Over five years since the catastrophe of hurricane Katrina, communities in New Orleans are still struggling to rebuild and return. Shocking images of Katrina broadcast globally continue to communicate the growing economic, social and racial fault lines in America. Beyond the headlines, community organizing and resistance to post-Katrina economic shock treatment of key public institutions, including the school systems and public housing, have drawn battle-lines illustrating broader contemporary struggles against hyper-capitalism.
On culture, artists in New Orleans are playing a critically important role in building a culture of community resistance for key political struggles, while creative, dynamic sounds and boundary challenging artistic practices — which have made New Orleans famous for the arts — continue to shape the front lines of contemporary culture in North America.
Author and community activist Jordan Flaherty explores culture, community and resistance in Floodlines, an inspiring read on Katrina and all the under-reported stories of social justice struggles in the years after the storm. Flaherty writes in a lyrical style, illustrating a deep connection to the arts, while also communicating the urgent realities facing the poor majority in New Orleans, a predominantly African-American city — realities that today have fallen far from the headline glare.
Floodlines is a key read for anyone interested in reading a critical contemporary history on Katrina and also for all involved in community organizing. It is an eye-opening examination on the hope, struggles and conflicts that revolve around community-led movements for social justice.
Community activist and Art Threat contributor Stefan Christoff had the opportunity to speak with Floodlines author Jordan Flaherty during a recent visit to Montreal.
Art Threat: In Floodlines you highlight community struggles and resistance in New Orleans surrounding hurricane Katrina, can you point to some key struggles you focus on in Floodlines and their importance for communities across the U.S. and in Canada.
Jordan Flaherty: U.S. policies on healthcare, education and criminal justice in someways presents a dystopian future for Canada, as many policies are first tried in the U.S. and then exported globally through structural adjustment programs via the IMF and World Bank. Today privatization policies are being applied and enforced in the U.S., striking communities like New Orleans.
A back and forward between different countries and contexts is taking place, different strategies to push privatization, militarization and the criminalization of the poor. All these issues were projected in hyper speed in New Orleans. Struggles around the privatization of education really came forward after Katrina.
In New Orleans overnight around 7500 teachers and employees, basically the entire staff of the public school system was fired. An entire school system radically disrupted in New Orleans, from a system under the control of local school boards, to a system of charter schools or state controlled schools, a major move toward a free market school system.
On criminal justice, the first state institution to restart after the storm in New Orleans was the city jail, a bus station was transformed into a city jail. Prisoners were also left behind as the waters were rising during the storm orshipped upstate to prisons like Angola, a former slave plantation where it is estimated that over 90% of the prison population will die behind bars.
Our public hospital in New Orleans was immediately shut down after Katrina.
After the storm you had 80% housing damaged in New Orleans but the public housing was mainly undamaged, but public housing was quickly boarded-up post storm by people in power who tried to take that opportunity to close public housing. Congressman Richard Baker, a prominent Republican said after the storm, “we finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans, we couldn’t do it, but God did.”
People in power took advantage of the situation to push forward rapid reforms on all of these issues.
In listening to you outline the board changes across the social structure of New Orleans after the storm Naomi Klein’s thesis outlined via The Shock Doctrine comes to mind, can you expand on reality of hyper capitalism enforced on New Orleans post Katrina?
Certainly Naomi Klein’s framing in The Shock Doctrine has been an important lens through which to look at the situation and what we faced in New Orleans after the storm.
On the teachers, the union that they were all members in was the largest union in the city, it was 80% African American, so it was a foundation of African American middle class life in the city. After Katrina the union cease to exist, all the teachers were fired and so that move hit the social-economic well being of so many in the community.
In New Orleans public schools were already in trouble prior to Katrina but you had two different views about what was wrong with the school system, many community members thought that the problem was the lack of public funding for the schools, the bad pay for teachers, the crumbling infrastructure, while people in power thought the problem was that the teachers union had too much power that there was too much local control.
So opportunists took advantage of the storm to completely wrest the school system out of local control, to effectively shutdown a public school system for New Orleans. So the firing of teachers, attacking the teachers union, taking the schools out of school board control, were all steps in their plan to try out free market experiments on the education system.
