“Hurricane Katrina did not happen in a vacuum, in America's imagination, to everyone, or in general. It happened in a particular geography, a history, an economy, and a field of race and power built to render certain people powerless.”
Abe Louise YoungFootnote 1“Around the city we could see the scars of Hurricane Katrina, especially represented by the spray-painted ‘X's on the houses that had been searched. But in the Ninth Ward … the houses were just gone. The whole time we drove the virtually empty street … I was conscious of the fact that this was a place where many of New Orleans’ poorest residents had lost their lives, and that at least part of the blame belongs to deeper structural factors that have isolated the city's poor and Black.”
Stephen MarottaFootnote 2The massive suffering in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina elicited a significant public outpouring of aid to help the victims. Two U.S. presidents pledged to reconstruct New Orleans and other affected areas, dozens of other countries—for the first time—sent large amounts of relief to the United States, and the American Red Cross and other organizations saw record donations of money and blood. Such donations spike each year on the tragedy's anniversary.Footnote 3 Indeed, Katrina and its repercussions have long been talked about in terms of what has been made visible.Footnote 4 This is probably the most common trope to describe these events, as if the hurricane swept through and stripped away our structural blinders along with the levees, revealing ugly socioeconomic and racial disparities.
A similar metaphor was invoked to describe the hurricane as wiping the slate clean and creating a kind of tabula rasa on which centuries of racism and inequalities, now visible to all, could be quickly erased in the service of a fresh start for a newly aware citizenry. Even President George W. Bush addressed structural inequities, including the disaster's “roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cuts off generations from the opportunity of America.”Footnote 5 In the wake of the hurricane, many vowed to tackle not only immediate and urgent needs, but to reverse the years of neglect and discrimination that played such a large part in expanding the scope of this so-called “natural” disaster.
Contrary to the surplus of literature on what was revealed or made visible by the hurricane, here we focus on who and what Katrina rendered invisible. We examine how some structural issues remained hidden despite abundant horrific images that ostensibly revealed structural violence.Footnote 6 Our interest is in how the seen and the not seen together have influenced the ways the purported tabula rasa of New Orleans has been (re)constructed and marked since 2005, and how the process of social triage has aided in re-concealing structural violence. In the ubiquitous public and theoretical framing of un-concealment, staggering visual evidence leads to an imperative to repair, to make whole. But we show that this imperative is irrevocably tied to power; New Orleans was not wiped clean, nor could the structural violence be miraculously transcended.
In an earlier piece, one of us advanced an ocular ethic for interrogating the relationship between structural inequality and representational practices.Footnote 7 Such a perspective suggests that what is exposed or made visible is matched in significance by what is rendered invisible, hidden, or erased. This methodology enables us to “reveal, resituate, and recuperate” missing bodies and other ghostly figures that inhabit our social worlds. But this is a political endeavor as well as an empirical one: “the ocular ethic represents the responsibility that comes with seeing or perceiving bodies and identifying and recovering those bodies that are unseen or less exposed to public view.”Footnote 8 Thus, to see is not just to bring to light the hidden, but also to unearth structures and practices that foster social invisibility: to excavate the ruins.
In sifting through Katrina's ruins, what can we learn about the bodies hidden beneath the debris or dragged away by the silt? How might the ocular ethic expose racialized violence that was and is so endemic to New Orleans and other southern cities? How might exposing the carcass of trauma and disaster add to our collective understanding of power as it operates in a specific place and time? Concerned with this potent nexus of power, structural violence, and trauma, we look to social theorists Steven Lukes and Clarissa Hayward, who recently engaged in extended dialogue on the nature of power, particularly regarding agency and responsibility. Their conversation is quite useful for understanding the aftermath of Katrina, including how exposures of inequality did not ultimately lead to structural changes and how conversations in the media and political circles shifted regarding who or what is to blame. In what follows, we reflect on Katrina through the lens of important political science treatments of power, and by incorporating “postmodern” concerns with “ocularity” and “social triage.” By doing so, we also aim to promote reflection on the ways that serious attention to the dynamics underlying “Katrina” and similar kinds of politically inscribed disasters can enhance political science inquiry.
“The City that Care Forgot”
New Orleans has many nicknames, perhaps the most renowned and widely used being The Big Easy. Yet the sobriquet “the city that care forgot” has also been in use since at least the 1930s, most likely in reference to the city as a place one comes to be carefree, to enjoy life without the presence of one's usual troubles which have been left behind. “The city that care forgot” has another, darker meaning, however, especially in Katrina's deadly wake. The famous musician, music producer, and music personality Dr. John, who has spoken of being “traumaticalized” by the hurricane and its aftermath,Footnote 9 titled his 2008 protest album City That Care Forgot. The New Orleans referenced in the songs, poetry, and literature that emerged from Katrina is a different city, one forsaken by government and tourists alike, and one whose most vulnerable citizens are removed to the cultural landfill like so much hazardous waste.
