Description
Katrina s Legacy is a history-based essay on revolutionary strategy at the intersection of the Black, Third World, and Climate Justice Revolutions. It roots the cause of the Climate Catastrophe in the social development of the Christian, European/U.S., feudal, capitalist, imperialist worldview.
Katrina s Legacy challenges white environmentalism and proposes an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, climate justice revolutionary strategy. Mann challenges the pretensions and lies of Western civilization and roots his work in the Indigenous, Black, and Third World rejections of white settler state barbarism.
Katrina s Legacy upholds the humanity, hope, and right of self-determination of Third World people and movements.
Katrina s Legacy is a tribute to the resiliency, determination, and resistance of Black people of New Orleans and is a plea to demand the Effective Right of Return of 100,000 Black People back to New Orleans. One key chapter is: Ten Reasons Why Katrina s Legacy Was a Genocidal Climate Crime.
Katrina s Legacy is rooted in the work of the author at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The chapter What Are We Going to do About the United States challenges President Obama s plans and pretensions in Paris and offers a programmatic alternative with real demands in the real world.
Katrina s Legacy teaches Black Revolutionary History, Environmental and Climate Studies, Urban Sociology, Revolutionary Strategy Tactics, and Organizing and Social Movement Studies.
Full Introductory Summary:
An Introduction to Katrina’s Legacy
By Eric Mann
Katrina’s Legacy is a history—based essay on revolutionary strategy at the intersection of the Black, Third World, and Climate Justice revolutions.
Katrina’s Legacy is an original intervention in the debate about Climate Change and Climate Justice Strategies. It roots the problem in the Christian, European/U.S., feudal, capitalist, imperialist economic, social, and ideological system of genocide and genocidal climate crimes. Mann argues that while all the systems of feudalism, capitalism, and imperialism are unique stages of economic development, they are three stages of one unified system of U.S./European world domination in which the domination of people and nature took on a uniquely barbaric historical development. Mann challenges the entire concept of “Western civilization” and roots his work in the Indigenous, Black, and Third World rejections of white settler state barbarism. Katrina’s Legacy upholds the humanity, hope, and strategic centrality of Third World people and movements—and the right of oppressed nations, including the Black Nation inside the United States, to the right of self-determination up to and including the right of secession.
Katrina’s Legacy is rooted in the struggle of the Labor/Community Strategy Center and many forces in the world Climate Justice Movement to shape the just-concluded United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) where LCSC members, including the author, played an active role. Katrina’s Legacy has an entire chapter, What Are We Going to Do About the United States, that is hot off the press, written only weeks before the Paris UNFCCC, that prophetically, exposes the role of President Obama, the United States, and the Democratic Party in sabotaging any efforts by world governments to radically reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and in opposing all efforts by Third World nations to demand climate reparations for the “loss and damages” caused by the U.S., the European Union, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. For the reader who has tried to unravel the Gordian knot of the United Nations or wants some help navigating that maze, Mann, a veteran of
the World Conference Against Racism, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, and now the UNFCCC walks you through the critical struggle of the world’s people to challenge the hegemony of the United States in that international arena.
Katrina’s Legacy is a tribute to the Black people of New Orleans for their resiliency, humanity, and super-human capacities of resistance. It is a plea to demand the Effective Right of Return of 100.000 Black Internally Displaced People to New Orleans—the victims of a U.S. Genocidal Climate Crime. Volume II has a long chapter: Hurricane Katrina: An Anatomy of a Genocidal Climate Crime that explains the mass subjugation, evacuation, and forced displacement of 100,000 Black residents of New Orleans as a conscious policy of the U.S. ruling classes.
Katrina’s Legacy builds on the knowledge and work of Dr. Beverly Wright, Dr. Robert Bullard and the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Endesha Juakali of the Survivor’s Village, Jacques Morial, Ashana Bigard, film-maker William Sabourin, Monique Harden and Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, Kali Akuno, Jordan Flaherty, Tracie Washington, and many other sisters and brothers who extended their hospitality and knowledge to Eric Mann in the process of his writing.
