Resilience is the Message, the Message is Death
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Brandan ‘Bmike’ Odums’ Peace Wall mural, New Orleans East, August 29, 2015. The site’s owner demolished the wall in 2019. // Chris Daemmrich
At the end of August, 2015, ten years after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a thousand people gathered beneath the great dome of McAlister Auditorium. Not all White people, to be sure, but as we were the student body of Tulane University in the heart of Uptown, the faces in the crowd hailed more from exurban Chicago and the Westside of LA than from the Westbank or New Orleans East.
We were young women and men who’d been preteens when the failure of the federal levees smashed generational attempts at pretense. I remembered when, two hundred miles from the Texas coast during my first week of sixth grade in Austin, I saw the disaster unfold through cable TV broadcasts and national newsmagazines. New Orleans revealed itself as mud and broken glass, oil slicks spanning whole neighborhoods and blankets over bodies of the dead. Televangelists and Congressmen said in so many words that the city deserved it, that the ******* and the faggots were lucky to escape the judgment of White God.
From the podium beneath the gilded university crest important men and women who would never have said such reprehensible things about African-Americans and the LGBT community preached the gospel of Resilience. New Orleans is back! Stronger than ever before. The city had faced a historic crisis, it was nearly destroyed, but it’s still here. Smaller but more efficient. A nationally recognized experiment in renewal, reform and retribution.
We didn’t talk about Alcee Fortier High School, before Katrina a nearly all-Black community institution three blocks from Tulane’s Uptown campus in the midst of the city’s most affluent White neighborhood, which was now a branch of Lusher Charter. An organization whose core constituency was affluent, mostly White parents, Lusher was named for a Reconstruction-era state education superintendent who believed Black children undeserving of schooling. It was one of more than two dozen charter managers in the city, whose public school system was abolished after the storm, 7,000 mostly Black teachers and staff laid off in a single stroke.
We didn’t talk about Charity Hospital, the city’s three-hundred-year-old public safety-net hospital which Black activists fought to access in the 1960s, sitting vacant and boarded-up across the street from Tulane Medical School. Unnecessarily closed to justify the clearance of a historic Black neighborhood for a new, $1.2-billion hospital complex, Charity’s limestone bulk sat vacant while Tulane administrators schemed on how to appropriate it as a dorm for the university’s affluent, mostly White student body.
We didn’t talk about public housing, already under attack before the storm, now virtually all demolished. The Magnolia, the St. Bernard, the Calliope, the Lafitte and the Iberville, 4,500 homes in solid 1940s brick buildings that survived the storm mostly undamaged, were fenced off with residents’ possessions still inside. All were bulldozed by citymakers in thrall to debunked, racist theories about “the deconcentration of poverty”. Developers pounced on the now-valuable land around the old project sites, where condos and luxury apartments sprouted.
We didn’t talk about disinvestment in the predominantly Black suburban neighborhoods of New Orleans East, the police murder of Henry Glover and the massacre of men and women at the Danziger Bridge, or the sale of the Regional Transit Authority bus and streetcar system to a French multinational conglomerate which cut half its routes. I could go on but I’ll save my breath. This isn’t what we talk about when we talk about Resilience.
When I say ‘we’ I mean White people, and people of all colors working for the priorities of White institutions under neoliberal racial capitalism. The privatization and sale of public assets serving people racialized as Black so that people racialized as White can extract value from them is so pervasive in post-Katrina New Orleans that to point it out makes me sound like a fish offering observations on the wetness of water.
Neoliberal racial capitalism is the most recent iteration of a political-economic system proceeding unbroken from Indigenous displacement and the enslavement of Africans, to the exploitation of Irish, Italian, Chinese, Honduran and Guatemalan immigrants’ labor, to Jim Crow and modern-day enslavement through the prison-industrial complex and the carceral state.
Resilience for people racialized as Black and for other people of color, and poor people of all races, means surviving the everyday attempted murder that is existence within these systems, to rise again tomorrow and have your labor exploited for another day. Resilience is your ability to survive as the systems which are supposed to support your survival are stolen from under you. Resilience for White people means never having to say you’re sorry. To never acknowledge that we’re the ones stealing.
To really acknowledge this would obligate us to stop. To give up our power, to repair the harm we cause, and not by half measures. Malcolm X said,
“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, that's not progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress comes from healing the wound that the blow made.”
Five years later we mark the 15th anniversary of Katrina’s landfall in the midst of a deadly pandemic, an economic depression, rising global temperatures and the rise of fascism in the United States. The same White people I once sat in that auditorium with packed the streets of New Orleans, Chicago and Los Angeles to protest the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
What will we demand of our nation’s recovery from COVID-19, a man-made disaster which, like Katrina, is impacting Black and Indigenous people worse than anyone else? If we’ve actually learned anything, if we want progress this time, resilience is not enough.
Thanks to Ismael Salgado and Kekeli Dawes, who contributed editorial guidance and thoughts on the subjects in this post. Read what Ish has to say about movies and culture at his blog, Cinematic Ishpressions, and find Kekeli on Instagram @_kawes.