It is a fitting nickname, given that New Orleans is one of the United States' great tourist attractions. It is “exotic” for many Americans; New Orleans is the Other, an outlier. Like Las Vegas, it is a cultural playground, a destination. But whereas Las Vegas thrives on artificiality, a neon oasis pulsing in the desert, New Orleans is represented and often experienced as an “authentic” tourist destination.Footnote 10 It is a place of murky beginnings and shady history; a place where Cajun and Creole cultures touch, however lightly, on mainstream U.S. culture; a place of swamps, riverboats, levees, French influence, voodoo, and cemetery tours. Shady politicians abound, Mardi Gras is legendary, and the jazz plays on. Little wonder that New Orleans is featured in so many novels, films, and television shows.
Even prior to Katrina, for tourists from outside the South, visiting New Orleans might be their only excursion to a city that is majority African American and “crime-ridden.” The underlying (perceived) sense of danger is undeniably part of the allure; think of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire or James Lee Burke's gritty Dave Robicheaux novels. A sense of exquisite intrigue hovers over the city like a haze of blue smoke, and tourists can flirt with danger while they're consorting with each other.
Of course, many tourists never see New Orleans in the day, as a working city, a living city, with real people rather than stereotypes. And until Katrina “revealed” the stunning decay, most visitors never saw the deep, relentless poverty. Nor did they take the time to understand recent historical events that shaped the city, such as the “Second Battle of New Orleans”Footnote 11 in the 1950s and 1960s surrounding desegregation; the massive and perhaps unprecedented “white flight”; the crime waves that swept the city in the 1990s that led New Orleans to being known, briefly, as the murder capital of the U.S.; or the vibrant, righteously angry environmental justice movement radiating through the city and across a state burdened with toxins.
The hurricane provoked tourists and consumers alike to see the city in a new and profoundly disturbing light. As Americans (and others around the world) watched endless news coverage, some could spot places they remembered. Indeed, major media attention was paid to how much damage was done to the French Quarter, and this popular area was among the first to be revitalized. These media images both troubled and reinforced the “tourist gaze”Footnote 12 that had framed New Orleans for so many. The tourist gaze is “a kind of domination; it forces people and places visited to manipulate themselves into objects to fulfill tourists' desires and for ease of consumption.”Footnote 13 Katrina disrupted the gaze; desperate African Americans on the news bore little resemblance to the taxi drivers, musicians, porters, and waiters whom tourists had encountered and with whom they might have struck up short-lived and mostly one-sided friendships. However, this disconnect helped to locate those suffering as Other, as radically unlike the tourists themselves. Those who engaged in the post-Katrina “misery tours” of New Orleans through media accounts, the plethora of picture books and special magazine issues, or even on-the-ground disaster tours put on by Gray Lines and others, could take in the extent of the disaster while remaining or returning home relatively unscathed, content, safe.
There was, in fact, a deluge of visual images associated with Hurricane Katrina (in spite of the fact that the government, with the cooperation of the media early on, tried to censor images emanating from the city with an official order), from the original menacing satellite and radar pictures of the encroaching storm to photography and videography of the unfolding disaster and its gruesome aftermath. Henry Giroux, for example, has written of “grotesque images of bloated corpses floating in the rotting waters that flooded the streets of New Orleans” that “circulated throughout the mainstream media.”Footnote 14 The hurricane's visual legacy could be found in pictures of the bodies abandoned in nursing homes and hospitals, the families huddled on near-submerged rooftops, the dead pets entangled in sodden foliage and debris, and of course nightmarish scenes at the Louisiana Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Television viewers and Internet junkies were awash in frightening, upsetting, and poignant pictures. Giroux argues that “America was forced to confront these disturbing images” and “the damning questions behind the images … revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation's citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see but had spent the better part of two decades demonizing.”Footnote 15
The storm supposedly ripped away our blinders and made visible the pathetic truth that in our political schema, some people are disposable—“an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves.”Footnote 16 Giroux posits that the neo-liberal and neo-racist state seeks the best, most efficient ways to make disposable people invisible. But Katrina was, at least initially, positioned discursively so as to un-conceal the effects of these policies and years of racism and neglect, and to at last reveal their “true” causes and consequences. The implication was that now Americans would be moved to action (the imperative to repair), to reverse neo-liberal policies, and to reinvigorate governmental programs aimed at reducing poverty.Footnote 17
But despite the visual proliferation of horror and loss, the structural violence and its victims almost immediately became invisible once again, crusted over with the noxious grime of racism, graft, and historic federal dismantling of urban infrastructures through defunding. What was supposed to be a revelation was, instead, an apparition. How and why did this happen?
