Resilience Is What Oppressors Demand From the Oppressed

and that word that i'm taking apart today is resilience so for a bit of real life context to frame this conversation in august 2015 new orleans in the u.s marked about 10 years since hurricane katrina the storm and the failure of the levees meant to hold back the water had emptied an entire neighborhood and the harm had fallen hardest on the city's black residents To mark this anniversary, the city announced a resilience strategy.

New Orleans had been among the first cities chosen for a global resilience program that was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

And the foundation's president described the city as the testing ground for the whole idea.

Resilience was going to be the story New Orleans told about itself and the story the world told about New Orleans.

And some of the people that that story was about answered on national television and on telephone poles.

Tracy Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute went on air that same anniversary weekend, I believe, and asked the country to stop using the word.

Her argument was simple and brilliant.

It went something like, every time someone says of the community, oh, they are resilient.

That means you can do something else to them.

The same words went up on posters across the city, beginning with four of them.

I think it was stop calling me resilient.

And the last word is the word that this episode discusses.

If you see tweets, resilience.

And if you see tweets, how strange that sentence may sound.

So stop calling me resilience.

And I think it's important because that strangeness is the point.

We are now used to hearing anyone refuse what has been framed and laundered as a compliment a refusal like that only makes sense if the compliment is doing something other than complimenting and to see specifically what it is doing you also have to go back to where the word came from i am always fascinated about language and words and you know the etymology of them and where they come from and what the person or the people who coined it you know coined them for and i think resilience is one of those words right because resilience actually was coined for systems and then of course learned that and now used on people So basically, the background is that in 1973, a Canadian ecologist C.S. Holland published a paper on how ecological systems survive disturbance.