Social Policy as Secondary Violences in the Aftermath of a Disaster

Abstract

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures plans for the rebuilding of New Orleans favored the redevelopment of some communities over others. Where residents of vulnerable communities, in particular the Lower Ninth Ward, protested the erasure of their communities, they have been largely socially abandoned as a retaliatory measure for not acquiescing to the elite plan of “Katrina Cleansing.” The implementation of this social abandonment as social policy and the various policies and conditions that have collectively punished residents of the Lower Ninth Ward who are trying to rebuild their community should be seen as uneven racialized capitalist development and as an important extension to what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” In this article, I conceptualize these policies and conditions as secondary violences and through three vignettes I provide a brief description of life in the Lower Ninth Ward where these violences permeate the warp and the woof of the community.

Keywords

secondary violences social policy disaster ecology disaster capitalism Lower Ninth Ward New Orleans Hurricane Katrina social disruption erasures

Personal Reflexive Statements

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans—the city I was born in—on August 29th—my birthday. Although my substantive research focus was not disasters nor had I lived in the area for over 20 years, I nonetheless had an ontological and intellectual need to make sense of it. This need was piqued three years later when a friend sent me a YouTube clip of the Lower Ninth Ward. The clip revealed a neighborhood very much still in the throws of disaster. Having grown up along the Gulf Coast outside of New Orleans and Galveston and being familiar with the destruction and aftermath of hurricanes, nonetheless I could not understand what I was watching. The political and economic abandonment of the neighborhood and the people who lived there was disconcerting and seemingly a violation of both civil and human rights. I lived there for 14 months to try and reconcile the why’s and how’s and to come to terms with the experience of living and working in a zone of abandonment. This article represents part of that attempt.

Introduction

I moved to the Ninth Ward of New Orleans during the last week of April 2010, the week of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and British Petroleum disaster. While for many in Southeastern Louisiana the spill dominated conversations, the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, while troubled by the spill, were still focused on their recovery from an event that had occurred almost five years earlier. On the day of Hurricane Katrina’s fifth anniversary, the Lower Ninth Ward had seen a quarter of its population return. More troubling was that there were no police or fire stations, no health clinic, no grocery store, no library, and the post office was only intermittently open. A large part of the neighborhood had become a dumping ground for neighboring parishes, and the murder rate was creeping up to pre-Katrina levels, when the neighborhood had the unfortunate moniker of “the murder capital of the murder capital” (Landphair 2007:842).

To be sure, New Orleans itself has undergone dramatic changes. As Klein (2007) vividly describes, much of the city had been reimagined and reconstructed. In her work on “disaster capitalism,” Klein notes how disasters, whether a coup, war, tsunami, or hurricane, shock the collective conscious of a society. Residents are “shocked and awed” into giving up taken-for-granted rights and private forces raid the public sphere. In New Orleans, this involved the firing of over 7,000 public school teachers and the replacing of public schools with charters; it involved the closing and demolition of public housing; hospitals and health clinics that served traditionally marginalized populations were closed, while a large swath of the city prepared for the building of the University Medical Center made possible through the use of eminent domain; and citywide rent increased by 50 percent. In the Lower Ninth Ward, nonprofits, often through well-intentioned endeavors, have nonetheless reinforced privatization through the promotion of homeownership and private real estate development (Johnson 2011).¹ Elsewhere, residents have been subjected to a process of urban or green laboratorization (Allen 2011), where rebuilding has been stalled while homeowners wait for sustainable rebuilding materials or certifications.² Homeowners working with rebuild nonprofits now often see their grants given directly to the nonprofit and thus lack any control over the rebuilding process.

In many parts of New Orleans, disaster capitalism has become a permanent way of life. The ongoing failure to rebuild and restore New Orleans allows for and justifies the existence of a society, where trauma is chronically perpetuated; the city is always in a state of emergency; it is constantly “responding” rather than “recovering” (Adams, Hattum, and English 2009:623). Others have likewise pointed out that post-Katrina New Orleans mixed disaster capitalism with feel good or do good capitalism (Adams 2013; Whitehall and Johnson 2011), but not everywhere in New Orleans has disaster capitalism supplanted life. Rather than the mobilization of market forces to profit off of suffering and trauma, some neighborhoods have simply been abandoned. Thus, while, as Adams et al. (2009:630) note, the failed recovery efforts continue to “authorize violence by way of its inhumane erasures and interventions,” within studies of disaster capitalism it is usually the interventions that are privileged.

Rarely is the violence of erasure part of the disaster capitalist narrative. In New Orleans, these mostly black and poor neighborhoods, such as the Lower Ninth, experienced the worst of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures. They were then met with “Katrina Cleansing”—a series of policies to permanently displace residents by reducing the footprint of their neighborhoods (Sanyika 2009). Where they protested their erasure, they have been punished through a series of retaliatory policies and measures designed to discourage and prevent them from rebuilding their homes and communities. This involved nearly a 12-month wait to return to rebuild in some communities, a racially discriminatory housing grant program, the elimination or reduction of public services (including housing, hospitals, clinics, schools, fire/police, transportation, and mail), and the largest instance of contractor fraud in the history of the country (which has to date not been investigated). So while disaster capitalism has come to particular neighborhoods and dominates New Orleans’s social, political, and economic institutions, something else entirely structures the experiences of the residents of the poor, predominantly black neighborhoods of New Orleans.