Power, Structure, and Culpability
Steven Lukes in his seminal work Power: A Radical View Footnote 18 developed an influential three-dimensional theory of power from what he calls a generally Anglo-American tradition. The first dimension—or, to use the term Lukes borrowed from Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “face”—of power was the one investigated by Robert Dahl, Nelson Polsby, and others, and refers to the ability of those with more resources to coerce the powerless who lack resources. The second face of power, the object of Bachrach and Baratz's research, refers to the ability to determine who participates and what is talked about in policy debates.Footnote 19 This agenda-setting or “non-decision making” power is the ability to control the discursive rules of the game. Lukes argued that there was a third face of social power, the ability to shape social interests—including control over the images and interpretations of the powerless. When the powerless hold interests at odds with what Lukes called their “real interests,”Footnote 20 the oppressed will acquiesce in their oppression. This third face of power is the most nefarious because “power is at its most effective when least observable.”Footnote 21 Lukes, in his early work, proposed that this third dimension could be empirically examined if we were to discern the real interests of the oppressed and compare them to their stated interests.
Lukes' original formulation of power was subjected to a number of critiques, and he has subsequently modified his work in important ways.Footnote 22 The most interesting critique for our purposes is the Foucauldian or structural argument, first advanced by Jeffrey C. Isaac in 1987 in his article “Beyond the Three Faces of Power” and in his book Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View. Isaac argued that Lukes' formulation of power was closer to the views of Dahl and Bachrach and Baratz than he realized, and that it downplayed the important role of social structure—typically defined as the fairly concrete sets of rules, practices, and institutions that shape individual and group behavior—in ways similar to theirs. Drawing on Anthony Giddens' theory of “the duality of structure and agency,” Isaac defended a “relational” and “structural” approach to power. As he maintained: “Social power should be understood relationally, by which I mean in terms of the underlying social relations which structure behavioral interaction and not in terms of the contingent regularities in the behaviors of discrete agents who may have no necessary relationship to one another.”Footnote 23
This critical perspective has been further advanced by Clarissa Rile Hayward, in her book De-Facing Power. Hayward suggests that we need to “de-face” power; that is, to understand power in contexts where it is disconnected from human agents. In an extensive dialogue with Hayward, Lukes maintained his position that power should be tied to agents and not to structures, insisting that power must be tied to responsibility or culpability, which in his view can only be attached to moral agents. For example, regarding discrimination in the U.S. housing market, Lukes argued that we can hold some elites accountable for lack of access to the market by many, but he would not ascribe power to the structure that constrains the actions of the elites or those who are victimized by structural forces. Where Hayward suggested that structure, including such phenomena as deindustrialization and white flight, was at fault—in addition to some specific individuals that we might be able to identify—Lukes worried that such an argument risks falling into structural determinism, what he calls the “ultra-radical” view of thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, who see power everywhere and thus have trouble placing blame.
Hayward replied, however, that while structural determinism was a risk, it was not necessary to appeal to it “in order to acknowledge that social actors never act in ways that are wholly independent of social constraint on action.”Footnote 24 For Hayward, no individual acts in a purely free way—all are constrained by structure—but this is not to say that their actions are determined by the structure. Paralleling the main tenets of social interactionism, she writes, “Structure does not determine action. Instead, it shapes action, by rendering some forms, in some contexts, costly or otherwise difficult, while rewarding or otherwise encouraging others. Structure shapes social action through social meanings, which agents continually interpret and re-interpret.”Footnote 25 There is in fact emancipatory potential in “a social capacity that enables actors, not to escape or to transcend power relations, but to participate effectively in shaping or re-shaping relationships defined by the practices and institutions that govern their action.”Footnote 26
It appears at first that the debate between Lukes and Hayward is a matter of emphasis.Footnote 27 Both thinkers hold that structure and agency are crucial, both agree that structure can and does constrain agency,Footnote 28 and both oppose any type of determinism. Hayward simply argues for a more prominent role for structure in any analysis of power, and that structure not only constrains the agent but also produces the agent, while Lukes holds to a more voluntarist position, still recognizing that agents' actions can be constrained by structure. They concluded their jointly-written essay in a rather prosaic fashion: “If we think of power, as Lukes urges us, in strictly agent-centric terms, then we may overlook some subset of significant and remediable social constraints on human freedom. Nevertheless, if we think of power, as Hayward suggests, in structural terms, then we may lose sight of those particular agents who are responsible for the constraints we analyze and review.”Footnote 29
