Social Policy as Secondary Violences in the Aftermath of a Disaster

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.

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.