In these marginalized neighborhoods, uneven racialized capitalist development and disaster ecologies mixed to facilitate both unequal destruction and recovery (Logan 2009; Loyd 2007). These neighborhoods have been consistently subject to various policies that result in the absence of state intervention. These policies represent a form of bureaucratic domination that has harmed residents for decades but has become especially troubling since the collapse of the levees on August 29, 2005 (Clark 2006; Gunewardena and Schuller 2008). They have exacerbated the original violence associated with Katrina but have become disassociated with the original disaster and yet still structure everyday life. I call this set of policies secondary violences. I do this in part to emphasize that Katrina and the federal levee failures should be understood as a process and not an event; the flooding of New Orleans was not made possible by a confluence of events in the Gulf of Mexico in late August 2005, but through decades of policies and decisions made by the members of its growth machine (Molotch 1976). In this article, I argue that these violences represent a natural extension to Klein’s disaster capitalism and that the experiences of residents who returned to the Lower Ninth Ward augur the future of marginalized communities in the aftermath of social disruption.³ In doing so, I hope to show that there is much in Klein’s work on disaster capitalism for social scientists to build upon and that this article represents an initial attempt to do just that. In the following section, I conceptualize secondary violences and explain the role that these violences have played in impeding the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward. In the third section, I briefly describe the experience of living with these violences on an everyday basis in the Lower Ninth Ward through three vignettes that come from field notes and interview data.

Secondary Violences

The concept of secondary violences is related to “secondary traumas” and “secondary disasters” (Gill 2007). Gill notes that Erikson’s (1976) use of “second trauma” to describe the aftermath of the Buffalo Creek Flood was to identify the loss of “communality” among residents. The loss produces a traumatic condition in addition to the trauma of the original disaster. Gill writes that the “[i]mpacts of secondary trauma are related to diminished social capital, a corrosive community, chronic stress and negative lifescape changes among individuals and prolonged social disruption in communities” (2007:625).

The secondary trauma extends the time period under which the effects of the disaster are experienced. These secondary traumas, at least in New Orleans, have included, as Gill (2007) and others (see especially Flagherty 2010) note, the abysmal efforts of the Road Home program (see Finch, Emrich, and Cutter 2010 for a description of how the Road Home program has actually hindered recovery), delays in rebuilding infrastructure, and increases in the crime and death rates. These traumas differ from secondary disasters in that secondary disasters are caused by the original disaster, but, conceptually speaking, must be a disaster in and of itself. In other words, the secondary disaster is an event that is separate from the original disaster, in both time and space, and causes its own social disruption (Gill 2007). While Gill’s notion of a secondary trauma accurately describes part of the experiences of residents in the aftermath of Katrina, I use the term secondary violences to capture the lived experience of the long-term aftermath for a couple of reasons.

Both secondary disasters and secondary traumas are related to the aftermath of the original disaster or trauma. Secondary violences, however, precede the original disaster or trauma, they simply become sped up or finalized in the aftermath. In New Orleans, these secondary violences (and their social causes) are most visible in those communities that pre-Katrina were the most marginalized and underdeveloped; marginalization in these neighborhoods has become hypermarginalization (Harvey 2014). The violences are thus the result of long-standing social and racial antipathies held by the dominant class in New Orleans toward particular communities and therefore conceptually highlights both the past and current pathological orientation to the (re)building of these communities. It is not the case that Katrina created these “urban outcasts” (Wacquant 2008) or outcasts of modernity (Bauman 2004), but rather that decades of both development (and nondevelopment) created Katrina (Germany 2007). These violences are thus located in part in the uneven racialized capitalist development of New Orleans, but they are secondary in the sense that the aftermath of the disaster represents the most visible and experiential culmination of those policies. Hence, the outcomes, discussed below, are seen as secondary to the disaster, much like secondary traumas and secondary disasters,⁴ but are always part of the slow violence that targets poor communities (Nixon 2013).

These violences have been intentional and foreseeable. In neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward, officials with the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB)⁵ calculated a simple social (some would argue racial) cost–benefit analysis regarding rebuilding and originally decided to erase the community. Thus, while rooted in pre-Katrina attitudes toward poor and black neighborhoods, they are also the direct consequence of social policies and decisions made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Clark 2006).

While the racial inequalities inscribed in the Road Home program should have been foreseen, few have claimed it was intentionally setup to be discriminatory. Yet anyone familiar with the history of racial segregation in housing and the role of the federal government in creating that segregation would have immediately identified problems with the Road Home program. The program provided homeowners money for rebuilding their homes based on the pre-Katrina home value rather than the cost of rebuilding. Hence, the program ignored the high demand for contractors and building supplies in the aftermath of Katrina, but more importantly simultaneously ignored the conditions that worked to suppress the market values of homes in marginalized neighborhoods and that the cost to rebuild a home in a “bad” neighborhood is the same as in a “good” neighborhood. Other policies, such as not allowing residents to return to the Lower Ninth Ward for almost a year, furthered the original environmental damage and forced many residents to spend rebuilding funds on day-to-day necessities. Likewise, in the failure to establish an oversight committee for contractors, the largest instance of contractor fraud occurred in the aftermath of Katrina, costing many residents the majority of their rebuilding funds. Also, the decision to not allow homeowners to rebuild if their house was declared more than 50 percent damaged, delayed rebuilding as some residents worked to get their home at the 50 percent mark so they could obtain rebuilding funds and permits. These policies (or their absence) were not part of the damage caused by Katrina but were secondary to it. These violences have become the recovery.