We hold that the debate is not just a matter of emphasis; rather, it reveals a critical difference regarding the purpose of analyses of power. Lukes and Hayward agree that the functions of power analysis are threefold:
(1) to map or understand power relations in society, that is, “to locate and track the agents, individual and collective, who have the capacity to affect our interests, as well as those of others”;Footnote 30
(2) to assign responsibility to those who have acted or did not act, especially when the results were harms to individuals or groups;Footnote 31 and
(3) “there is the practice of evaluating social inequalities, where what is at issue is the distribution of power: the power of differently situated individuals and groups to form and realize their objectives.”Footnote 32
For Lukes, structure is most important in functions 2 and 3. To assign responsibility—or, more accurately, culpability—requires us to separate structure from agency in order to identify the powerful whose actions or inactions limited “others' freedoms.” In identifying and changing social inequalities, social structures are important so far as they are causal factors producing inequalities, and they will determine how we should act to change them. Hayward recognizes the moral need to find culpable agents; however, for her, “the critical project that lies at the heart of the power debate [is] the project of identifying, evaluating, and elaborating methods for changing differential remediable social constraint on freedom.”Footnote 33 In this third function, social structure is crucial: “if the concern is to criticize and to change the overall pattern of such actions and such decisions, one should attend, as well, to the social constraints that structure each agent's actions.” Lukes wants to critique constraints but thinks it is more important to find a person culpable, while Hayward wants to find those culpable, but also wants to change structures. By focusing on culpable agents, Hayward argues, Lukes moves the analysis of power away from social structures.Footnote 34
Lukes claims that by privileging the culpability of individuals in analyses of power, he is able “to cast a critical eye on attempts by powerful agents to escape their own responsibilities by ‘blaming the system.’” Here, he offers as example the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the assignment of blame for it. He cites Martha J. Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, who offers a “succinct power-and-responsibility analysis” by arguing that the federal government shirked its responsibility in design of the levees and in “withdraw(ing) housing assistance to the neediest people.”Footnote 35 He juxtaposes this example with debates between state and federal actors during the disaster about whether the federal government had the constitutional authority to intervene more vigorously. Such debates continued in the “blame game” of the aftermath. While some argued they were constrained by structure, others, such as President Bush, insisted that we should focus on the future and not the past. Lukes argues that focusing on an agent-centered model “allows us to keep alive the crucial question of the moral and the political responsibility of the powerful for what they do and what they fail to do in the past and in the future.”Footnote 36
But we suggest that Lukes, by emphasizing the function of finding culpability, is actually hampering the search. Social constraints will determine who is found culpable and which social structures are subject to change. Recall that Lukes in his original formulation of the third face of power posed a research agenda to identify real interests and compare the actual interests of the powerless. This implies that structure works on meanings and interpretations (as argued by symbolic interactionists), including the assignment of culpability. We argue that those seeking to assign responsibility, and scholars seeking to understand power, are similarly constrained by social structures. There is no privileged place untouched by social structures. Lukes worries that emphasizing structure will allow evasion of responsibility. Yet we argue that rushing to find culpable individuals ignores the important role that structure plays on the agents held to be responsible and on the agents who determine who is culpable. To show how, and to explain why the general structure was not laid bare or wiped clean by Hurricane Katrina but proved to be surprisingly resilient, we turn to two concepts from critical trauma studies: social triage and tabula rasa.
Tabulae Rasae and Social Triage
There seems to be a predilection to “find” tabulae rasae where they do not exist. As Naomi Klein has argued, colonialisms cannot “resist the allure of the blank slate—that was colonialism's seductive promise: ‘discovering’ wide open new lands where utopia seemed possible.”Footnote 37 Of course, tabulae rasae are neither empty spaces nor neutral, and those who mark an allegedly blank slate do so from specific social locations, with their own unique perspectives and interests. Just as “America” was not the tabula rasa that John Locke famously wished it to be in the late seventeenth century, New Orleans after Katrina was never, nor could it ever be, a blank slate. To argue otherwise is to minimize the structural violence that created and exacerbated the disaster in the first place, to ignore the manifold damages suffered and still being endured, and to render increasingly invisible the agendas of those wishing to mark the supposed blank state. As Casper and Moore assert, we must instead “probe beneath the surface, to the ghosts lurking inside and haunting structures and practices, to the bodies caught up and made invisible in rational discourses.”Footnote 38 For theorists as much as for archaeologists, excavating the ruins makes good empirical sense, in that there is always something meaningful in the wreckage.
