TEXAS—Two months after the devastation from Hurricane Harvey, the world series has put Houston in the spotlight again. For much of the city life seems to have returned to normal.
Nationalist Slogan Masks Capitalism’s Role
The “Houston Strong” slogan that was pushed in the aftermath of the storm has now reached a fever pitch with the Astros win. This slogan masks the capitalist causes of the disaster and hides the ongoing crisis faced by the workers hardest hit by the hurricane.
Despite being a natural disaster, the laws of capitalism are at the heart of what made Hurricane Harvey a catastrophe.
Houston’s population has grown exponentially in the past few decades and developers seeking to maximize profit have taken full advantage of Houston’s lax building laws. Houston’s lack of zoning laws doesn’t require builders to use flood prevention like green zones or retention ponds to offset their development. And with the explosion of urban dense housing near the inner city and unregulated sprawl outside the city, there is very little land left to absorb floodwater in a rain event like Harvey.
Added to this is the city’s aging flood protection infrastructure. The bayou system in Houston is not capable of handling the large storms that have hit the city in the past several years and development around them has left little room to widen the bayou system.  
The Addicks and Barker reservoirs, the only two reservoirs in the city to hold storm water, are 70 years old and in desperate need of updating. In the late 2000s the Army Corps of Engineers rated Houston’s reservoirs and spillways as “extremely high-risk” infrastructure. Like much of the U.S., infrastructure is rotting away as the bosses divert billions to their imperialist wars in the Middle East, Africa and around the world.
In the midst of the storm, it wasn’t the government that saved people but instead it was a multi-racial army of workers that organized to save themselves and their fellow workers. Images of white workers in particular with access to fishing boats and large trucks rescuing fellow Asian, Latin, Black and white workers demonstrated the potential for multi-racial unity among workers.
Despite this display of working-class multi-racial unity, the narrative the media ran with was a nationalist “Houston Strong” account that promoted an all-class patriotic version of the rescues.
Racist Attack on Black Youth
On top of the “Houston Strong” narrative, the media injected its usual dose of racist “looting” coverage. At the height of the storm, Reuters ran a story claiming, “Storm-hit Houston reels from influx of evacuees, crime outbreak” citing an “outbreak of looting and armed robberies”. The “looters” in these stories are almost always assumed to be Black youth. Despite appearing in an international newsfeed, there was no evidence of a “crime outbreak” to back up this claim. In fact, the crime rate actually went down during the hurricane compared to the previous year (kut.org).
While a slew of fake tweets and news reports labeled Black youth as “looters,” the reality was that Black and Latin youth were among the most devastated by the hurricane. The more time we spent volunteering in the evacuation shelters, the more obvious it became that despite the widespread nature of the disaster, it was mainly poor Black and Latin workers who lacked funds and a safety net that caused them to end up in the evacuation shelters.
FEMA
The structural racism of this capitalist system means that mainly poor Black and Latin workers who live in the most impoverished, segregated neighborhoods in the city and whose school are the most underfunded will bear the brunt of these capitalist disasters. The pennies FEMA is offering families who have the time and energy to navigate through FEMA’s bureaucratic hula-hoops is barely enough to cover a few bills much less restart your life. For undocumented workers, the fear of deportation has prevented many from seeking government assistance, further deepening their already desperate situation. Disasters like Harvey only deepen the structural racism that already exists under capitalism.
Volunteering in the evacuation shelter and working with the teacher’s union to help teachers and their families clean out their homes, Progressive Labor Party had the opportunity to build ties with fellow workers and to discuss the ways in which capitalism turned a natural disaster into a man-made catastrophe. Now that school is in session, we are looking to work with students and their families in more long-term ways to both expose this racist capitalist system and to build a movement to fight back against it.