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Organized Abandonment

What would a truly democratic recovery look like? Altadena, California. | Pacific Southwest Forest Service

I woke up on New Year’s day to a flurry of texts and messages on various social media apps from friends asking if I was all right. Most of them didn’t tell me what had caused them to text, so I quickly searched for my city, New Orleans, in the news and learned that a man had hurtled down Bourbon Street in a pickup truck, running down as many people as he could before he was eventually shot and killed by police. News was scarce beyond those details, and what we didn’t know was scary: Was this “terrorism”? Did the man work alone? Were there, perhaps, bombs planted all around the city?

That day, we sat through a clown show of a press conference where city and state officials elbowed past each other to answer or dodge questions; we wondered how much of what we were hearing was real. We saw the governor take himself to a nice steak dinner and watched the mayor make her way down Bourbon Street to “reopen” it for business; we were told that New Orleans was, after all, resilient and would bounce back, the way it has in the past. We learned the names of fourteen dead and many of the injured.

The attack was soon eclipsed in the headlines by the horrific fires around Los Angeles, which as of this writing are confirmed to have killed twenty-nine, devoured more than sixteen thousand homes and buildings, and have only just been contained. All of this in winter, which is not usually fire season, but such demarcations of disaster—hurricane season, wildfire season—are increasingly unhelpful in a time of accelerating climate chaos. The scenes that we have watched and shared, so many of them captured on smartphone cameras as residents fled, looked like hell on earth. But even as the fires raged, as those who didn’t or couldn’t leave breathed toxic smoke, attention had already turned to rebuilding: LA’s mayor Karen Bass promised to get rid of “red tape and bureaucracy” to speed new construction.

We’re going to hear a lot about resilience in the coming weeks and months, as the LA fires are gradually contained and awards season hits its stride, as New Orleans prepares for the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras. These cities are being celebrated for their ability to rise above—to, in the case of LA, literally emerge from the ashes to host the Olympics in 2028. But the people who live and work in these places will have a different story to tell, if anyone cares to listen. The residents of these places are used to demands for their resilience, as storms, fires, and earthquakes batter their homes and conniving politicians come in to mop up the mess by selling chunks of real estate and infrastructure—most famously, the New Orleans public school system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—to the highest bidders.

While of course there is urgency in rebuilding after a disaster, particularly when thousands are out of their homes, the rush to declare the tragedy over, to restore “normalcy,” has grown untenable. In a time of escalating climate catastrophe, we need something other than paeans to resilience. New Orleans residents expressed their irritation and frustration with the R-word in the days after the Bourbon Street attack, recalling Katrina and other, more recent storms, the BP oil spill in 2010, and ongoing violence in the city. “It’s not fair to be judged by your ability to navigate trauma,” one man told reporters last month; in the same article, another man, identified as a bartender, said, “We’re so sick and tired of having to be resilient. How about for once things just work?” New Orleans filmmaker Edward Buckles Jr. wrote in Time, “Like so many times before, the process of grieving and healing was pushed aside, overtaken by the rush to reopen the city for business. This time, it was for the Sugar Bowl.” Just thirteen years old when Katrina hit, Buckles wrote that the praise for the city missed the struggles of residents when off the clock. Resilience, for New Orleans, is so much performance for the tourists who pay our bills. “When do we get to grieve? When do we get to heal before we’re forced to move on?” Buckles wrote. “Resilience should be a choice, not something forced upon us.” 

These articles, and the social media posts that I saw from friends and neighbors, echo a refrain I heard while reporting my book From the Ashes. “I hate the term resilientbecause that stops you from grieving,” Jo Banner, the cofounder of the Descendants Project, an environmental justice organization based in the river parishes in Louisiana, told me. In Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, in Minneapolis after the George Floyd uprising in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and all across the world, people told me how tired they were of the R-word. It seemed to go hand in hand with the demand to return to work, to get back to business as usual, before the fires had even gone out, the blood dried.

As Ajay Singh Chaudhary writes in his book The Exhausted of the Earth, this conception of resilience has its roots in research on people who had survived the worst humanity has to offer—Nazi concentration camps—and somehow managed to go on to live seemingly well-adjusted lives. But, as he writes, “resilience theory” became a way to press systems and individual people to “absorbever greater risk, crisis, trauma, and stress.” Resilience is the expectation that we will just get on with living, no matter what is thrown at us. “Even in its most generous formulations, it looks for just how little some unit—a body, a region, a population—might need, while avoiding the possibility of significant external change entirely,” Chaudhary writes. “Resilience is a management strategy and apology for the status quo, for global capitalism with all its constitutive social and socioecological relations.” We may have to live and organize in conditions not of our own choosing, but this does not mean we have to embrace a philosophy that counsels adaptation rather than that otherover-used R-word: resistance. The demand for resilience is keeping us exhausted, isolated, scared: a recipe for miserable compliance.

In Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Ricia Anne Chansky writes that resilient “is a word that has often been used to describe the people of Puerto Rico in the aftermaths of Hurricane María. This label is problematic, though, as it sidesteps the reality that this resiliency is born of repeated abandonment by the federal government during the almost 125 years that Puerto Rico has been a part of the United States.” Groups like Taller Salud, a feminist health care organization which I visited there in 2022, stepped into the gaps left by the state; they took care of each other, created new programs and plans for the next storm while holding their community together with blue tarps and orange tote bags of emergency supplies.

Organized abandonment, as abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes it, is the process by which the state and capital deliberately leave behind communities through disinvestment, privatization, and the degradation of the environment. New Orleans’ neglected levees—which failed disastrously during Katrina—were a version of it but so was the rush to reopen Bourbon Street and play the Sugar Bowl the day after a mass murder. It is a way of conditioning survivors to the fact that no help will be coming, of demanding they be resilient because there is no alternative. “Crisis, then, is organized abandonment’s condition of existence and its inherent vice,” Gilmore writes, alongside Craig Gilmore.

We can see this play out, too, in the unfolding battle over aid to California. The Trump administration, a disaster in itself, is threatening to attach conditions to any funds sent to rebuild, backed up by the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson—a Louisiana native. Trump, as part of a tour of recovery efforts in North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene, floated the idea of eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency entirely. In his final days in the White House, Joe Biden promised money for firefighting and sent $770 individual payments to survivors in California, but this is a tiny drop in what will be a massive bucket: Governor Gavin Newsom has suggested that the fire damage could surpass the costs of Katrina, with some estimates as high as $250 billion. Some California Republicans, elected with the slimmest of majorities, have threatened to rebel at the prospect of Congress stiffing their state.

But political battles over disaster aid aren’t new. As Mike Davis writes in Ecology of Fear, first published in 1998, California has been the site of a struggle between Democrats and Republicans over aid before. Then, it was after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and then-governor Pete Wilson scolded its victims that “aid is not an entitlement.” Bill Clinton got to sweep in with federal largesse—LA got nearly eight times more federal aid after that quake than South Florida had gotten from George Bush the First after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Bush, Davis wrote, “had treated South Floridians as so much ‘trailer trash’—more a law-and-order problem than a possible electoral windfall.” And meanwhile Congress, under the Gingrich revolution, demanded cuts in social spending to “balance” disaster aid, deliberately making the poor pay for rebuilding and “recycling natural disaster as class struggle.” Similar “trade-offs” are likely in the coming fight over aid to California.

This is what Gilmore calls the “anti-state state,” a reorganization of the state away from making people’s lives better and toward power and punishment, greasing the wheels for capital accumulation while systematically abandoning less-favored people—and, eventually, all of us. This is neoliberalism, of course, but Gilmore’s formulation helps us to see past the shallow understanding of neoliberalism as simply shrinking the state and into the ways that it actually grows in power in some areas while others are hacked off. Louisiana governor Landry has been flexing his muscles, after all, using every excuse to militarize New Orleans, clear homeless encampments, and increase prison spending. And he was champing at the bit to send in the National Guard after the Bourbon Street attack. Meanwhile, service workers who witnessed or were injured in the incident had to resort to GoFundMe to take a couple of days off of work. The anti-state state consolidates wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer, while making cuts to services that will only become more necessary as disasters multiply. As has been repeatedly noted, California in fact relies on incarcerated firefighters to battle the flames, a project with bipartisan support and defended by, among others, the office of the attorney general under Kamala Harris.

And as Davis noted way back in the 1990s, “Fire itself accelerates gentrification,” as do other supposedly natural disasters. Landlords choose not to rebuild at all in poorer areas; insurance gets more expensive or impossible to acquire; the slashing of red tape that Mayor Bass promises means that those with the means to do so can rebuild quickly and perhaps even larger. Disaster then produces cities which are even more fragmented and divided by class, race, ethnicity, and policed and abandoned to differing degrees. Certain areas—like New Orleans’s French Quarter, where I live and where the New Year’s attack occurred—are restored quickly, protected from destruction, and policed to high heaven to maintain the illusion of safety for tourists. Poorer residents are left to scramble. Infamously, New Orleans bulldozed public housing in the wake of Katrina; many of those residents simply never came home.