The term tabula rasa has come to mean a blank slate, but the original meaning of “rasa” was to be erased or scraped off, oftentimes leaving traces of writing on the slate. To create a blank slate by erasing or scraping away text is undeniably to transform the original, to wound so as to create blankness or emptiness. Such wounding on a human scale, as opposed to the medium of stone tablets, may result in trauma to bodies, communities, nation-states. Indeed, the original root of the word “trauma” in Homeric Greek came from the verb τείρω, which meant to rub something, usually a piece of leather hide, until a hole developed. To relentlessly rub or scrape, then, is to induce trauma: to open a fissure, to wound, be it in a body, a levee, a community, or a city. Yet this wounding is uneven, stratified, with some places and some people harmed more than others.Footnote 39
The imperative to repair, to make whole, is also stratified. Gideon Sjoberg, Ted Vaughan, and Norma Williams have employed the term ‘social triage’ to better understand how bureaucracies, even the best-intentioned ones, in the name of efficiency perpetuate the marginalization of the lowest classes, or what Sjoberg, Vaughan, and Williams call the “sacrifice of the disadvantaged.”Footnote 40 The concept of “triage” was first used in the Napoleonic wars “for the decision to abandon the terminally ill or horribly injured patients in order to save others less time-consuming or costly to treat.”Footnote 41 Some wounded bodies are too far gone to be salvaged, at least in a cost-efficient manner. Applied to social settings, the drive for efficiency, marked by the ubiquity of cost-benefit rationalities, requires bureaucracies to address the needs of those who are easier to reach and save, while those bodies that would require longer-term investments of time and resources are neglected. Here, suffering meets head-on the limitations of biopolitical governance and institutional structures.
Hence the term “social triage” has been employed by sociologists to mean sacrifice of the weakest sector of society. It is “a sorting on social grounds, which diverts the goods and services from those found to be most wanting.”Footnote 42 In urban planning, triage refers to the cessation of financial support and housing services within the “worst” neighborhoods, assuming that the neighborhoods (and by extension, the people who live there) cost too much to save. Triage is thus a giving of preference, a sacrificing of some over others and a valuing of the fiscal and institutional over human needs.Footnote 43 Triage allows policy makers and the public “not to become involved, to be insulated from the horrors of a situation.”Footnote 44 And as a consequence of social triage, certain questions about deeper levels of structural violence will not be addressed. Thus, triage, driven by cost-benefit analyses and other neo-liberal rationalities, fosters invisibility of large segments of the population, in effect, cauterizing the marginalized.Footnote 45
Processes of social triage derive from and are responsible to larger social forces; triage is not implemented in a neutral way, whether in emergency rooms or on battlefields or in sites of urban catastrophe. And quite often, the needs of the most vulnerable remain unmet even after triage. Beyond the immediate site of wounding, a focus on social triage also means that analogous systemic violence will go unnoticed and thus unaddressed. Disasters defined as “trauma” prompt immediate responses;Footnote 46 in the focus on the immediate and urgent, triage enables both help and the appearance of help.
There Are No Victims Here
Clearly, the scope of Katrina's devastation overwhelmed our collective ability to see beneath the surface, much less to comprehend what we would find there. In such cases of sensory overload, people seek cues for digesting or making sense of information. Despite the plethora of images and the readily apparent manifestations of structural violence,Footnote 47 Katrina as grand revealer did not shed light on all the victims. Existing structural violences which had created biases in media coverage colluded with systemic inequality to keep some victims from ever being seen. Scholars have noted that the many Hispanic and Asian-American victims of Katrina were mostly ignored by mainstream media.Footnote 48 Similarly, people with disabilitiesFootnote 49 and the elderlyFootnote 50 were overlooked (or worse) before, during, and after the disaster. The victims of sexual violence, such as the young aid workers who flocked to the city, were deliberately shrouded.Footnote 51 Courte C.W. Voorhees et al. found that “the media accurately represented the racial distribution of the local population while covering Katrina, but fell short with gender and the representation of power and poverty.”Footnote 52
This concealment intensified when, instead of focusing on the corpses and the underlying causes of poverty and racism, the media quickly turned its attention to looters, criminals, and those who had refused to leave supposedly despite numerous warnings.Footnote 53 While claims that sufficient warning had been given to all residents before the storm, and claims of rampant crime (murders, rape, looting, etc.) in its wake, ultimately proved to be false,Footnote 54 the discourse had irrevocably shifted: the victims had come to be seen by many as having deserved their fate—evoking another catastrophe, HIV/AIDS, and its “culpable” sufferers.Footnote 55 The social constructionsFootnote 56 of those affected and possibly culpable were interpreted through a particularly invidious lens of structure. The survivors clinging to rooftops were no longer human beings deserving of empathy, but now were frequently branded or cauterized as drug addicts and criminals, or the predictable products of the welfare state run amok. Local politicians in New Orleans aided this cauterization process, with Police Superintendent Eddie Compass passing on unsubstantiated rumors as fact to reporters, making such claims as that criminals were attacking tourists: “they are beating, they are raping them in the streets.”Footnote 57 He claimed that in the Superdome “we had little babies in there … some of the little babies getting raped.”Footnote 58 Even Mayor Nagin used pathological drug addiction, without any verification, as an explanation for the alleged widespread crime spree:
Right now, [the drug addicts] don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns. So what you're seeing is drug-starving crazy addicts, drug addicts, they are wreaking havoc. And we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only … hope to God that we're not overrun.Footnote 59
While local officials may have been attempting to proffer a rationalization for their colossal inability to control the growing crisis, we should ask why the media and public were so willing to believe what turned out to be unsubstantiated rumors, tales that would ultimately impede relief activities and deaden feelings for the sufferers, especially as the rescue effort transformed into one of massive containment.
