Family members help remove an elderly woman from her home as residents and firefighters try to stop flames from the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California in January 2025. | Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP
The fires raging through southern California have devastated Black communities, such as in Altadena. The failures of city and state political leadership to provide proper emergency services have left residents without answers. Carlos Sirah of the Black Alliance for Peace Southern California Citywide Alliance (SOCAL) provided this update and analysis of the situation.
Unprecedented January wildfires devastate Los Angeles, as communities face both natural disaster and militarized state response. The Eaton Fire displaces numerous families in the Pasadena-Altadena area, including multigenerational Black households who have built lives in these neighborhoods for decades. Among them, the Edwards family stands displaced from their home of 32 years.
For those seeking to support impacted community members, the Edwards family’s GoFundMe, provides direct aid to one of many displaced households fighting to survive. A broader directory of displaced Black families seeking support can be found here.
While community mutual aid networks are mobilizing rapidly, confusion about available resources, from federal and state, for example FEMA, remains widespread. A zombified Joe Biden offers a laughable $770 in FEMA assistance - an insult to families who have lost everything. This deliberate undermining of disaster relief follows a familiar pattern.
The state's response lays bare familiar dynamics: California National Guard deployment focuses on property protection - echoing their role in 1992 (LA Riots) and 2020 (George Floyd Protests) - while displaced residents struggle without basic aid. We're witnessing the mechanics of dispossession in real time managed by the US State.
The parallels to the displacement of Black people have the potential to be just as catastrophic. Just as New Orleans saw the permanent displacement of Black communities under the guise of "recovery," similar forces now converge on Los Angeles. With no rent control protections in place, landlords are already hiking rents beyond reach.
This economic predation runs parallel to the state's long history of extracting crisis labor from imprisoned people - a practice that began in the 1850s and continues today through the inmate firefighter program. While officials frame this exploitation as 'rehabilitation,' the reality is stark: prisoners earning $1.12 an hour for 24-hour shifts face injury rates many times higher than professional firefighters while battling the same deadly blazes. The state's reliance on this captive workforce, paid pennies on the dollar, reveals how crisis is weaponized to normalize and expand exploitative labor practices.
This manufactured crisis threatens to permanently drive out Black families who have anchored these neighborhoods for generations. We see it in the militarized response, the privatization of basic resources, and speculative interests already circling our neighborhoods. Black Alliance for Peace Southern California (BAP-SOCAL) is currently developing a detailed analysis of this crisis, which will focus on:
Field Notes
We now turn to critical field reports from mutual aid organizations operating at the intersection of immediate crisis response and long-term community building. These reports, from PUMA and Black Lantern Books/Legacy Library, offer vital ground-level insights into both the immediate impacts and broader implications of this crisis:
PUMA
From PUMA - Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid (PUMA) is a local abolitionist mutual aid network that supports unhoused residents in the Mid-city and West LA areas of the city. During this present wildfire crisis, organizers continue to work with unhoused people and other targeted populations, along with now newly unhoused and displaced persons. As made apparent by mainstream media coverage of celebrity homes, the Palisade fire is raging in a wealthy part of the city. Indeed, the average annual household income in Pacific Palisades is over $350,000 and while those individuals have lost their homes, they will have the access and resources they need to rebuild either in the Palisades or elsewhere. Who is forgotten in these conversations are the day laborers, domestic workers, care providers, and other working-class people from the area who've now lost their homes, sources of income, and stability.
Apart from mostly supporting survivors of the Eaton fire in Pasadena/Altadena, PUMA is maintaining their weekly outreach, distribution, and political education efforts in Palms and with our newly displaced neighbors. Along with our partner, Community Solidarity Projects, we've managed to source, individually package, and distribute everything from N95 masks, blankets, and insulin to folks in need across the city. We're also organizing clean-up efforts and pulling in volunteers to help our community with applications/paperwork.
We've made several observations over the past week:
- These wildfires should be considered not only a mass-displacement, but also a mass-disabling event. Here we must mention that while 8% of LA residents are Black, they make up 34% of the unhoused population in the county. Black elders, Black youth, and those with disabilities, mental illness, and substance use disorders are particularly susceptible to the health effects of climate breakdown. We expect these folks to be even more vulnerable. Our organizing must go beyond struggles for rent control, eviction moratoria, or accessible services. Ongoing and emergent mobilizations and mutual aid work should be weaponized toward new structure-making that actually allows our people to thrive.
- The neoliberal city, state, and federal responses to the wildfires are inconsistent and inaccessible to the most vulnerable. They are bandaids at best. In certain cases, evacuation sites dismiss unhoused individuals to serve newly displaced people. There is a proposal that the fire-displaced be allowed to live in RVs, all while unhoused people currently face criminalization for doing the same. This reinforces a "deserving poor" and "undeserving poor" dynamic that we reject. Mutual aid must embrace a revolutionary politic that goes beyond redistribution, disaster mitigation, and survival. - Ndindi K
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Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid (PUMA)
Solidarity Projects/Bernie's Coffee Shop
Black Lantern Books
For those who are unfamiliar, Black Lantern Books / Legacy Library is a joint project of members of Black Alliance for Peace, Black Autonomy LA, and Community Movement Builders. We have recently found our physical home in Inglewood, CA, one of the last predominantly black areas of Los Angeles County. The fires that have scarred LA have also tested and proved the vision we had for our space - to be a foundation and hub to grow the liberation struggle between the Black Led organizations in the region and to build trust within the surrounding community of Inglewood so they know us as a place for support, political insight, and care.
Black Lantern immediately became a hub for the mutual aid network that emerged as communities and Black Organization like AAPRP International, BAP SoCal, CMBLA, The Love We Don't See, California Black Women's Health Project took action to support one another during this crisis moving food, clothing, baby supplies, water, children's toys, and hygiene supplies to those immediately and severely impacted by the fires; prioritizing getting supplies to the Black residents of Altadena and that surrounding community. But as we all know the crisis of housing destruction and being resource starved did not begin or end with these fires and in this city it is mostly our people that get their tents swept and live in food deserts. So we made sure to invite our neighbors housed and unhoused to get what they needed from the aid that was dropped off. We saw joy like it was Christmas as children and adults alike filled their bags with food, toys, clothes, soap, and clothes. And move forward to continue the work in the aftermath of these fires and beyond. - BLB
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We understand that the forces at work and the behavior of city and state mirror the same imperial playbook we've seen globally—using crisis and catastrophe as cover for wealth extraction and community displacement. Just as we've witnessed the exploitation of disaster on the national front in places like New Orleans and internationally in places like Haiti, we now see similar tactics deployed locally: militarized responses, artificial scarcity, and economic violence masked as "market forces." Those who exploit disasters for profit—whether through looting the masses via price gouging of essential goods or speculative real estate grabs—are engaging in the same extractive practices that have historically targeted Global South communities.
We will continue communicating with immediate support networks while organizing for our community's right to self-determination here in Los Angeles and the Southern California region. This moment demands both immediate action and careful study—we must read the patterns of imperial manipulation taking shape around us. Our work continues through direct community engagement and rigorous analysis of these unfolding conditions. A more thorough and considered analysis will follow.
In solidarity and struggle,
BAP-SOCAL