In 2015, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute asked the country to stop calling New Orleans resilient, because every time someone says a community is resilient, it means something else can be done to them. Chisom takes her refusal seriously. She traces resilience from the ecologist C. S. Holling’s 1973 description of systems that absorb disturbance to its present use as a demand on people, and shows why its being a common human capacity makes it so cheap to ask for. The episode follows that demand into the workplace, where a study of 46,336 UK workers found no evidence that resilience programmes improve wellbeing, into the lives of Black women, where parts of the expectation of strength carry a cost the body records, and into climate policy, where Global South countries are told to build resilience while receiving a twelfth to a fourteenth of what adaptation will cost. What institutions call resilience has a more accurate name, absorption, and nobody is obliged to supply it.
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