When Hurricane Katrina roared up the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Coast in August, 2005, the devastation was just beginning. The government was murderously unprepared—when the levees failed, 80% of New Orleans was underwater, 1500 people lost their lives, thousand more were injured, and property losses were estimated at $125 billion. The capitalist media consistently smacked its lips over suffering and offered an upside down world where victims became criminals, and mutual aid was portrayed as theft. The afterlife—the trauma, waste. and wreckage—of the catastrophe is ongoing and includes displacement, corporate theft, privatization of public goods, educide, and cultural sacking. We’re joined on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by Kristin Buras, an anti-racist activist, teacher, and researcher who is the director of the New Orleans–based Urban South Grass-roots Research Collective, a coalition with African American community groups that combines research and grass-roots organizing for racial equity. She is the author, most recently, of What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School.

The speed at which a fascist government can disrupt, dismantle, and destroy on its way to building a full-blown fascist society is breathtaking. Resistance is scattered, and anyone looking to the Democratic Party to offer guidance or leadership should remember that we came to this point on bipartisan rails, that is, the ruling class and the political establishment has agreed for decades on every major issue: unqualified support for Israel’s murderous and illegal actions; the militarization of domestic police forces and policing as the ready-answer to every social problems; mass incarceration as a defining feature of society; the frantic privatization of public goods and services. And underlying it all, the tenacious and deadly legacy of the culture and structures of white supremacy. We’re joined in conversation with the activist, organizer, and writer Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, author most recently of Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future.

Just as the US Department of Defense should change its name back to the more accurate and honest War Department—its true function and its title from 1789 until 1947 when it morphed into the National Military Establishment (NME), and then, with mad-help from a PR offensive in 1949, the DoD—state and city organizations with names such as “child welfare” and “family services” should stop air-brushing their true functions—the Departments of Family Policing. We’re joined in conversation today with Erin Miles Cloud, the mother of two dazzling kids, a civil rights attorney, and co-editor of a new book from Haymarket called How to End Family Policing: From outrage to action.