Relatedly, as Susman, O’Keefe, and Wisner (1983) note underdevelopment is linked with both control and exploitation, and crisis often leads to exacerbated vulnerability. While New Orleans’s economy is itself insufficiently integrated (the tourism and hospitality and oil sectors dominate), many marginalized neighborhoods have long relied on informal economies to subsist. This underdevelopment and lack of integration into both larger economies and the city itself led to the forgetting of these neighborhoods. Thus, almost all of the rebuilding efforts in these neighborhoods have neglected the structural crisis that precipitated Katrina and the levee failures. It is difficult (and yet not sufficient) to separate the capitalist and racial exploitation of communities in New Orleans.

Goldberg (2009; Golberg and Giroux 2014) explains that the trauma inflicted upon post–Katrina New Orleans has much to do with racial neoliberalism. While neoliberalism involves the privatization of property, programs, and poverty, for Goldberg, racial neoliberalism involves privatizing race. This process simply involves officially removing race from public categories and pushing it into the private sphere, where racial inequalities are furthered and yet the state absolves itself of the need/ability to enact laws that would further racial equality.

While racial neoliberalism has been the norm for decades in places like New Orleans, post-Katrina it was visible for all to see. State policies there are well known, and include, in part the demolition of public housing and its replacement with a Section 8 voucher system (an additional 5,000 families needed housing assistance post-Katrina); the closing of public hospitals and public health clinics—in a state that already had one of the lowest rates of insurance and where Orleans Parish had almost 1 in 3 residents on Medicaid (Rudowitz, Rowland, and Shartzer 2006); and, likewise, all of the firing of all public school teachers in Orleans Parish. The immediate effect of these policies overwhelmingly was placed on black communities.

For example, pre-Katrina, 19 percent of white voucher users used vouchers in lower poverty areas (as opposed to extreme poverty areas), but only 6 percent of black voucher users were able to do so (Devine et al. 2003). Ten times the number of black voucher users (21 percent) were forced to use vouchers in extreme poverty areas as compared to whites (2 percent). Pushing market solutions into the private sphere has not substantially decreased these trends, where now over 90 percent of voucher users are black (U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development [2000] 2010). In fact, a Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center audit test in 2009 found that in 82 percent of the tests landlords refused to accept vouchers, and a 2014 test found that blacks using vouchers received less favorable treatment than whites using the same vouchers in the same instance 44 percent of the time (Seicshnaydre and Albright 2015). The result has been a major housing crisis in the black community. And to follow through, blacks represented 74 percent of New Orleans public school teachers before the storm, down to 51 percent in 2012, while the percentage of white teachers increased 18 percent (Dreilinger 2015); likewise close to 75 percent of Charity Hospital’s patients were black (http://www.savecharityhospital.com/racial-and-economic-justice). As Goldberg demonstrates, racial neoliberalization is an unusually violent process. It is for him, using Mbembe’s (2003) term a matter of “necropolitics,” where the state uses abandonment to facilitate death. These policies that fall into the category of secondary violences involve “the foreshortening of life and life’s possibilities. The humiliations, degradations, indignities, and modes of exclusion … directly or indirectly foreshorten life” (Goldberg 2014:34). Thus, these violences are also secondary in the sense that they reveal the secondary class of citizenship held by those targeted by the most pernicious post-disaster policies.

The result of these violences has been an increase in racial segregation, and as many scholars have demonstrated the languished rebuilding of black communities (Elliott and Pais 2006; Johnson 2011; Logan 2009; Pais and Elliott 2008). As Elliott and Pais (2006) note in their discussion of class and racial differences in Katrina’s effects on victims, blacks were four times more likely than whites to lose their jobs and seven times more likely than the “average” worker to lose their job when taking income into consideration. This has greatly affected the ability to move back and has reentrenched poverty and racial inequality. In their later work, Pais and Elliott (2008:1448) call this the “treadmill of destruction”—an instance where disaster zones reproduce, and often actually augment, previous versions of themselves as socially divided landscapes. Green, Kouassi, and Mambo (2013) demonstrated a significant correlation between race and return, finding blacks have been less likely to return than whites even holding damage of the neighborhood constant. Others, including my own qualitative field work for 14 months from 2010 to 2011 in the Lower Ninth Ward, have found that residents of these abandoned neighborhoods understand the racial differences inherent to the recovery (or lack thereof) of New Orleans’s neighborhoods (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2010; Finch et al. 2010; Harvey 2014; Marable 2006).

Furthermore, and particularly important to the concept of secondary violences, the flow of recovery money and aid away from black neighborhoods and grass-roots organizations to “favored regional foundations controlled by local elites” (BondGraham 2011:280) has made recovery in black neighborhoods secondary. This transfer of money (and the transfer of wealth as much of the transfer of land in New Orleans has gone from black neighborhoods to growth machine coalitions controlled by whites) has diverted aid away from black communities and made their recovery secondary, dependent upon the recovery of the (white) city writ large. Additionally, sadly, even attempts to aid black communities have often reinforced white hegemony by supporting homeowners over renters or by simply discounting local knowledge and thus again making black recovery secondary to white recovery (Arena 2012; Harvey, Kato, and Passidomo Forthcoming).