Katrina’s Legacy is an effort to integrate Black Revolutionary Thought, urban sociology, an Afro-centric anti-imperialist interpretation of U.S. history, revolutionary strategy and tactics, demand development, and movement-building. The goal is to push the reader, community groups, unions, Black and Latino organizations, to think through their politics and then take action to carry them out.
Katrina’s Legacy is based on the concept of a Black Nation that is rooted in theory and practice of Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, the Comintern Resolutions on the Afro-American National Question, Harry Haywood, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Queen Mother Moore, the Black Panther Party and many other freedom fighters who advocated for Black self-determination.
Katrina’s Legacy is dedicated to the work of the Black organizations on the front lines of the struggle today, in Ferguson, Chicago, the struggle over Trayvon Martin, the work of Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter, We Charge Genocide, Organization of Black Struggle, and the Strategy Center’s Black Liberation organizing in the Bus Riders Union and Community Rights Campaigns—and many others.
Katrina’s Legacy models the author’s theory of counter-hegemonic consciousness raising and transformative organizing. Its cover is an effort to model that theory. It uses revolutionary language and concepts so the reader can judge a book by its cover—Black Nation, U.S. Imperialism, White Settler State, Genocide, Genocidal Climate Crimes. This is in the pedagogical traditions of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X and the author’s own body of work to challenge the system’s reactionary rules of thought that suppress the revolutionary imagination. The goal is to provoke, persuade, and challenge the reader to envision a revolutionary possibility in our lifetime and to take action to make it happen.
Katrina’s Legacy is 2 books each written in real time with the urgency of Now.
Katrina’s Legacy Volume I began in the first weeks after Katrina. It was originally called Letter to the Movement in Support of a Black Reconstruction in New Orleans. By August 2015 it was published in book form—Katrina’s Legacy: White Racism and Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
Now, ten years later, in 2016, Frontlines Press is proud to publish Katrina’s Legacy: Volume II – The Black Nation and the People of the World Confront the U.S. Empire and Its Genocidal Climate Crimes.
The most enduring books are written in real time to impact real events and real history. The New Edition includes Volume I fully reprinted with it original cover because it is relevant, prescient and captures the immediacy of the events and feelings on the ground in the first year of Katrina. The demand for the Effective Right of Return was raised in 2005 and is still on the table today.
Katrina’s Legacy is a short course in a Black Revolutionary View of U.S. History. This is most developed in Volume I in the chapter History Can Guide Us.
The author’s interpretation of U.S. history is rooted in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and his epic Black Reconstruction in America. Mann continues Dr. DuBois’ work in interpreting U.S. society as a series of Black— led revolutions and anti-Black counterrevolutions. In Volume II he integrates Gerald Horn’s discussion of the U.S. Revolution as in fact The Counterrevolution of 1776. He then popularizes Du Bois view of The First Reconstruction (1865-1877) and the Second Counter-revolution (Jim Crow—1877 to 1954).
Mann argues that the Second Revolutionary Reconstruction that overturned Jim Crow was what he calls The Twenty Six Years of the Sixties (1954-1980) which he traces from the Murder of Emmet Till, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Brown Versus Board of Education, Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations and the defeat of the French by the Vietnamese at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954) to the victory of the Vietnamese in 1975 until the rise of Ronald Regan in 1980. He traces the Third Counter-revolution that overthrew the great victories of the 26 Years of the Sixties from 1980, with the rise of Ronald Reagan, to the present.
Mann argues that a Third Revolutionary Reconstruction is not yet fully developed but the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, the rise of the Black struggle in the streets of U.S. cities, and the growing climate justice movement internationally can be part of a frontal assault on the Third Counter-revolution—an historical model that can guide our organizing today.
