This week marks twenty years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, a major turning point in our movement for Environmental Justice. As the crisis unfolded, Hurricane Katrina laid bare the many ways in which environmental racism and corporate greed conspire to abandon, displace and exploit Black, immigrant and working-class communities.
As I reflect on Katrina’s legacy, what comes to mind immediately is both the ongoing vulnerability of communities to climate disasters and how those disasters can be exploited to advance radical policy changes that dismantle democratic institutions and worsen inequities.
Twenty years ago I was part of a national network of organizers working toward Educational Justice for BIPOC youth and their families. Less than a month after Katrina, while New Orleans was still flooding and the crisis was multiplying, we saw a well-financed charter school movement moving swiftly through the city with a network of right-wing lobbyists descending on the city in the days after the storm.
Soon after, New Orleans public schools were taken over by the state and eventually turned into autonomous charter schools, with all public school teachers fired and the union contract allowed to expire. Within two months of Katrina, public education had been privatized across the city. [source]
What we witnessed in the wake of Katrina was the epitome of disaster capitalism, a concept coined by Naomi Klein to describe the way corporations exploit moments of collective trauma to usher in disastrous policies that maximize profits while selling out our communities.
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina transformed New Orleans into America’s largest school privatization experiment, we now face a perfect storm: intensifying climate disasters under an administration actively dismantling the very protections New Orleans and other similar communities need most.[source]
The aftermath of Katrina taught us that we must learn to build the kind of grassroots power that can defend our communities on two fronts: surviving the escalating climate disasters ahead, while simultaneously resisting the forces that exploit these crises to dismantle our democratic institutions and privatize our public goods.
True community resilience means organizing not just against floods and fires, but against the disaster capitalists who see our moments of greatest vulnerability as their greatest opportunity ensuring we emerge from climate catastrophes with stronger, more equitable communities rather than ones stripped of democratic control and sold to the highest bidder.
As we mark twenty years, hundreds of Gulf South organizers, artists, educators, and activists have created the K20 Week of Action to remember and heal from the losses, to commemorate the resistance, and to offer powerful lessons for our current and future movements.
This week, we stand in solidarity with the Katrina 20 Local Organizing Committee, as they commemorate the crucial lessons learned from the crisis after Katrina, and we join them in celebrating the power that fuels our collective social movements today. We invite our supporters and friends in the movement to join us in signing the K20 Solidarity Statement and participating in the K20 Week of Action. Learn more at https://www.katrina20.org/
Byron Ramos Gudiel is Executive Director of Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy (CEED).