Finally, the socioeconomic conditions of these neighborhoods are directly related to the exploitation of the physical environment (Susman et al. 1983) and the continuity of society–environment relations (Hewitt 1983; Watts 1983). The dominant paradigm of understanding disasters still heavily relies on the interpretation that the environment hits humans rather than one of humans hitting the environment (Freudenburg et al. 2009; Lewis and Kelman 2010). But the hitting of humans remains secondary to the primary understanding of humans being hit.⁶

In New Orleans, making sense of the causes of Katrina thus involves understanding, as Bullard and Wright (2012) have explained, the history of people being labeled “the wrong complexion for protection.” Others have likewise noted that Southeastern Louisiana has long been a place, where economics, race, and hazards have been intertwined (Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss 2001). Louisiana has often been at the center of environmental justice issues (Bullard 1990; Lerner 2005; Shrader-Frechette 2002), and much of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath has to be put in the context of white, urban elites hitting the environment and black, poor communities being hit. Again, while rooted in its pre-Katrina history (see Colten 2005), much of black New Orleans has been subject to and eventually subjugated by white control over the environment. This has placed black neighborhoods in harm’s way.

As Fussell, Sastry, and VanLandingham (2010) show, the racial disparity in recovery from Hurricane Katrina disappears among blacks and whites when controlling for housing damage. Simply put, blacks living in New Orleans lived in neighborhoods that pre-Katrina were environmentally more vulnerable than those where whites lived. But this continued after Katrina. From the BNOB decision cited above to the post–Katrina decision by the Army Corps of Engineers to widen the Industrial Canal, which bisects the overwhelmingly black Lower Ninth Ward from the rest of the city, and thus exposes the neighborhood to higher flood levels, black neighborhoods are continually seen as environmentally expendable. Thus, the environmental well-being in these neighborhoods is secondary to growth machine politics elsewhere in the city.

For Gill (2007), secondary traumas thwart the recovery effort. Secondary violences, however, become the recovery effort; they are the lived reality of those who are forced to dwell amid the debris and detritus of the disaster. As noted above, these violences are secondary in part as the policies that create the violence predate the disaster but are primarily felt afterward; they reveal the secondary status of the people targeted by the policies; they treat the recovery of these neighborhoods as secondary to recovery of whiter, wealthier neighborhoods (defined as the city); and, residents’ rights, in particular environmental rights, are secondary to urban growth policies elsewhere.

The result of these violences is that Katrina should thus be understood as a “process” rather than an “event.” Rather than seeing it as “an archipelago of isolated misfortunes” (Hewitt 1983:12), it is simply part of the larger framework of everyday life (Laska and Morrow 2006). And yet the everyday experiences of residents in the Lower Ninth Ward have gone beyond the traditional experiences of marginalized communities in the aftermath of disasters. While the marginalizing process of cutting bus routes, closing health clinics, cutting rent subsidies, and generally deinvesting in communities has long been a fixture of neoliberal cities, post-Katrina, in many neighborhoods, it has been sped up. With the lack of housing, lack of schools, and lack of safety, these communities have been divested and devalorized. If, as Bourgois and Schonenberg (2009) note, neoliberalism is increasingly characterized by a violent coercion, then the violent abandonment of marginalized populations must be seen as a cocurrent project of neoliberalism; and secondary violences should be seen as an extension of neoliberalism’s most pernicious project—disaster capitalism (Klein 2007).

Three Vignettes

In the 14 months I spent in the Lower Ninth Ward, from April 2010 to June 2011, I worked with a number of nonprofits, neighborhood associations, community groups, and a consortium of government officials and academics. I did so in part to engage in participant observation but also to involve myself as much as possible in efforts to rebuild the community. As part of my research for a larger project, I formally interviewed 38 residents of the Lower Ninth Ward and carried out hundreds of informal interviews and conversations with homeowners and community members. I also attended on average three meetings a week. These ranged from neighborhood association meetings, meetings held by nonprofits or community groups, meetings called by government officials, and meetings held by concerned citizens. While helping to rebuild houses and in working on other community projects, I also spent much time meeting and working with residents. Due to the nature of rebuilding houses in the Lower Ninth Ward, which proceeded in a piecemeal fashion where homes were rebuilt in large part by volunteers, many hours were spent with little work to do or waiting for supplies. I used this time to interact with homeowners and neighbors who were still interested in the rebuilding process five to six years after Katrina and would often stop by rebuild sites to talk. Interviews, meeting notes, and field notes were typed and then coded using Atlas ti. While there was a wide range of issues discussed at these meetings (crime, education, rezoning, levee protection, food safety, etc.) and in conversations, there were three issues that continually came up. Below I offer three vignettes based on field notes and interview data that detail living with secondary violences and the toll they take on residents.