Katrina’s Legacy is rooted in the author’s theory of Counter-hegemonic Demand Development in which specific demands on the system call the question of the system itself. These are winnable structural demands with historically possible outcomes that carry ideological content and valence in their very statement, can help mobilize a revolutionary mass movement rooted in Black, Latino, and international Third World movements and peoples, and if won, can expand the ideological and political power of a revolutionary opposition movement.
Katrina’s Legacy focuses on 5 key demands as part of a larger, Fight for the Soul of the Cities revolutionary program
U.S. and President Obama to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 50% of 1990 Levels by 2025
U.S. and President Obama Contribute $10 Billion a year into the U.N. Green Climate Fund and additional funds for climate reparations
U.S. and President Obama to Immediately and Effectively Grant the Right of Return Back to New Orleans for 100,000 Black Internally Displaced People Since Hurricane Katrina
U.S. and President Obama to End the Department of Defense 1033 Program—that gives military grade weapons including tanks to city and state police forces to suppress protests over racism, poverty, and climate catastrophe.
U.S. and President Obama: Pay Reparations to Black People in the U.S., the nations and peoples of Africa, and all those in the African Diaspora— for the crimes of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade that continue to this day.
Katrina’s Legacy: Volumes I and II, along with Eric Mann’s Seven Components of Transformative Organizing Theory and Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer is a helpful introduction to revolutionary history, strategy, tactics, and organizing. It can offer direction to high school, college, and graduate school courses as well as political education classes for organizers in Black, Latino, social justice, environmental and climate justice organizations.
The Strategy Center. Frontlines Press, and the author hope that high school, university faculty and organizers would consider course adoptions and bulk orders. We would be happy to help you make that happen.
Please contact:
Channing Martinez
Frontlines Press
213-387-2800
info (AT) thestrategycenter (DOT) org
KOMOZI WOODARD, author of A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics. –
“Buy this book and study it well. Eric Mann was my first teacher in the black freedom movement; he taught me door-to-door canvassing and basic organizing. And then he introduced me to SNCC. Eric is still teaching and organizing a new generation, and setting the pace as we build up our strength for the Battle of New Orleans.”
VIJAY PRASHAD, author of Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. –
“Eric Mann’s Katrina’s Legacy is excellent. Mann has a distinct talent for drawing political lessons from historical events. Every movement needs a map. Katrina’s Legacy takes us to the ravaged Gulf Coast and shows us how to find the road toward a Third Reconstruction. America needs this movement, and Eric helps us find our way.”
KALI AKUNO, People’s Hurricane Relief Fund Oversight Coalition. –
“Katrina’s Legacy stands with ‘Black Nations 9/11’ as the clearest strategic statement within the movement, a must read for anyone working in solidarity with the reconstruction movement in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.”
XOCHITL BERVERA, Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children. –
“Mann’s writing is a door. Our movement, and indeed, the very life of Black New Orleans, depends on our ability to fully comprehend and embrace the counter-hegemonic and long-term movement building demands that Mann describes.”
PHIL HUTCHINGS, Former chair, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. –
“Eric Mann is one of the few people who can combine strategy, tactics, effective grassroots organizing, and compelling writing.”
GLEN FORD, Executive Editor and Co-Publisher, BlackCommentator.com –
“Eric Mann places the Gulf catastrophe in the historical context of racist capitalist rule in the U.S. a system that reproduces disaster as a matter of course. In the struggle to allow the New Orleans diaspora to Return, Rebuild and Remain in their city, African Americans have the opportunity to launch a Third Reconstruction, one that will address demands for land, reparations, and the right to self-determination. Mann’s book arrives at what he correctly describes as a “critical moment,” when the “cracks in the ruling class levees” are visible for all to see. This moment cannot be allowed to pass. Eric Mann provides political generalship, and the outlines of a plan for action. He calls us all to our battle stations.”
AI-JEN POO, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities –
“An inspiring call to action rooted in a powerful tradition of Black resistance in the South. It provides a comprehensive framework, a clear vision and strategy for this moment in history to build the movement among communities of color and low-wage workers.”