Acting Together in the Midst of Disaster
We must never forget these facts that made Hurricane Katrina a travesty: That climate change is creating unprecedented storms in size and intensity. Katrina was one of them. That ongoing ecological destruction in the name of profits has been perpetuated for more than a hundred years, including the destruction of wetlands and other natural barriers along the coastlines, allowing hurricanes to move further inland than ever before, in order to open up access to Gulf oil and commercial shipping routes.
Next, it was that levees were built substandard by corruption and greed when contractors and some politicians knew they would never hold. And, finally, that the government response at all levels left thousands of people to die who had no means to evacuate due to health, age, and lack of funds, transportation, or connections. Individuals and families were trapped in their homes, on the streets, on their rooftops, and in their attics. Power reacted with brute force and criminalization of the people. It was criminal neglect. This was the latest in a long history of largely invisible disasters of neglect in these communities. To me, the levees became a symbol of the way that the corruption and arrogance of governments disregards the most vulnerable people.(crow 2014: 4)
When Hurricane Katrina devastated communities across the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005, it became painfully clear to many people living in the U.S. that climate change was no longer some abstract or distant problem. As the above remarks from long-time community organizer scott crow suggest, the impacts of climate change9 are shaped by a variety of factors— psychological, social, and systemic—including inadequate preparation, corruption, arrogance, greed, and deeply ingrained patterns of indifference and neglect. When the levees surrounding New Orleans gave way to surging coastal waters, all the amenities upon which residents had come to rely abruptly vanished.
Many houses were swept away or consumed by floodwaters, while others were left smoldering in flames amidst sparking power lines and leaky gas mains. Water, electrical, and telecommunications infrastructures were downed or disconnected. Flooded cars, buses, and streets rendered the usual modes of transportation unusable. Jobs were swiftly relocated, rendered irrelevant, or disappeared. Meanwhile, opportunistic landlords raised rents amidst growing real estate speculation. Developers and investors scooped up bundles of properties for a song, often holding buildings left vacant and in disrepair, banking on rising values to come. Charter schools swooped in to replace an underfunded public school system left further in disarray, saddled with dozens of crumbling buildings: roofs leaking, mold spreading, immersed in a toxic soup of floodwaters laced with gas, debris, and animal carcasses.While thousands of New Orleanians were voluntarily evacuated by government agencies in the days following the storm, many others were forcefully displaced to disparate locations hundreds of miles away, often without any means of returning home. The several thousand others whom the federal government simply left behind to fend for themselves, or who were unable or refused to be evacuated from their homes, were faced with the enormous challenge of surviving in post-Katrina New Orleans. The difficult situations of many remaining residents were exacerbated by the fact that official channels of support proved grossly incapable of addressing emerging needs, particularly in historically underserviced neighborhoods. In several overwhelmingly poor, largely black communities, state-sponsored and professional relief was either entirely absent, or unhelpfully, insultingly present, answering to needs that didn’t exist and setting up bureaucratic hurdles that prevented people from accessing needed services.
In his 2014 book, Black Flags and Windmills, crow offers an extensive account of why so many people were compelled to rush into New Orleans with “emergency hearts” (65), precisely when the federal government was struggling to evacuate everyone they could manage.
In his own case, it was a longstanding friendship with Robert H. King, a former member of the Black Panther Party, that first moved crow to journey from his home in Austin, Texas. King, who was living in New Orleans when Katrina made landfall, lost contact with crow when the levees broke. With the streets flooding and news of a citywide lockdown spreading, crow grew increasingly worried. When an acquaintance proposed that the two go in search of King, crow “had to know if he was all right” (ibid. 8). “As a community organizer who cares about people no matter where they might be,” recalls crow, “I felt that it was my responsibility to aid those in New Orleans who, already marginalized, now had total devastation added to their burden” (8—9). After making an initial, particularly jarring trip into the city by boat, the search team turned up no signs of their friend, returning to Austin deeply shaken by all they had encountered along the way.Several days later, upon receiving a call for aid from Malik Rahim, crow decided to make a second trip to New Orleans. Taking another opportunity to search for King, he also intended to contribute to relief efforts organized by those with deep roots in the city. Rahim, a veteran community organizer and former Panther, had helped run free breakfast for children programs in two of the most poverty-stricken housing projects in New Orleans. Calling from his house in the predominantly black neighborhood of Algiers, Rahim reported to crow: “we got racist white vigilantes driving around in pickup trucks terrorizing black people on the street. It’s very serious. We need supplies and support” (ibid. 46).
