Communities in Crisis

In Colfax, Louisiana, an interracial group of residents are exposed to harmful inhalants every hour, and many have begun to get sick. The toxins come from an open-air incineration facility on the outskirts of town. As residents protest and document their experiences of environmental violence, the town has continued to come to grips with the Colfax Massacre of 1873, an extreme instance of white supremacist violence which changed U.S. history and set the stage for the Jim Crow era.

This piece combines selected photographs by Tulane’s Critical Media and Visualization Lab and watercolor portraits of Colfax residents by New Orleans-based artist Hugo Martínez.

Death due to opiate overdose is a growing concern in the U.S. Together with mental health, wellbeing, and employment, opiate addiction is one of the topics often described as contributing to a national crisis (Mega 2020). However, in public discourse the concept of crisis is wielded to depict situations that seem without solutions.

Driving around northeastern New York on the roads known as ‘heroin highway,’ the landscape once shaped by growing industries is a familiar blur of dispossession. The towns and spaces in between along the winding line of weathered asphalt are defined by overlapping narratives of crisis: the chemical dehumanization and death– embodied in the synthetic opioid fentanyl – and the damaged environments, illegible economies, and suffering bodies of late industrialism. My early work with law enforcement agents, drug courts, and archives found these overlapping crises to be far from total: seemingly “ruined” people and places along the highway are entwined with the area’s postindustrial middle class, extensive green spaces, and thriving ecotourism.

Decades after the Army closed the Savanna Army Depot in 2000, the lingering impact from its past use haunts this place in the soil and groundwater. Upon its closure, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the Savanna Army Depot a Superfund site, given the enduring contamination from TNT, asbestos, unexploded ordnance, chemical pollutants, and the residues of other environmental hazards. The Department of Defense is responsible for funding the restoration of former military lands to communities in a usable state, but the cleanup has been glacial at many sites like the Savanna Army Depot. In the years—decades—since, residents of Savanna have experienced the facility’s closure and its subsequent neglect as a long crisis of abandonment.

I grew up in a food insecure household in Appalachian Eastern Kentucky, yet I can understand why hunger is believed to be far away. Our hunger was a stigmatized secret, pushed to the back of the pantry, just like the expired can of yams we hoarded just in case social services came by—or we reached a new threshold of desperation.

This photo essay is a collaboration among Isiah ThoughtPoet Veney, Ana Croegaert, and Jacob Campbell, and reflects on the challenges faced by residents in long-disinvested neighborhoods in the deeply segregated city. Isiah leads us in the essay, reminding us that, although devastated by racialized urban planning systems and job loss, decades of criminalization, police-sanctioned torture, and lack of adequate mental health care, people in his communities create beauty, express love, endeavor to take care of one another (Contreras 2021). They reach out across neighborhoods and racial difference to build connections that, although fragile, are needed now, as ever.

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In this vignette, I am centering the gaze of our group, whose labor and ethics of distribution encapsulated the definition of mutual aid as the “collective coordination to meet each other's needs, usually from the awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them” (Spade 2020, 7). I especially engage with mutual aid groups coming out of the Covid-19 crisis and the values that shape their work. These values lie in the acts of solidarity of supporting protests through the distribution of supplies. They also manifest through non-hierarchical acts of distribution, that is, the refusal of means testing, policing needs or paperwork. Finally, there is a politicization of abundance, mobilized by mutual aid organizations as a respons