be blamed for our problems, and even our deaths due to the hurricane.

Oh yes, situating Katrina helped me to situate myself! I came to see that Our lives were less than money to be made. Our babies could be left to die in their attics. Our grandmothers could be left in hospitals to drown. Our brothers in jail could be left chained in their cells in the rising sewage water. We could be shot in the street for crossing into white Parishes. Katrina helped me understand that this country, as it stands, is no place suitable for poor Black people, or (as I would later come to understand) any poor or non-white people.

My heart goes out to the people of New Orleans and Mississippi as we approach the anniversary of Katrina. Your deaths will not be in vain. I am Kindred with the people of New Orleans and lower Mississippi.