Why were so many almost gleeful when confronted with startling (if untrue) stories of looting and murders? Why was there a palpable sense of relief in his voice when one of our colleagues exclaimed, “It is Lord of the Flies down there!” We suggest that this false counter-narrative eased the collective conscience of people who were not suffering in the overcrowded Superdome or huddling on rooftops, absolving television viewers from blame but also from the imperative to feel, to care, to do something more substantial than donate money to the Red Cross. This cauterization of the Other and the dramatic rhetorical shift, in salving the psychic wounds of viewers, paved the way for Katrina and its victims to recede into an “anti-spectacle” that “dictates that there is nothing to see and that instead one must keep moving, keep circulating and keep consuming.”Footnote 60
So once again, the vulnerable become the disappeared.
With New Orleans perceived as a violent, Hobbesian state of nature populated by outlaws, the policy solution was no longer evacuation and humanitarian aid or serious discussions about ameliorating long-standing structural violence. Instead, the need for an all-powerful sovereign was invoked to justify an increased military presence and martial law to contain those who were branded as not deserving the right to seek protection. This is culpability run amok. In the most dramatic example, local law enforcement officials from the neighboring city of Gretna turned fleeing survivors away, preventing them from reaching safety when they attempted to cross the Crescent City Connection Bridge.Footnote 61 Their tactics, later valorized with yard signs by (White) residents of Gretna, included aiming rifles at the survivors and firing shots over their heads.Footnote 62
Though the images to which we were privy during the disaster caused many to shudder and to open up their wallets, and still others to quickly rush to New Orleans to lend a hand (or to gawk), the anticipated deep soul-searching among Americans about widespread structural violence, especially racism, did not happen. Instead, Katrina quickly became a rhetorical football in a blame-and-shame game among local, state, and federal governments and their diverse citizenry. A counter-narrative was created against the early prevalent view that infamous FEMA Director Michael D. Brown and others in the federal government were to blame for the escalation of the rapidly evolving tragedy.
For example, empirical studies quickly showed that the attribution of blame was racially polarized. African Americans were much more sympathetic to the victims than Whites, and were much more likely to blame the federal government, especially President Bush, while Whites were more likely to blame the (mostly African-American) residents and (African-American) Mayor Ray Nagin.Footnote 63 Cedric Herring found similar racialized views among displaced victims of Katrina. Whereas more than three-fourths of the African-American respondents felt that aid would have been provided more swiftly if the victims were mostly White, less than half of the Whites felt that way.Footnote 64 Those who wanted to hold New Orleans and its people accountable for the problems blamed local government; those who wanted more structural reforms tended to blame the federal government or the state government, depending on which side of an inter-party fight they were on. In fact, for many conservatives the lesson of Katrina was the failure of the welfare state that had created thousands of dependents who could not mobilize the will or the resources to evacuate themselves.Footnote 65 Thus, the empathy-inducing narrative of Katrina, spurred by the compelling, urgent visual images of suffering and ruin, was rapidly swallowed up by pre-existing and comforting rhetorical and political agendas. All sides could maintain their good consciences and their overall worldviews for understanding social problems in the United States, as well as their party loyalties.