By the time crow arrived, Rahim and his neighbors, including native New Orleanian Sharon Johnson, had already been struggling to find ways to provide basic aid to one another. “There was no Red Cross, no FEMA,” writes crow. “There were no other options” (ibid. 50). On September 5, 2005, the trio decided to form a collective based at Rahim’s home in Algiers, calling themselves the “Common Ground Collective” in honor of their lost friend King.10 Within a week, the group grew to around fifty strong.
Over the following months, its ranks swelled to several hundred, with mostly white, twenty-something, anarchist-oriented volunteers arriving from across the country. Common Ground was a community-initiated, all-volunteer organization with a mission “to provide short-term relief for victims of hurricane disasters in the Gulf Coast region, and long-term support in rebuilding the communities affected in the New Orleans area” (ibid. 229). Much of the group’s work involved responding to seemingly intractable problems confronting those left behind, many of which were shaped, in part, by inept government and philanthropic responses. As crow recalls,We were seeing, in real time, what slowly filtered out to become painfully apparent worldwide. The state was off balance and unresponsive. The entities within it were failing to grasp the developing issues. The Red Cross wasn’t doing any better. They were raising billions of dollars while people were still suffering. For me, it was the closest thing to seeing those in Power lose their stranglehold of control. We interpreted this as an opportunity to create an autonomous space where residents could establish self-determination over their future, be treated with dignity and respect, and have access to basic services that hadn’t existed in years, if ever. We would begin relief work, without reliance on or interference from the state or professional aid agencies. We would prefigure the civil society we would like to see in the future.
(ibid. 65)
I want to propose that an alternative approach to understanding collective responsibility can be assembled from the work of Common Ground—one that draws our attention to the collective accomplishments of ordinary people navigating impossibly difficult situations.11 This approach can be summarized in three recommendations for future inquiry, to which I now turn.
14.3.1 Clear Paths or Paths Cleared?
Characterizing Common Ground as a “revolutionary aid organization,” crow recounts their first three years in Algiers as “a story of ordinary people compelled to act for justice in an extraordinary situation” (ibid.
59, 4). Indeed, the collective’s story is one of people joining forces to deal with problems that existing institutions and practices were not—and likely could not— address, thus exhibiting their collective brilliance in action. As a guide to understanding collective responsibility, crow’s retelling of the story teaches us to focus not on what other people ought to have known at a given instant, but on how those who came to each other’s aid managed to generate new questions, ideas, and knowledge together, in and through collective struggle.For instance, next to Algiers in the much smaller, wealthier, whiter neighborhood of Algiers Point, a racist white militia had surfaced in the wake of the storm. Militia members hung hostile, stigmatizing signs (e.g., “You Loot, We Shoot”) outside their homes and patrolled the streets of neighboring black communities in trucks, harassing and on several occasions, gunning down unarmed black men with impunity (Thompson 2008). “It was as if the dam of civil society that kept them from acting out their most racist tendencies had broken enough to allow their hatred to emerge,” writes crow.
Local authorities, with their racist attitudes toward the communities they were supposed to protect, stood by and let this militia function. There were bullet-riddled bodies of black men in the street, including the one that we tried to get picked up for days while it continued to decompose.
