"I'm Back, By Popular Demand": Charter Schools, Black Social Life, and the Refusal of Death on Post-Katrina New Orleans

• In Event: Black Geographies: Vulnerability, Possibility, and Futurity in the U.S. South

Abstract

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in 2005, the Louisiana State legislature fired 8,500 New Orleans teachers and school administrators. The state then immediately ordered the conversion of all New Orleans public schools into privately managed charter schools. Using insights from long term ethnographic fieldwork in two working class Black communities in New Orleans, this paper examines Black sociality in Post-Katrina New Orleans by exploring the social consequences of this privatization of the city’s public school system. This paper elucidates the ways that collective trauma and social memory of state retrenchment after previous environmental catastrophes influence the expressive culture and subjectivities of Black residents, informing their critiques of school privatization and anti-Black state violence. Also explored is the way that local activists invoke the cultural memory of historical Black insurgency in New Orleans to stimulate political mobilization, transform sites of Black death into healing spaces, and create new cartographies for the future of Black life in the city. Lastly, this paper uses spatial analysis to interrogate how the elimination of traditional neighborhood schools has fractured important social and economic bonds across the city, hastening the removal of Black social life from the city by causing many Black families to become unmoored from neighborhoods where they had previously thrived. Drawing on these observations, this analysis deepens understandings of the relationship among race, urban space, and neoliberalism by arguing that the privatization of public schools is one tactic of a specifically anti-Black political-economic project that maintains its coherence through the dispossession and obliteration of Black New Orleanians from the city.

Author

• Justin Hosbey, University of Florida