{"id":54,"date":"2006-04-06T14:20:20","date_gmt":"2006-04-06T19:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/2006\/04\/06\/making-disaster-samples\/"},"modified":"2006-04-06T14:20:20","modified_gmt":"2006-04-06T19:20:20","slug":"making-disaster-samples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/2006\/04\/06\/making-disaster-samples\/","title":{"rendered":"making disaster samples …"},"content":{"rendered":"

for when we perform is really nice because it gives me the opportunity to go through a bunch of media that missed my radar, or that I saw or heard, but didn’t fully process. This DN! interview with Michael Eric Dyson<\/a> about racism and hurricane Katrina is a good example of this.<\/p>\n

Being in New Orleans, even months of time and an onslaut of media coverage since the hurricane, it was still startling how destroyed and vacant some of the neighborhoods seemed.\u00c2\u00a0 It was interesting to go through a lot of radio broadcasts and finally have a first-hand visual for the things they were talking about.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, the whole experience was really difficult to process or to come to any coherent conclusion.\u00c2\u00a0 I saw something Ryan wrote, and I feel like\u00c2\u00a0 it sums things up pretty accurately.\u00c2\u00a0 To paraphrase him, “it was a picture of everything that’s wrong about the world, with no good solution”.<\/p>\n

As we were driving away from the city, to play another show, in another town, we talked about some hard questions.\u00c2\u00a0 Is there really someone who can be blamed?\u00c2\u00a0 Was there ever the infrastructure to evacuate less mobile communities?\u00c2\u00a0 Would folks have evacuated if they had the chance?\u00c2\u00a0 Peoples homes and lives aside (which, I know, is an assy place to start), does it make sense to rebuild in geographically disadvantaged areas?<\/p>\n

In the interview, Dyson makes some compelling analysis to the issue of responsibility for the injustices of the response (or lack thereof).\u00c2\u00a0 Dyson describes that some of the apathy towards trying to aid some residents of NOLA as “a southern racial narrative playing itself out on a global stage.”\u00c2\u00a0 He continues:<\/p>\n

I think we saw the vicious politics of the collective racial imagination of the South, which has no tolerance, as one historian put it, either for black pain or black suffering on the one hand or black agency or success on the other. Both of them are obliterated in the Southern imagination, and we saw that down in Hurricane Katrina.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This same understanding helps explain not only the response, but why people lived in such dangerous areas to begin with, and why many couldn’t leave on their own.\u00c2\u00a0 Its a systemic and shared neglect of injustices that have compounded, over and over, for as long as America has been around.\u00c2\u00a0 Can we blame our forefathers?\u00c2\u00a0 The first slave owners in the Americas, or ourselves for lacking the collective motivation so that these same old injustices play out again and again.
\nWhat is troubling is not only stories of apathy towards some New Orleans residents, but actively turning away resources that could have saved lives like seats on an empty Amtrak train or international aid.\u00c2\u00a0 Other reports, such as this one<\/a> aired on This American Life tell stories of police preventing\u00c2\u00a0 people from passing to safer areas of the city.\u00c2\u00a0 Ultimately, what is horrible about these stories is that they don’t represent an example of a lack of resources, but, simply, people intervening in other people’s attempts to do what was common sense to try to save their lives.<\/p>\n

Returning to the idea of the injustice and tragedy of the hurricane being a direct result of a troubling history and a failure by all of us in the US to acknowledge that history and how it still shapes our country and many, many lives, such an understanding does give us some ideas for rebuilding NOLA, and maybe for using this reconstruction as an opportunity to start building a more just society.\u00c2\u00a0 Many, such as Mitch Landrieu, a Louisianna politician, argue that hurricane hurt everybody<\/a>, meaning that communities were destroyed and people displaced across many lines of race and class.\u00c2\u00a0 In that case, shouldn’t the rebuilding of the city and the people in it be so egalitarian.\u00c2\u00a0 Perhaps, ultimately, we will have to accept that some places will not be rebuilt, that New Orleans will have fewer residents.\u00c2\u00a0 But there are parts of the city that are being rebuilt (some parts, in fact, that it is difficult to perceive having undergone any trauma) and people returning to carry on with their lives.\u00c2\u00a0 The city can either be one of rhethorical diversity, or one that tries to really be that.\u00c2\u00a0 There can be a collective decision about who those people who get to return to the city and live in the higher-lying areas, or there can be no real decision.\u00c2\u00a0 The new, New Orleans can reflect our collective legacy of racial and economic injustice or it can be the start of something more.<\/p>\n

I do feel strange writing about a city that I have absolutely no ties to.\u00c2\u00a0 And it was strange to see packs of largely non-resident, largely-white, largely middle-class, largely college student folks helping to rebuild some of the most devestated parts of the city.\u00c2\u00a0 But I think what is important to think about is that while the hurricane is a story about a region of the country endangered by nature, and one that most accutely carries the legagy of an unjust history, the dynamics that made the event so tragic are ones that are playing out in communities all over America, and that play out all over the world.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe we’re all so fascinated with the hurricane because the the end result of our history is so apparent, so tangible, that we are holding our collective breaths waiting to see if it could be a turning point for this history.\u00c2\u00a0 The mass protests by Latinos and Chicanos against anti-immigrant legistation offers us the same hope in a point of divergence.\u00c2\u00a0 It might be a mistake, though, to be patient gawking bystanders waiting to see if those in power try to create justice in NOLA.\u00c2\u00a0 Rather, we should create our own justice, and if each of us can’t make it in NOLA, we need to create it wherever we can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

for when we perform is really nice because it gives me the opportunity to go through a bunch of media that missed my radar, or that I saw or heard, but didn’t fully process. This DN! interview with Michael Eric Dyson about racism and hurricane Katrina is a good example of this. Being in New… Continue reading making disaster samples …<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wnIz-S","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}