(crow 2014: 51)
How would the collective and their neighbors protect themselves? Who would check these racist vigilantes, and how—with local law enforcement in complete disarray, at best, and passively or actively supporting racist terrorism, at worst? “In the stress of those days, I struggled to think through the unstable situation,” writes crow (ibid. 59). Under circumstances unfamiliar to all involved, there was no dearth of clear solutions to the threat of racist violence left unpoliced. Nevertheless, drawing lessons from the community safety programs initiated by the Panthers in the late 1960s (see Newton 2009), and retailoring those experiments to suit a historically unique situation, members of Common Ground came up with the idea of setting up safety patrols, taking up a practice of community armed self-defense—a practice that crow notes was adopted reluctantly and as a last resort, following a series of violent confrontations (crow 2014: 55—58; cf.
crow 2018). According to crow, “The presence of whites and blacks working together against the militia would later be cited by locals as one of the factors that helped ease tensions in that difficult time” (crow 2014: 54). “Self-defense opens up the possibility of changing the rules of engagement,” he observes in retrospect. “It doesn’t always make situations less violent, but it can help to balance the inequity of power” (ibid. 58).Taking up arms to discourage racist violence also helped remaining residents direct their collective energies to addressing the scarcity of basic amenities. After establishing a measure of security for themselves and their neighbors, on September 13 the collective came up with the idea of setting up a distribution center at Rahim’s home. The plan was to gather supplies on regular out-of-town excursions while coordinating larger deliveries from abroad. Within a matter of weeks, Common Ground was able to make a wide variety of goods and services available to Algiers residents, operating the distribution center “from 7 a.m. until curfew, seven days a week” (ibid. 115). With the help of a team of street medics, the group also established a more permanent first aid station in a nearby mosque, which quickly evolved into the Common Ground Health Clinic. This clinic—one of three the collective would eventually set up—still operates to this day, having morphed into a non-profit organization by the same name.
Common Ground went on to give birth to a wide range of programs organically, out of necessity, attending keenly to evolving local problems and needs with an optimistic, creative outlook on the future. As crow puts it, “Our intentions were to create permanent and sustainable solutions with and for those who were the most affected,” grounded in the practice of solidarity and, eventually, “mutual aid” (ibid. 103, 165). For example, in addition to providing protection from white militias and distributing basic amenities, members also fought for displaced residents’ rights to return; provided legal aid and safe shelter for women; pressured police for accountability and supported prisoners’ rights; prevented housing demolitions, partly by gutting and repairing structures; used available legal means and direct action tactics to halt evictions; worked together with neighborhood councils; and helped create long-term food security through small-scale agricultural projects (ibid. 165, Appendix). The collective included a team of street medics and, eventually, nurses and doctors. In addition to establishing clinics, members engaged in Latinx health care outreach; cleaned up garbage and toxic floodwaters along streets and in houses; provided soil and water testing; offered bioremediation services for soils damaged by toxic substances; made counselling and social work services available, as well as massage, acupuncture, and herbal remedies; constructed compost toilets for families dealing with plumbing problems and water shutoffs; and planted community gardens that brought people together growing food.
Unlike state and professional aid organizations, Common Ground refused to see those whom they were serving as faceless or helpless victims, insisting instead on treating their neighbors as “active participants in the struggle to make their lives better”—that is, as people who were coming together “to struggle for survival, justice, and self-determination” (ibid. 103, 60). Rather than establishing relations of dependence between long-time residents, on the one hand, and relief organizations staffed by out-of-towners, on the other, the collective worked to support those most directly affected by the storm in taking charge of their own lives; in collectively analyzing deeply rooted problems in the course of developing solutions; and in rebuilding their own communities in sustainable, self-determining ways. While it would not be unreasonable to suppose that organizations such as FEMA and the Red Cross ought to be best positioned to deliver aid, the types of solutions that seemed clearest to these groups were actually among the problems Algiers residents would be forced to confront.
