Dark Waters: Hurricane Katrina, the Politics of Disposability and the Racism of Malcolm Gladwell
September 8, 2015
Dark Waters: Hurricane Katrina, the Politics of Disposability and the Racism of Malcolm Gladwell
by Henry Giroux
Katrina does more than evoke a critical understanding of institutional racism and the politics of racial disposability[1]; it also elicits new and more dangerous justifications for racist policies. For instance, the neoliberal shill Malcolm Gladwell reaches a new low with his piece on Katrina titled Starting Over which was published in The New Yorker.[2] He argues that for many of the 100,000 poor blacks displaced by the storm involuntary displacement was a good thing because it opened up new opportunities for upward mobility for them and provided a model for public policy.
When Barbara Bush uttered a similar statement after Katrina, she was condemned roundly in the press for being morally insensitive. Greeting displaced Katrina victims in Houston in the aftermath of the hurricane and forced evacuations, she exclaimed “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this – this is working very well for them.”[3] Barbara Bush’s insensitivity was viewed by many in the black community as a justification for a form of state violence and symptomatic of the racism that dominated her son’s presidency. Yet in Obama’s post-racial America, Gladwell’s racist creed provokes no moral outrage and is published without a touch of irony or a shred of historical consciousness. One exceptional critique comes from Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda, who zeroes in on the racist implications of Gladwell’s commentary. He writes:
Malcolm Gladwell, a biracial Canadian who made his bones promoting the hyper-aggressive “broken windows” police strategy, concludes that involuntary displacement is a good thing for people who are stuck in “bad” neighborhoods or bad cities where poverty is high and chances for upward mobility are low. Since every heavily Black city in the country fits that description, the logic is that Black people should be dispersed to the four winds and prevented from forming concentrated populations.The forced exodus of Katrina should be replicated as public policy, for the good of both the purposely displaced and society as a whole…. It is far too kind to say that Gladwell and his white supremacist sociologists and statisticians blame the victim. The logic of their reasoning is genocidal: the elimination – rather than mere deconcentration – of “bad” populations.[4]
What Ford makes clear is that there is more at stake here than a form of idiotic neoliberal racist fantasy wrapped in the logic of a churlish real-estate agent and sterile numbers cruncher, there is also a hint of the endgame many white conservatives support regarding those marginalized by race, ethnicity, and class. A positon in full-bloom with the emergence of Donald Trump and his overt message of hate and racism. Gladwell is not as crude as Trump, but his logic is the same and the message, wrapped in the discourse of social mobility, is similar. That is, the call is for one of expulsion: get rid of them whether they be poor blacks or immigrants, get them out of the suburbs, out of the cities, put them anywhere where they cannot form communities and where they will be utterly dependent on the good will of the new white missionaries—who have been blessed with quality schools, city services, job opportunities, and so it goes. This is not only disgusting; it is also the logic of genocide with a smile. This is the reasoning in support of creating the dehumanized Other, one that rationalizes not only an intolerable violence, but also supports producing new forms of disposability, new zones of social death, and terminal exclusion.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/08/dark-waters-hurricane-katrina-the-politics-of-disposability-and-the-racism-of-malcolm-gladwell/