A bit late but that’s okay...
“By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and the nexus of Republican politicians, think tanks and land developers started talking about "clean sheets" and exciting opportunities, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.” ~ Naomi Klein from The Shock Doctrine
A “Clean Sheet” (Klein 4): The general praise made by people who benefit from the erasing of structures that make up a political, economic, cultural, or social entity. This is replaced with a new system that is neo-liberal, capitalist, and perpetuates privatization.
The monstrous presence that we see in this week’s topics center around the ways that history repeats itself over and over again. In Naomi Klein’s introduction to their book, The Shock Doctrine, they describe how disaster capitalists have used the practice of “economic shock treatment” to take advantage of natural disasters that strike underprivileged areas. For example, Klein illustrates how public schools were replaced by the private corporations of charter schools after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Some politicians praised the disaster as a “fresh start” in terms of rebuilding New Orleans to have “lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a ‘smaller, safer city’” (Klein 4). However, this claim to a “clean slate” refers to more monstrous means (Klein 4).
According to a quick web search, black folks made up 67% of the population 2005 (year of Hurricane Katrina) and 60% of the population in 2019. The ways in which politicians and capitalist used the disaster as a way to so-called fix the city demonstrates how racism is at play. This clean slate goes to rebuilding New Orleans as they see fit: gentrified and privatized which affects the millions of black folks who live there. And as Klein shows, this is not the first time that disasters have been taken advantage of and built off of the violence against people of color.
Economic shock therapy is an example of orphaned beginnings. With the condition of a natural disaster, it uses physical destruction and chaos to bring forth a solution that runs in capitalist ideologies. It tries to erase the histories, structures, and people that existed before the disaster. This erasure is an act of violence that piggybacks on the demolition of less privileged communities such as people of color, womxn of color, and non-western areas.
Liberatory futures can be listened for through how intentional we are with our use of language. I appreciated how our professor used the indigenious word, “Turtle Island” instead of “North America” to describe how when Muslim womxn were enslaved and brought there through the trans-atlantic slave trade. It is a form of decolonization that recognizes the violent implications (such as erasure) made through interpreting the world with western geography.
Liberatory futures can also be made in the physical voices that are spoken and listened to. In class, we listened to a short radio speech by Laura Bush, the wife of President Bush, made a few months after 9/11. Although this speech employed harmful narratives, it did demonstrate to us the importance of who gets chosen to deliver such narratives. Laura was a white woman who clearly had a southern accent. Pairing her voice and the message she gave powerfully expressed different ideologies of nationalism, white womanhood/white feminism, and the white savior complex. Our podcasts can hold voices like these accountable through the voices we choose to speak. Mia Mingus and her podcast, Disability Visibility, mentions how she hopes to proliferate and diversify whose voices are heard on the radio or in podcasts. I recall her saying she wants to hear disabled voices (her own voice she compares to Darth Vader) and normalize them, celebrate them. In creating our characters, I feel like it is crucial to take into account the ways our audience will listen to our podcasts.
