A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

While the media circulated rumors about armed gangs of Black men, most of the violence committed in the aftermath of Katrina was by white vigilante groups against Black men, sometimes assisted by police. Citizens, fearing theft and violence, often acted “preemptively,” shooting people for the slightest infractions or completely unprovoked. The media described these vigilantes often as protecting property from looters, without including the racialized violence that was occurring. Later, many of these vigilantes boasted on camera of the murders they’d committed, justifying their actions as protecting their own.

The murders of at least 18 Black men were not formally investigated at first, despite coverage in a Spike Lee documentary and elsewhere. In some cases, homicide investigators were dissuaded or ordered not to report these killings. Eventually, Solnit, who was reporting in New Orleans at the time, helped organize an investigation. The story moves to Donnell Harrington, a man who was shot by vigilantes but lived. He was initially a rescuer of neighbors and family, helping people get to safety. One day, a white man walked up and shot him, puncturing his jugular and leaving bullet wounds all over his chest and body. Solnit explains that racists imagine that without them, savagery would break out. They see themselves as preservers of civilization and order.

More death was caused by poor evacuation and disaster planning in New Orleans. FEMA’s approach to evacuation was “lackadaisical,” but the agency also rejected aid. Worst of all, the way out of New Orleans by foot was blocked off by the authorities, leaving people trapped. Authorities made excuses that evacuating was “too dangerous,” so citizens took matters into their own hands and evacuated people by boat.

The chapter concludes with a comparison of the way evacuations were handled in Cuba, where over 2.5 million people were brought to higher ground and deaths were few. Solnit partially credits Cuba’s strong civil society and social capital for these successes.

Solnit describes the warmth and conviviality of many of the people she met in New Orleans. Community was strong, and neighbors held barbeques and chatted on their front porches. Solnit writes that New Orleans, although poor and high in crime, had a sense of true community closeness and love of place that the rest of the country lacks. The hurricane devastated this sense, and it still has not fully recovered.

New Orleans is famous for its parades and celebrations, like Mardi Gras but including many others as well. Among them are second line parades, which involve groups of people dancing and following the main parade and band. These are often funded by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, which emerged after slavery as Black mutual aid societies. The parades can grant Black people “immunity” in moving throughout the segregated city.

After the hurricane, a huge outpouring of support followed, with people across the country offering emergency housing to hurricane victims. Neighborhood associations helped residents move back, rebuild, and navigate FEMA’s bureaucracy.

In the Ninth Ward and other poor neighborhoods, the hurricane was an excuse for developers to raze the damaged neighborhoods and take them over. Neighborhood organizations, with the help of environmentalists and celebrities, resisted this trend and rebuilt on their own while addressing the challenges that the location, made precarious by human-built waterways, posed. Some of these houses were built on stilts to prevent flooding.

Katrina was a somewhat different disaster than the others in this book because so many citizens evacuated to various parts of the country. This evacuation left few behind to clean up and form networks of mutual aid. These networks were not enough, however, to address the scale of the disaster, and government aid from outside was needed, though it came haltingly and insufficiently. Six months after the disaster, many areas still appeared as if the hurricane had just happened, and volunteers from around the country poured in to help rebuild.

Solnit argues that Katrina caused President Bush’s popularity to sink and caused the administration to lose the mandate of heaven. It is seen by many as the turning point that allowed Obama to be elected in 2008, as the country’s political leanings shifted left, and many felt emboldened to criticize the war in Iraq. After Cindy Sheehan’s son was killed in war, the suburban Catholic mother sparked an antiwar protest at Bush’s ranch, which became known as Camp Casey after her son. At the camp, strong bonds were made as people shared their grief and hopes for the future.

Solnit introduces Dr. Martin Luther King’s concept of “beloved community,” which described a vision of integration that penetrated people’s hearts of minds to achieve a “metaphysic of solidarity and affinity” (384). King considered this vision of a better world to be the end goal of the protests of the civil rights movement. Solnit writes that social movements suggest “leaving behind one way and traveling toward another” (385), but they also require “settling in together” and forming communities (385).

With a vision of creating this community in New Orleans, former Black Panthers founded Common Ground, a relief network that provided a tool lending program, led bioremediation efforts, and ran a soup kitchen, among other projects. Despite some friction in Common Ground’s internal organization, it was successful in getting aid to where it was needed in changing circumstances.

Solnit then describes the Rainbow Gatherings, annual self-sufficient gatherings of hundreds to thousands of people in wilderness areas who form temporary communities. They camp out, create improvised kitchens, make art, and mingle. Solnit proposes that this is a “fuzzy but functioning version of the beloved community” (400). Many of the Rainbow attendees came to aid communities after Katrina, finding common ground with evangelical Christian organizations.

Not just survivors of the hurricane behaved altruistically—so did volunteers from around the country, many of whom belonged to churches or counter-culture organizations. They existed as a “latent disaster community” (408), as civil society organizations already dream of a better future and act as a connecting point for community members. These organizations are therefore well-poised to assist in disaster settings.