Orange Store (Only in a Black Community)

A crucial feature of secondary violences is the abandonment, in particular, of communities by police and health care providers, but also, more generally, the reluctance to monitor or regulate any ongoing activity in the community. This particular vignette demonstrates not only the refusal on the part of authorities to regulate violent behavior at this store but also the reluctance to refuse a permit to the owners of the store after the community asked city officials to not allow liquor stores into the neighborhood post-Katrina. The activities at the store further contrasts with the absence of other businesses, such as restaurants or markets, that government officials have promised help in developing but that have not been forthcoming.

In the aftermath of Katrina, few businesses have returned to the Lower Ninth Ward. While residents continually oppose applications for permits for liquor stores, the majority of the gas stations and convenience stores, which make up the majority of all stores, sell alcohol. One convenience store in particular, deemed the “orange store” because of its brightly painted orange exterior, has become the focal point of much violence. Despite several attempts by the community to regulate activity at the store or to close the store, little has been done to prevent large gatherings and loitering outside the store. Additionally, many people, both customers and noncustomers, gather in the empty lot next to the store to drink and socialize. The activity at the orange store is vexing for community members for a number of reasons. The following is part of a field note taken at a community meeting in the Lower Ninth Ward in March 2011.

President:

Is there any other complaints, concerns?

Resident One:

They had forty cars at the orange store last night. I could barely get home.

President:

Did you call the police?

Resident Two:

That doesn’t do any good.

Resident Three:

There had to be at least that many the night before. Look, if the police aren’t doing anything we got to. The first thing people see when they cross the St. Claude bridge is that store; people walking in the street, sitting on the sidewalk, cars all over the place. It’s embarrassing. Not to mention dangerous. I almost hit someone the other day who was just walking through the street, fumbling more like it.

Resident Two:

Ain’t no one going to want to have business here with that going on. You going try and sell a house with that on your street, in your neighborhood.

No!

President:

Ok, Ok, we’ll talk to Officer Thompson again. Theresa is there something we can do with this?

Theresa, a community activist and the president of another community group, somewhat laconically (she had addressed the subject on at least two prior occasions) explained that the police have a difficult time enforcing the antiloitering law at the orange store because store owners have to object to the loitering and the owner does not want to antagonize his customers. Other residents mention the trash that accumulates around the store and additional traffic issues. A couple of residents note the escalating level of physical violence surrounding the store and question whether or not there is gang activity associated with the store.

A few weeks after this particular meeting, a young man was shot and killed in his driveway. He had left his family a few hours earlier and on the way home stopped at the orange store. Leaving the store, depending on whose version is correct, he scratched a car with his bumper. The owner of the other car followed him home and asked if he had scratched it, and when the young man replied in the negative the owner of the other car pulled his gun and fired several times. Word of the young man’s death was slow to reach the community. The next morning I had two formal interviews scheduled with leaders of two nonprofits. The first interview took place in a church. In the middle of the interview, we were interrupted by the younger brother of the deceased man who was looking for someone to talk and pray with. We sat with him for close to an hour and afterward we both reluctantly decided to resume the interview.

Daina Harvey:

So, I think we were talking about how long you thought it might take the community to recover, did, umm, did you think it would take this long?

Tom Waters:

No, I mean … [long pause]

Daina Harvey:

We don’t have to do this.

Tom Waters:

No, it’s okay. I’m just thinking about that store. I’m sorry, but that would only happen in a black community. We’ve called the police dozens of times and this is what you get. If this were a white community, that store would already be done. It’s like they want that kind of stuff to happen here.

The other interviewee lamented that really nothing could be done. She had personally tried to have the store closed on several occasions and had even asked the mayor and a senator to look into what could be done about the escalating violence at the store.

Rachel Hardy:

It’s really just one more thing. It’s like, just the other day, I was talking to Senator Landrieu and I said, we were talking about housing and schools, and I could tell she was listening, so I said to her, I said, we have this orange store and it just looks bad. But not only that, I mean it’s not safe. It’s not a good thing to have in our community, in any community. You know I told her, I did, I told her, that kind of place is here because the police just expect a certain amount of trouble here and for us that’s what it does, that’s what the orange store does.

Daina Harvey:

What did she say?

Rachel Hardy:

You know, what can she say? I mean we’re alone out here. Ain’t no one coming to help. If she, in fact if she had said she’d do something about it, I’d gotten more worried. That place will be here until it closes for whatever reason and then something else will open.

The orange store has become a symbol for social abandonment. Residents believe that if the city cared about the community, the store would be closed or at least policed on a daily basis. They believe that the store is allowed to remain as a place of both symbolic and physical violence. It discourages businesses and residents from moving to the neighborhood and prevents tourists from exploring the neighborhood. It is not the case that stores like the orange store didn’t exist before Katrina, but residents believe that the violence that is allowed to flourish there is part of the punishment for returning to the Lower Ninth. One resident summed it up by saying, “[it’s] a large orange reminder that we’re on our own.”

Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO; Who Else Has to Deal with This)

The concept of secondary violences posits an adverse relationship between elected officials and particular publics. While taking a laissez-faire approach to development in the neighborhood (and hence keeping it undeveloped), the state and other powerful actors have proposed development projects that have the potential to increase the suffering in the community. Rather than acquiesce to residents’ demands to not place the community in harm’s way, residents have been forced into legal action to prevent unwanted development. The attempt to harm the community has been interpreted by residents as retaliatory and as a punishment for protesting their planned erasure.