Moreover, despite the exposure, however abbreviated, of deep cleavages and profound stratification, a more sustainable understanding of poverty, racism, and structural violence failed to emerge. Notwithstanding the publicity of philanthropic and volunteer efforts, most Americans did not change their attitudes toward the poor or toward government assistance for the poor. While public awareness of poverty did increase after Katrina (albeit from an already high state of awareness), the number of respondents in a nationwide survey who were willing to support government assistance actually decreased.Footnote 66 Indeed, the number of “deniers,” those who denied the extent of poverty and the need for governmental assistance, as well as the number of “realists,” those who admitted the extent of poverty but saw government assistance as wrong-headed and inefficient, both increased after Katrina.Footnote 67 Even people in Houston and Baton Rouge, two cities that displayed enormous levels of volunteerism and philanthropic efforts to accommodate hundreds of thousands of evacuees, showed increasing negative emotions toward the poor and African Americans after Katrina.Footnote 68
Thus, it would seem that for many—before, during, and after the storm—the lesson of Katrina was of inept governments and undeserving poor people. The predominance of this belief may be attributed to the rhetorical shift from calling sufferers “victims” to calling them “criminals” or unworthy products of the welfare state. The victims, not the structure, became culpable.
Limits of Social Triage in Addressing Structural Violence
Social triage signifies the perpetuation of structural violence,Footnote 69 and post-hurricane New Orleans exemplifies this dynamic. Indeed, this sense of insulating the mainstream from the horrors of battle or the underprivileged is especially apt for the Katrina situation. Social triage after landfall meant that broader issues of environmental justice, poverty, and racism endemic to Louisiana and the Gulf region could be set aside. Social sorting after Katrina—decrepit human bodies on airport baggage carousels, families stranded on rooftops, FEMA resources for some but not others—offers evidence of chronic, pervasive structural violence. Indeed such sorting even extends systemic violence, which is exacerbated further yet by broad-scale market forces. Aid has been justly criticized for leaving many neglected, for privileging some over others,Footnote 70 and for exacerbating pre-existing colonial structures.Footnote 71 And there is strong evidence that some of the support provided is making people sick: the trailers for displaced residents made of toxic materials, for example, or the use of the mostly African-American area of New Orleans East as a landfill for storm debris (including re-opening of the controversial Old Gentilly Landfill).Footnote 72
The social triage extends to which parts of New Orleans were selected to be rebuilt. Indeed, there has been massive ecological and social transformation, and a drastically altered city has emerged. But there are few stories of French Quarter tourist businesses or white upper-class families still waiting to return to New Orleans, while stories of African Americans unable to return even seven years later are legion. New Orleans was recently named by the Wall Street Journal as the “most improved” city for business, in an article whose tagline reads, “what a difference a disaster makes.”Footnote 73 Citing a “pro-growth” attitude, the article quotes one official remarking, “Katrina has been a near-death experience and cleansing event.”
Obviously, those who have benefited the most from these changes are not the displaced and the indigent, or the racially dispossessed, who have been purged like so much silt from the resurrected and newly purified New Orleans. Six years after Katrina, New Orleans was described as “richer, whiter, emptier.”Footnote 74 Since 2000, New Orleans has lost over 140,000 residents, and African Americans now make up a much smaller percentage of its population. Some of this depopulation, especially of African Americans, is due to the governmental and corporate decision not to rebuild public housing in the city—a form of social triage. The African-American community, which has been relocated and splintered from previous urban renewal efforts, is now even more dispersed. We are witness to yet another iteration of the Diaspora.
Structural constraints on triage also affect progressive movements. Rachel E. Luft provides a unique perspective on how pre-existing ideologies were perpetuated even by “liberal” aid workers.Footnote 75 Spring 2006 witnessed an alternative spring break on a grand scale with thousands of young people, mostly Whites, flocking to New Orleans to engage in clean-up operations organized largely by the grassroots organization Common Ground. As the spring wore on, it became clear that a number of young aid workers were being sexually assaulted, but many of them did not come forward. As the reports continued, Common Ground took steps, including warning aid workers to be more cautious when venturing out into the local, mostly African-American, neighborhoods. The leaders of Common Ground, many of them African American, blamed the local community, but it was clear that the mostly White (male) aid workers perpetrated an overwhelming number of the sexual assaults. The organization tried to cover up reports of the assaults, and many of the victims did not report them in the first place, in order to avoid tarnishing the aid work and perpetuating racial stereotypes. Pro-woman stances had to take a backseat to the prevailing anti-racism discourse among the volunteers.
