Revisiting Hurricane Katrina: Racist Violence and the Politics of Disposability

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Revisiting Hurricane Katrina: Racist Violence and the Politics of Disposability
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed


In the long aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people in the United States and globally are still struggling to draw the correct conclusions and learn the right lessons from that horrific catastrophe. Initially, we were led to believe that Katrina was the result of a fateful combination of a natural disaster and government incompetence. The perfect storm of bad luck provided one more example of the general inability of the Bush administration to actually govern, let alone protect its citizenry. Yet, with some distance and sober reflection, such assessment seems a bit shortsighted, and a little too localized.

In truth, Katrina offers a number of relevant lessons not only for US citizens, but also for Canadians and citizens all over the world who must grapple with the global advance of what I call a politics of disposability. First, Katrina is symptomatic of a form of negative globalization that is as evident in Ottawa, Paris and London, as it is in Washington, DC, or New Orleans, or any other city throughout the world. As capital, goods, trade and information flow all over the globe, material and symbolic resources are increasingly being invested in the "free market" while the social state pays a terrible price. As safety nets and social services are being hollowed out and communities crumble and give way to individualized, one-person archipelagos, it is increasingly difficult to address as a collectivity, to act in concert, to meet the basic needs of citizens or maintain the social investments needed to provide life-sustaining services. As nation-states fall under the sway of the principal philosophy of the times, which insists on the end of the era of "big government" in favor of unencumbered individualism and the all-encompassing logic of the market, it is difficult to resurrect a language of social investment, protection and accountability.

Second, as Katrina made perfectly clear, the challenges of a global world, especially its growing ecological challenges, are collective and not simply private. This suggests that citizens in New Orleans as well as in Vancouver, Halifax and Toronto - coastal and inland - must protect those principles of the social contract that offer collective solutions to foster and maintain both ecological sustainability and human survival. Certainly, Canadians have done much to ensure environmental protections, especially in comparison with their neighbors to the south, but there is much, much more that has to be done to curtail the threat of global warming and numerous ecological disasters.

Third, as Hurricane Katrina vividly illustrated, the decline of the social state along with the rise of massive inequality increasingly bar whole populations from the rights and guarantees accorded to fully fledged citizens of the republic, who are increasingly rendered disposable, and left to fend for themselves in the face of natural or human-made disasters. This last challenge is difficult, for here we must connect the painful dots between the crisis in the Gulf Coast and that "other" Gulf crisis in the Middle East; we must connect the dots between images of US soldiers standing next to tortured Iraqis forced to assume the additional indignity of a dog leash to images of bloated bodies floating in the toxic waters that overwhelmed New Orleans city streets after five long days of punctuated government indifference to the suffering of some of its citizen populations. ..................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32629-revisiting-hurricane-katrina-racist-violence-and-the-politics-of-disposability