Resilience is a question of resources—not just the kind of inner strength or “grit” touted by various researchers and pundits, but real, material resources. Places to go when you have to evacuate and the property ownership that ensures your right to return. The money to rebuild, of course. But also the social networks that not only provide material but emotional support, the ones that come together in the aftermath in mutual aid networks and hold us as we cry, rage, scream. The ones that fill up the coffers on those GoFundMe pages, the grimmest reminder at once that humans really do care about one another and that the people we’ve elected don’t.

Precapitalist forms of resilience—controlled burning once practiced by the Indigenous stewards of what we now call California—were banned, Mike Davis famously noted, in order to allow the wealthy to build firetraps along the state’s most beautiful stretches. And today, the people who do the dirty work of resilience are often the super exploited: prisoners fighting fires, migrant workers cleaning up after the burn or the flood. These workers and neighbors do their best but are often working in dangerous conditions without protection; a survey by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network of migrant disaster workers in New Orleans after 2021’s Hurricane Ida found that 50 percent had been victims of wage theft, and only 15 percent had received any training for the work they did. Now, of course, those workers labor under threat of deportation under the second Trump administration.

Trump—and the far right around the world—is a symptom of organized abandonment as it has crept from black and brown communities to touch the lives of suburban property owners and small business owners. An anti-state state that has long ceased to attempt to make their lives better becomes the target of the ire of those people who feel themselves falling. Community resilience, longtime racial justice organizer Asad Rehman of War on Want told me, turns grief into organizing and action, but those without such supports often seize on the empty promises of demagogues in the hopes that some of the wealth will finally trickle down. It never does. In the past, Rehman noted, some of these communities now turning to the right would have social structures built by labor unions and even radical organizations; those unions and revolutionaries themselves were crushed even as they became more and more necessary for our collective survival. Now, generations don’t know they ever existed. But they do know, as one New Orleanian said in the wake of the Bourbon Street attack, “The only people who take care of each other is us.”

These moments of collective loss demand mourning and organizing in tandem. They demand that we refuse the rush back to normal, which only benefits those relatively protected in the first place. To grieve and recover is not to return to a prior state but to transform. We need, as Malkia Devich-Cyril writes, to build structures for grief and recovery into our movements, to give people the time off they need to heal, to recognize that rather than a distraction, this time to pause allows us to understand what we need to change.

In the middle of the night recently, I woke up and looked at my phone. I had messages from two people I love and a news alert with the ominous headline: “White House collects lists of federal DEI office employees as punishments begin.” With the second Trump administration, the anti-state state has reached an apotheosis of sorts: a state that cannot help and does not want to, that restricts access to health care and withholds life-saving aid, that can only deliver punishments of various kinds. A state that could help would be so different from what we have now that we might not even call it a state anymore. This is what we must imagine now, a thing that feels impossible. Gilmore, in a talk at this past autumn, suggested, “Imagine abundance as entitlement that binds us in radical interdependence. Just imagine it and then do something to realize it.”

What care the state once offered was designed to preserve order and the reproduction of enough people to work; these days even that is disappearing. The response has been renewed calls for mutual aid—which is necessary and beautiful but can, in its own way, abet the broader project of organized abandonment in that the performance of resilience often justifies still more cuts.

We keep us safe, yes, and yet institutions of care and repair require coordination, expertise, and resources beyond the reach of most mutual aid networks. I can cook a meal and man a spreadsheet, but I cannot repave a road nor perform emergency surgery nor provide clean running water. And the reliance on volunteers often results in those volunteers burning out in the medium term, before reconstruction is completed. The urgency of crisis keeps us running, patching the holes in the safety net with our bodies, duct tape, and prayer. Mutual aid, Gilmore suggests, is “a modest form of communist philanthropy,” but the challenge is to build something big enough to support a society, “to imagine meeting needs and desires of strangers one can’t touch or of despised people one might prefer not to be around.” True democratic systems take patience; they require time-consuming deliberation across difference. We have never had a democratic disaster response, but it is this which we must turn to creating. We will have to imagine what true recovery might look like for all.