Here’s an impression of some of the talks at the Reflections on Katrina Conference organized by the Center for Cultural Studies that took place here at UCSC last Saturday.
Craig Colton elaborated on the link between vulnerability and poverty: how the poor are more vulnerable to extreme events, how drought and flood damages first felt among the poor. He gave a historical perspective on the patterns of floods in New Orleans, and the structural respons they were followed by, mainly the building of levees. He also highlighted the links between social stratification and who inhabits the higher and lower parts of the city. The rumour of intentional flooding, he mentioned, has at least one historical base in the big 1927 flooding. Jordan Flaherty, connected to Left Turn, talked about different dimensions of what kind of disaster exactely hit New Orleans. The city was not devasted by the hurricane, but the following day when the levees broke. Crowds put on buses without knowing where the buses were going; no cars allowed near 17 miles of the camps; army shooting on the people who tried to cross the bridge by foot. No matter the amount of chaos, it is clear that such kind of evacuation would have never been tolerated if the people were white and/or rich. And now people are being stopped from coming back. An official “prediction” says that 250.000 (half of the population) will be back by 2007. The truth is: there is an elaborated policy to police who is allowed back in the city. “Residents need to change their attitude before they are allowed back in,” according to one of the officials. The plan that neighborhoods will be demolished if not enough residents are rebuilding the neighborhood thus effectively ties into a plan about which neighborhoods are to be demolished. An assault on the strong traditions of community and resistance of New Orleans. The disaster industrial complex. The first public building reconstructed after the hurricane where prisons. Clyde Woods spoke of Katrina as a striptease of American humanism before the eyes of the whole world. Cracking open the discourse on racial equality, making the extent of racial division painfully visible. The media discourse on looters and savages echoes very old racist discourses – the discourse had effectively gone beyond the the coded (pacifying) language for racism. Woods also spoke of the importance of the city of New Orleans in Afro-American culture, New Orleans as a sacred and spiritual space in that respect. And the current struggle for displaced residentes of New Orleans, internal refugees, to get back to their city. “Afro-Americans never thought they would have to fight for “a right to return” within the U.S., and here we are… and it is going nowhere.” Paul Ortiz spoke about how natural disaster and capitalism work together. His contribution to the collection Hurricane Katrina. Responses and Responsibilities was partly prompted by his disturbance at the assumption that the Katrina disaster would harm the Bush administration. In fact the disasters offers major opportunities for the destruction of public goods and community and for the further privitisation. For making the poor even more poor. The state respons thus should not be considered as “a failure”, but a logic extension of Reaganism. Ortiz talked about the dominance of the ideology in which people are trained to be hostile versus any kind of goverment, leaving the American people with little tools to reclaim their goverment. Instead the reflex is: defend yourself, get your own resoures, get educated, rely on yourself… Somebody brought up the proposition in a newspaper commentary to divide spend the total sum needed for reconstruction of New Orleans into individual checks to damaged residents. Where does that leave the value of the reconstruction of a city, of community, of collective memory… In a last session about remembrance, Elizabeth Spelman talked about the relationship to the land, to physical environment through material objects, through “belongings”. Functioning as a link to the past; mediating our relationship to space. And what these considerations mean for the construction of a city: commemoration, the preservation of memories of those who inhabity the city versus the selling of memories: the reconstruction of the French quarter for tourists imaginations.
MarÃa and i were very struck by the extent of (planned, organized) “social hygiene” and ethnic cleansing operations involved in the disaster that hit the city of New Orleans… As i write this up, the Bush administration is under fire for having ignored the warning that the levees wouldn’t hold a day before Katrina hit – given that the levees broke the day after the hurricane, that adds up to the precious time of two days to try to organize… “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans, we couldn’t do it but God did,” an official said earlier. This unholly alliance between the Bush administration and (their) God doesn’t stop to get more worrisome…
A hopeful moment at the conference: a group of students announced that they would be organizing a week of thinking and action around the issues raised by Katrina, and the situation in New Orleans, in February. Kristy, Sam and MarÃa, you girls rock!
Other references to groups during the conference:
Common Ground Collective
Community Labor United
New Orleans Housing Emergency Team
Latino Outreach Project
Safe Street Strong Communities
