'That Could Have Been Us' -- Struggling Communities Seek New Solutions After Katrina
New America Media, Commentary, Raj Jayadev, Posted: Sep 22, 2005
Editor's Note: An organizer says people in underserved neighborhoods nationwide saw themselves in images of New Orleans residents stranded on rooftops. Katrina has pushed community groups to seek novel ways to provide for their own protection, rather than petitioning a government that may be unwilling or unable to help.
SAN JOSE, Calif.--Every community meeting I've attended in the weeks since Hurricane Katrina hit has ended the same way. Everyone sits with eyes to the floor, nodding in silent agreement as one of us says, "That would have been us."
For struggling communities, the overwhelming reaction to the horrors of Hurricane Katrina has been not just empathy but identification. Whether it's youths organizing against police harassment, immigrant assembly workers fighting for health insurance or black elders campaigning against a toxic waste plant, we can all see ourselves stranded on a rooftop in a drowning city.
In every city in the nation, there is a segment of the population that can now self-identify as the people who would be left to die. The sense of connectedness emerging among these disparate communities is not only national but global: Katrina victims received immediate assistance from the people of Sri Lanka as well as the people of New York.
As Hurricane Rita bears down on Texas just weeks after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, it may find a community landscape dramatically altered, emboldened even, by the events of the intervening weeks.
Unlike the post-9/11 era, many of us are thinking about ourselves not in terms of country, state or region, but rather as communities that know that all we have in an impending disaster is each other. This is why President Bush's belated attempt to "take responsibility" elicited little in the way of praise or condemnation from anyone outside the political class.
Louisiana brought to terms what we all say in our community organizing meetings anyhow: "The government doesn't care about us," or, "An injury to one is an injury to all." Those sayings used to be directed at those in power, to shame or
implore them into acting. Now they direct us in our
community building.
If governmental failure has showed us that the need is real, the people of the Gulf Coast are showing us that the work is possible. In the midst of the stories of the vulgar failings of the authorities came tales of neighbors saving each other; of church vans supplying resources to communities that FEMA had neglected. The media have used these images to demonstrate "the strength of the human spirit," but they also show the potential of community organizing as a life-saving infrastructure. We have to look at ourselves as our own FEMA; our own homeland security.
In Louisiana, a coalition of community groups has created the People's Hurricane Fund. Administered by the evacuees themselves, the fund has drawn resources from individuals and community groups around the world.
At the San Jose community group where I work with young people organizing around labor and community rights, I was struck by how dwarfed we are by the task that Katrina exposed: protecting our people. It struck me that we may need to take a page from those freaky white militias in the hills of Michigan. We don't need the arms, or the manifestos, but we may need to shift our efforts from applying vertical pressure for change to a horizontal ethic of self-determination and self-preservation.
Then it dawned on me that even before Katrina, community groups here in San Jose were already moving in this direction. For example, as the number of civilians unjustifiably killed by police has continued to rise -- despite our petitions and protests -- a coalition led by families who have lost a loved one to police has resorted to following police around with video cameras. The coalition, of which I am a member, is letting the police know that we are monitoring them even if their superiors are not.
As the police violence leaves people increasingly unwilling to call the cops when there is an emergency, and more likely to call on each other, our coalition is also facing the larger question raised by Katrina: How do people who have lost trust in the state apparatus protect themselves when they are in danger?
Re-Anita Burns is a 20-year-old community organizer who works with an East Palo Alto youth group that is trying keep a toxic waste company out of their underserved city. Her group is now conducting its own city-wide health study, after their demands that the city undertake one went unanswered.
Burns just returned from visiting relatives in Louisiana, and says that what she saw there has broadened the way she sees her work.
"I saw that it doesn't matter who calls themselves a community organizer," she says. "Everyone has to become one when the time comes."
PNS contributor Raj Jayadev is editor of Silicon Valley De-Bug (www.siliconvalleydebug.com), the voice of young workers, writers and artists in Silicon Valley.
Page 1 1 Next Page
|
