The destruction that ripped through the populous Los Angeles Basin tied with the improper governmental response is nothing but a repeat of unpreparedness for numerous environmental catastrophes that results from the ruling entities’ failure to properly assess the crumbling infrastructure of the LAFD, climate change response, and lack of social services for the needs of the people. The decimation of structures, homes, and memories, in one of the most influential cultural hubs in the world has received a devastatingly inadequate response from the City of Los Angeles that has in turn bolstered community-oriented and mutual-aid-centered engagement holding up the societal infrastructure before its entire demise. As we plunge deeper into a christo-fascist and sensationalist state given the current political representatives, there is a greater need for disciplined community building, protection, and practice.
Los Angeles is widely discerned as a capitalistic foreground for gentrification and dispossession. This area of over 9 million has cultivated some of the most influential cultural and political communities and stances. The destruction of such space caused by wildfires, mudslides, torrential rain and pressing environmental and state-sponsored destruction creates a clean slate for landowners and private property management firms that prey on the devaluation of Afrikan and marginalized communities. The city’s vision of serving the people throughout the most notable Eaton and Palisades fires was through the mass-deployment of police officers to prevent looting, and preventing folks from being able to see their homes. The historic area of the Afrikan middle class in Altadena may never recover. The homes of folks who have been there since the Great Migration are gone and likely never to be rebuilt due to the lack of state resources. This mass displacement of a majority Afrikan community has prolonged and will greatly influence the confinement and racialized banishment of Afrikan folks in America. As evacuation shelters, like the Pasadena Civic Center, begin to book events such as America’s Got Talent recordings and award shows, not even 2 months after destruction leaves these folks displaced with municipal support dying down. I would like to ask: Where were these health concerns for the ongoing pandemic? For the Afrikan elders? The unhoused? For the poor air quality? For serving the community material resources? Diapers, medications, proper PPE? That was all thrown together by community members impromptu, nonprofit, and political organizations. The criminalization of such movement of essential resources and tools of organization is a threat to the current regime of surveillance in Los Angeles. Mass displacement and resource isolation, similar to the actions taken toward the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the failed state response, ties into the intentionality behind structural barriers of justice and support. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the South, displacing almost 1 million people with 40% of evacuees from Louisiana unable to return to their homes. Thousands are still recovering from the ecological degradation and trauma associated with loss alongside a lack of social safety nets already foretold the inadequate state response to disasters that impact the most marginalized. With displacement the Afrikan community of the Katrina impacted South faced white vigilantism coupled with lack of health infrastructure, prompting the conservation of a declining Afrikan population. This is not to present comparable figures looking at Katrina and the Los Angeles fires but serves as a call to our conditions. We must adapt and restore using material and tangible changes. Today we stand and ask where are we to go from here, from pessimism to revolutionary optimism, smashing imperialism, to practice, to pedagogy, to discipline, to care, to love. In reflection I ask: What are some starting points we can use to create community organization and begin our struggle toward an Afrikan revolutionary praxis?