For those watching television in the days after Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, the destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward was seemingly caused by a barge breaching the levee adjacent to the Industrial Canal. Others, however, pointed to the MRGO. Residents of the Lower Ninth Ward had long wanted the MRGO closed. It was supposed to benefit residents by increasing commerce to the Port of New Orleans by allowing deep draft ships and barges to carry cargo that would otherwise have to go to another port. The need for such an outlet was heavily debated in the 1940s, and a bill to fund its construction was defeated early on. After World War II, local business leaders tried again and were successful, but the outlet was largely outdated when it was finally completed in 1965 (Freudenberg et al. 2009). Residents continually claimed that MRGO exacerbated storm effects. They nicknamed it the “Hurricane Highway” for its ability to channel flood surges up the canal, over levees and into their homes. The final year it operated only a dozen round trips were made on it by ships often carrying low value cargo like frozen chickens, but at the exorbitant cost to the taxpayer, who funded the annual dredging of the canal, of US$1.5 million dollars per trip (Freudenburg et al. 2009).

The damage caused by the levees and development projects like the MRGO is in part due to the destruction of the wetlands. Freudenburg et al. (2009) and others (Tidwell 2007) point to wetland loss as the main reason Katrina’s impact on areas like the Lower Ninth Ward was so severe. Some have estimated that wetlands would have prevented about 5 of the 11 to 16 feet that inundated the Lower Ninth Ward (Buss 2011).

In the aftermath of Katrina, there was a large groundswell for the closing of the MRGO. Through the constant pressure of nonprofits and community groups, such as MRGO Must Go and the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, The Army Corps of Engineers finally relented and closed the outlet. Almost immediately afterward, the corps began the design of and request for another deep draft canal, one that would be even closer to the Lower Ninth Ward than the MRGO. Residents were confused and angry. They characterized it as a violent attack on their community.

Daina Harvey:

What’s going on with this new project, the lock project?

Jean Pena:

Can you believe that? I don’t know what to make of it. It’s like keep busy work. We don’t have time for this. We have had to go to dozens of meetings to protest it and listen to talks about designs. I don’t need to see some power point about how you are going to mess up my neighborhood. Now we have to go to court. I mean we are trying to rebuild our houses, our community, largely because of these damn guys and now, and you know, they’ve never admitted responsibility for what happened, never said sorry. This, it can’t really be happening.

Daina Harvey:

What reasons are they giving for the need to build it?

Jean Pena:

There aren’t any. It’s a make work project for the Corps, so they can get money. And it’s a take money project for us. Because we have to take time away from our jobs and I mean, you know, eventually, we are going to flood again and do you think the Corps is going to come out and say, oops, we did it again? No, they’ll fight us again and we will have to pay money to fix their mistakes. It’s just hard to imagine that they are putting us through this again.

At the U.S. District Court in New Orleans, the judge hearing the second motion for summary judgment likewise seemed perplexed. He repeatedly stopped the council for the corps and asked for them to again explain why the new outlet was needed, and not why they thought they were legally entitled to build it over the concerns of local communities. Because only a handful of community members were able to make it to the meeting, I was asked afterward to debrief community members. The following is an excerpt from a field note I wrote after the debriefing and an interview with Paula.

Field note March 2010

I attended the hearing on the lock project today. The case was argued by two student lawyers from Tulane. The judge had to prod and nudge them a few times to say the correct thing. Afterward Paula asked if I could give a non-biased debriefing to some of the community representatives, which I agreed to do. I told her I thought it went really well. She asked why and I told her that first of all the judge seemed actually upset with the Corps’ lawyers for bringing this case. Second, and even more astonishingly, the Corps’ lawyers threw away all of their maps and materials afterward. Paula immediately stopped me and asked what I meant. I told her I was waiting on a bench down by the elevators for James and Mike to see how they thought things went and saw the lawyers laughing and that they put everything they had brought into the court room into the trash can. I thought Paula would get a laugh out of this, but instead she exploded. She couldn’t believe it. It was further proof that this was just an exercise to “mess with us.” She went on to say that [they] had no real interest in building the outlet other than to just build it.

Paula Bertrand:

They were suppose to do community studies, to figure out the worst case scenario if something went wrong, but they didn’t do them correctly, so we kept going to trial over that. It’s almost laughable, but it’s like this all the time. No one else has to deal with this. I’ll tell you, they just pick on us. We are poor and black and they don’t think we know better. They think we’ll just let them do whatever they want. They’re wrong. We’re proving them wrong every chance we get.

Daina Harvey:

So you think that’s the end of it.

Paula Bertrand:

Oh Lord no. Watch, before you leave, we’ll be back in court on some other issue. We got multiple lawsuits against them right now. If they ain’t doing one thing, they’re doing another. And the thing is we have to defend ourselves. The city ain’t doing nothing to stop them. The city supported them, filed a brief for them in fact. The state won’t do nothing. We had to go out and get free council. We’re alone in this. It’s just us against everyone. I know how that sounds, trust me, but that’s how it is.