14.3.2 Inactive Groups or Groups in Action?
The array of ideas and experiments Common Ground managed to generate in the midst of severe instability, uncertainty, and hostility is truly astounding. So is the amount of collective learning that took place over those years, which later nourished a variety of developing projects, including the Occupy Sandy relief efforts that surfaced in 2012 (see Lustig 2012; Moore & Russell 2011). Second, then, I want to suggest that the story of Common Ground teaches us to focus not on particular, supposedly singularly significant moments of collective inaction, but on how such moments of astounding collective creativity emerge in the first place.
As the philosopher John P Clark points out in his foreword to the second edition of Black Flags and Windmills, collective responses to overwhelmingly complex problems do not just materialize out of thin air, even when they seem like genuine miracles. They certainly are not the result of sudden flashes of insight, nor of clear blueprints for collective action studiously absorbed by groups of strangers. Rather, “such miracles have deep roots” (crow 2014: xviii). The moment of Common Ground’s emergence was “the product of many small but powerful transformative moments,” adds Clark (2014: xix), not only in the personal lives of its founders, but in the lives and afterlives of the broader social movements from which the collective drew inspiration, volunteers, and material support, and to whom its members continually looked for hard-won lessons.
Some of those histories of collective struggle helped shape the place and people of New Orleans, including many who became involved in Common Ground. Other layers were national and global in scope—particularly in the cases of the Spanish anarchists during the 1930s, the Black Panthers during the 1960s and 1970s, and the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) from the 1980s onward, whose work was especially influential in the formation of Common Ground. “In each of these political tendencies, people rose up to create initiatives that addressed complex and interrelated problems,” observes crow.
They didn’t follow prescribed blueprints for revolution; they reimagined and reconfigured them. When they made mistakes, they learned more about themselves and the evolving situations around them, so as to be more effective. They were motivated by the love of humanity that drives us to create something better in the face of cynicism and repression.
(2014: 72)
14.3.3 Conditions for Collective Blame or Brilliance?
Finally, the story of Common Ground teaches us to focus not on the conditions for collective liability and blame, but on how to create the conditions for more such moments of collective brilliance in the lives of more people.12 These moments are clearly valuable, protecting people from impending harms while building towards more liveable futures. Moreover, we know that these moments have underlying conditions—not only in the initial hours and days when people find themselves thrown into states of emergency, but in the ongoing practices of mutual care and nurtur- ance cultivated in their everyday lives, long before and after storms of various sorts.
I find crow’s notion of the “emergency heart” useful in describing what motivates people to take up the responsibility we all share for making more such moments possible. Inspired by the words of Geronimo ji Jaga, the notion of the emergency heart encapsulates a deep feeling of love that “forms parts of the roots from which struggles grow” (ibid. 87). “Love drives what I call our emergency hearts to action and change in the face of repression and against all odds,” writes crow. “The emergency heart is the feeling of empathy and compassion that motivates us to act now to end oppression and destruction. An emergency heart gets people into the streets to resist injustice and create something better” (ibid.).
Much as collective responses to overwhelmingly complex problems may seem to materialize out of thin air, the emergency heart may seem to beat for exceptional situations only, moving people to act in the now of disaster, in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. But there is another, more mundane sense in which the “state of emergency” is what arises between human beings whenever we find one another in assembly and set to work on assembling ourselves collectively. This everyday sense of emergency is, as Clark points out, “the normal condition of human beings in constant need of responsiveness to other human beings” (2014: xvii). Part of that shared need is a need to prepare each other to respond in situations where no clear and definitive responses are in the offing, and where no single portion of prior knowledge and skill will suffice. There are no sure-fire techniques for readying one another here, though there are plenty of past lessons from which to learn, and the story of Common Ground is but one worthwhile resource. Neither will there be any single, decisive moment where we collectively fail at the task of mutual preparation. As crow’s retelling makes plain, it will take a good deal of patience and encouragement to sustain each other for the long haul—the creative patience of love in the midst of emergency.
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