The effects of social triage extend to the costs of selective public and donor focus as well. As Clifford Bob has shown,Footnote 76 when a social movement garners the attention of an NGO/gatekeeper or the mass media, other movements are (further) neglected, especially ones working on underlying causes or structural violence. Consider for example the decades-old environmental justice movement in Louisiana led by intrepid women like Florence Robinson, Beverly Wright, Monique Harden, and Nathalie Walker. Even though Katrina was arguably the most widespread reported environmental justice event, only a few ancillary benefits from all of the attention to the disaster reached their efforts at the local level. The movement's pioneers continue to serve numerous poor and predominantly African-American communities throughout Louisiana, but mostly in the shadows, as leading NGOs and the public's attention shifted later on to tsunamis, wars, budget deficits, and elections. Julie Sze rightly holds that this inattention to environmental justice discourse in the aftermath of the hurricane is “not a product of neglect, but reflective of three simultaneous erasures”: the dismissal of the voices of environmental justice activism, the suspending of environmental regulations in the cleanup, and the Bush Administration's reversal of environmental justice priorities in the EPA only weeks before Katrina.Footnote 77
Conclusion: “How to Rebuild a City”Footnote 78
The question remains: can we rub or scrape enough to create a fissure not in human bodies and lives but rather in structural violence and invisible ideologies? Perhaps not. If a Category 3 hurricane that inundated one of the largest and most visited and famous cities in the U.S. and provided thousands of images that shocked our collective conscience and was supposed to un-conceal so much has had little long-term effect on racial attitudes, attitudes toward poverty, or even race relations within the affected areas, it would seem that little hope remains for significant beneficial change.
Structural violence is adept at reproducing itself. As we have seen, efforts to “do good” are swallowed up or co-opted by other agendas and processes of social triage driven by efficiency and governmental priorities. The storm of the century that was supposed to reveal all has in the end left much concealed, with shocking levels of human devastation unaddressed. Unrelenting structural violence has not been ameliorated; and with the exception of a cadre of social scientists, it has been largely hidden from our view. Even the process of assigning blame in this case did not lead to agents being found culpable, as Lukes would wish, but instead allowed structural violence to conceal its previous deleterious effects and, worse, to cast the victims as the ones culpable for their suffering.
Are we, then, suggesting that no progressive change is possible, that agency is impossible? To argue that structural violence is obdurate is not to suggest that New Orleans has remained inert, unchanging. We are not structural determinists, and we obviously support the efforts of social agents—citizens, activists, public officials—to bring about more substantial and beneficial change. But any such political agency is going to require recognition of just how constraining structure is. The surge in Katrina studies and pockets of grassroots activism in and around New Orleans offer some hope. Our theoretical tools as well as our experiences with pedagogical tourism have provided us with a broader view of the ongoing, entrenched problems resulting from Katrina, but we have also been witness to some potential if partial solutions.
In 2010, while visiting New Orleans, Casper and her graduate students in a course on environmental justice spent time with Rebuilding Together New Orleans, an organization serving low-income communities through home repair and community revitalization. The group visited the hardest-hit neighborhoods, talked with volunteers and homeowners, browsed the Preservation Salvage Store on Marais Street, and enjoyed an insider's account of political strategizing and infighting. This sort of immersive experience enabled the students to learn far more than would have been possible through second- and third-hand accounts in the media. Although dismayed throughout the tour by how much damage remains in New Orleans, and how scarred the city's poorest enclaves are, the group returned to Phoenix with a keener sense of the limitations and the points of intervention for producing structural change.
Just as environmental justice advocates continue to fight structural violence, so too do those victimized by the hurricane and the rebuilding efforts. Rachel Breunlin and Helen A. Regis report that for the displaced of New Orleans, Katrina and its aftermath are seen as more of the same, an extension of historical patterns; they had already been victimized by a series of urban renewal projects, from the building of housing projects (and their later demolishing) to the draining of back-swamps to allow for higher-end development, which made New Orleans more likely to flood.Footnote 79 The results of urban renewal projects, just like the supposed rebuilding of New Orleans, have invariably led to increases in land value for new developments and loss of land value for those in the poorest neighborhoods. In spite of these obstacles, the communities have developed numerous ways to remain intact, such as the participatory second line parades in the 9th Ward which weave through formerly connected neighborhoods. Breunlin and Regis argue that “although invisible to other sectors of society, individual and larger social identities develop that are nonetheless extremely powerful in their own communities.”Footnote 80
We want to close by suggesting that the concepts of the ocular ethic, social triage, and cauterization provide an important supplement to theories of power for understanding certain concealed aspects of Hurricane Katrina. While the media and many scholars have attended to what was revealed by the disaster—most concretely, a legacy of racism—our methodological inversion has instead focused on what and who were elided, obscured, and/or entombed by rhetoric and the persistence of structural violence, especially racial inequality. We have shown that not all affected bodies and lives have been seen and that relief has been as stratified as the effects of the disaster itself. Social triage is not equivalent to social change, and disparities in comprehension and care abound. Only through careful excavation of the still-smoldering ruins can we begin to comprehend the sedimented inequality and layers of vulnerability that structure and sustain violence. Political science can play an important role in advancing such comprehension. And the broadly archaeological perspective we have offered here, drawing upon both conventional disciplinary debates about power and less conventional forms of “postmodern” and “critical” theory, can play an important role in opening up further lines of political science inquiry.