The rebirth of the MRGO could certainly be seen as part of Klein’s disaster capitalism. In the aftermath of Katrina, the corps could have perhaps acquiesced to the closing of the MRGO and taken the opportunity, in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, to simply rebuild it elsewhere. But to see the actions of the corps as disaster capitalism misses the point. The pursuit of the new outlet is retribution for the neighborhood’s role in closing MRGO. As the lawyers for Holy Cross noted, the proposed outlet, while completely unnecessary, could have been built up river or even in an adjacent Parish. Even the judge at the hearing asked if the outlet could be put somewhere else, stating that the neighborhood had suffered enough in its relationship with the corps. Residents believe that because of their marginalized status the corps feels it is justified in putting them in peril. Furthermore, the plan for the outlet would have required dredging and widening the Industrial Canal which borders the Lower Ninth Ward. Residents were concerned about the toxic sludge that would come from the Canal. The corps’ plan was to build a facility, a warehouse, in the Lower Ninth that would store the sludge and other toxic sediments. In numerous meetings between the corps and neighborhood groups, the corps never allowed the residents access to the documents detailing the outcome for a worst-case scenario regarding the warehouse should something of the magnitude of Katrina happen again. Likewise, they would not tell the residents the ingredients of the toxic soup that they planned to store just yards away from their homes.

The relationship between the corps and the Lower Ninth resembles the “misuse of power in intimate relations that conjugate victims with perpetrators in a trauma of betrayal over an extended period of time” that Bourgois and Schonenberg identify as “lumpen abuse” (2009:16). Here, the betrayal is interpreted by residents as an abrogation of their civil rights (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2010). Residents see the violence caused by the corps as an extension of the damage associated with Katrina and the federal levee failures and rooted in a deeper hostility toward their neighborhood.

Toxic Dusting (What You Mean We Don’t Count)

A crucial part of the continual assault on the community is the environmental peril that neighboring petrochemical plants pose for residents. The constant threat of toxic uncertainty (Auyero and Swistun 2009) means that the violence is not only physical but also cognitive.

The Lower Ninth Ward has long been a community of environmental suffering (Auyero and Swistun 2009). It is part of an area that environmental activists call “Cancer Alley;” a stretch of land from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, developed by the petrochemical industry, where today there are over 150 petrochemical plants that are responsible for 129 million pounds of toxic releases each year (Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality 2000). This area has the highest incidence of cancer in the country.

Despite the toxic assault on the community by the floodwaters of Katrina, in which an estimated 575 oil spills occurred resulting in over eight million gallons covering the area, the Environmental Protection Agency has been reluctant to demand a cleanup of the neighborhood with federal funds assigned to aid communities recovering from the Hurricane. In short, they state that it is not known how much of the environmental damage to the community predated 2005. As such, residents of the Lower Ninth live with toxic uncertainty (Auyero and Swistun 2009). They don’t know the degree to which they should be afraid of their environment.

On Labor Day in 2010, residents of the Lower Ninth Ward awoke to find their homes and cars covered in a fine white powder. Many residents simply wiped the powder off of their cars and went to work. A few days later, after several residents complained of health complications, the Chalmette refinery, located a few miles away in the adjacent Parish, admitted to a small leakage of nontoxic substances from the plant. The refinery refused to admit that residents in the Lower Ninth had been affected by the event. In the days afterward, the spokespeople for the refinery admitted that there may or may not have been minute traces of toxic substances in the powder and that it was conceivable that some portions of the Lower Ninth Ward had been affected. They advised that children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems should not come into contact with the powdery substance.

The following neighborhood association meeting swelled from the customary 20 to 30 residents to almost a hundred. There were also representatives from a local law office that gave a presentation about the event at the refinery and offered to enroll claimants in a class action lawsuit that a couple of members of the community were initiating. Additionally, residents were told that the refinery had dramatically increased upward their original estimates of the toxins released from one ton of catalyst and 2,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide to 19 tons of catalyst and 106,646 pounds of sulfur dioxide. Residents were also, however, informed that the refinery was once again saying that the Lower Ninth was not affected.

The initial reaction to the dusting was muted. Several residents I spoke with felt that they knew something had happened; that they knew of too many people who had been sick or had severe throat irritations that week. Yet many were reluctant to come forth with their story or join the class action lawsuit. They saw the dusting as simply something else to deal with and were sure that any time spent pursuing a claim against the refinery would be wasted.

The Chalmette refinery has regularly polluted the area. It is one of the worst polluters in the state, releasing 6 million pounds of airborne pollutants and 12 million gallons of pollutants into local waters from 2005 to 2009. Residents have regularly sought political and economic action against the refinery but to little avail. They believe that the refinery, which is located in St. Bernard Parish, which is predominantly white, fails to acknowledge their claim to the community because they are black. This ongoing violence is supported through the Enterprise Zone program in which the state encourages companies to locate to areas with a high percentage of residents on public assistance, who are unemployed, or who have low incomes. If a company moves to such an area, they receive tax credits, tax rebates, and the return of local taxes paid for the construction of new facilities. As Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss (2001) point out, this program creates more problems than opportunities. Louisiana has one of the most lax zoning policies in the country. As the program is open to all companies, the result for many years has been that chemical processing plants and other polluting facilities have been located in poor communities, often only a few yards from homes. The plants have historically been welcomed by both black and white residents, but because of racial discrimination the overwhelming majority of the jobs go to whites. Whites, who typically live miles away from the plant, benefit economically from the plant’s location and support the continued operation of the plant. Blacks, on the other hand, who see a rapid decrease in their home values because of the toxic pollution and danger in living next to the plants, find little support from the white community when they pursue claims against the plants.

Paul, whom I spoke to after the community meeting where residents were informed that despite finding white powder on their cars and homes they were officially outside the affected area, said:

we don’t count, what you mean we don’t count? How can they tell us that? You gonna let white folks make claims, but then just dismiss us out [of] hand? We don’t count. You know how long that Parish being telling us that.

Likewise, Gladys noted that:

this ain’t the first time, won’t be the last. This is what they do to us, because they can. Ain’t no one going to say it, but it’s because we’re black. If this was Uptown or the Garden District they ain’t saying that, they [white neighborhoods] wouldn’t have it.

It was clear that the reaction to the refinery’s toxic dusting was framed by residents as both a matter of environmental and racial injustice. One of the initiators of the class action lawsuit asked that I accompany him to a meeting with concerned residents because “it would be nice to show them that white people who don’t have any economic interests in the outcome [of the case] care about the health of the community.”

The most telling reaction in the community was one of casualness. A couple residents said they might join the class action because they “hadn’t gotten anything for their ‘Katrina Cough’,” referring to the fact that prolonged illness caused from Katrina has not been economically remediated. A few mentioned that next to the BP spill this was “small potatoes.” While most others simply portrayed the event as just another thing to deal with in a community besieged with problems. When telling Lee, who was born and raised in the Lower Ninth and with whom I spoke on an almost daily basis, that I was surprised more people were not upset, he succinctly explained, “that was Tuesday, Wednesday was just as bad.”

These secondary violences are part of an ongoing process that is sped up in the aftermath of social disruption. The orange store represents the social abandonment and hypermarginalization inherent to this process. While the neighborhood has always had its share of liquor stores, the refusal to police them, enforce loitering laws, or respond to neighborhood complaints allow problems at the store to spill out into the neighborhood. It facilitates both actual physical violence and symbolic violence, as the store becomes seen as typifying the Lower Ninth Ward. The attempt to relocate the MRGO likewise encompasses the notion of secondary violences as the product of intentional policy. Residents understand this as a retaliatory action. Perhaps more so than any other punitive policy used against residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, the four-year long legal battle against the corps has come to firmly entrench in the minds of many residents that their relationship to the city is an adversarial one. Finally, the concentrated harm represented by the continual environmental assault by neighboring development and the refusal to compensate residents for their environmental suffering constitutes another aspect of secondary violences. Together, these policies represent, in part, the violent orientation of government and urban elites to marginalized communities in the aftermath of a disaster. And yet, as I have argued, to see this as simply a manifestation of disaster capitalism would be to miss an important part of what is happening here.

Conclusion

Using the framework of disaster capitalism, we are able to witness many of the changes in New Orleans. New high-end restaurants and shops can be found Uptown. The housing market has experienced a revitalization. Parts of New Orleans, like the Bywater, have become gentrified, while areas like the Central Business District have been rebranded as an arts district. Schools and hospitals have completely changed, not only in location, but from public to private entities. Nearly 200 million dollars was used from relief funds to rebuild the Superdome. And yet disaster capitalism is not an all-encompassing phenomenon. Those places that have been socially abandoned have been bypassed by capital. While many of these places were underdeveloped pre-Katrina, post-Katrina they have been “undeveloped.” As Hewitt (1983) explains, catastrophes and other accidents are simply extremely convenient ways to see disruption as uncommon or unnatural or leading to uncertainty, when in fact they are part of the ongoing social order. In the Lower Ninth Ward, Katrina represented the opportunity for social inequality to reach its apogee.

This article argues that the experiences of residents of the Lower Ninth Ward represent an extension to Klein’s disaster capitalism. While some communities and neighborhoods are seized as opportunities to expropriate wealth or to marginalize residents, other neighborhoods are simply abandoned. To outsiders and visitors to the Lower Ninth, this abandonment is naturalized. At best, it is seen as simply a product of a previously disorganized neighborhood and/or the result of a major disaster. Residents, however, acutely sense the violence to the community caused by the abandonment and experience it on an everyday basis. It is fundamentally understood as a violation of the social contract. Furthermore, they see it as a process that is actively reconstituted time and time again. The violences here have become part of the social fabric. They continually roil the community in myriad forms. Residents have a difficult time imaging a future free from these secondary violences. In past disasters, it was largely assumed that some attempt to restore the affected community would be forthcoming. The Lower Ninth Ward, while not the first, has nonetheless become the largest and perhaps most instructive instance of social abandonment as disastrous social policy. It portends a future, where racial capitalism becomes the social determinant of whether or not to rebuild postdisaster communities. While the chronic and acute suffering associated with disasters will most likely increase in the future, the unequal distribution of that suffering seems more certain. Here, the experiences of the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward have a lot to offer.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

The author would also like to thank Rebecca West and Michael Rosino for helpful comments on the previous draft.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author thanks the Rutgers University Initiative on Climate and Society, The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and The Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Public Entity Risk Institute with support from the National Science Foundation and Swiss Re for funding portions of this research.

Notes

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