Economics & Race & Racism & Human Rights Posted by christian h., 30 Aug 2007 04:59 am
Katrina, two years on; or, a large-scale experiment in gentrification.
Yesterday, the Decider paid a visit to New Orleans. You won’t be surprised to hear that he “delivered a message of hope”. More grating, he claimed “[Katrina] didn’t effect the spirit of a lot of citizens in this community”. Both in Washington, and in Louisiana, political games are being played.
Meanwhile, the rebuilding of New Orleans is turning into an exercise in ethnic, and class, cleansing. Many of the people who lived and worked in the city are still housed in trailers - as reported here (YouTube clip). What Americans don’t know, and what they must know, is that many Black people are not being allowed to return to their homes in New Orleans:
Among the miles and miles of devastated houses, rubble still there today in New Orleans, we found dry, beautiful homes. But their residents were told by guys dressed like Ninjas wearing “Blackwater” badges: “Try to go into your home and we’ll arrest you.”
See more details at Greg Palast’s blog, where you will also find clips (such as the YouTube one above) and info on the not-to-be-missed investigative documentary, New Orleans: Big Easy to Big Empty.
Bush got one thing right, though: the people’s spirits have not been crushed. People like Kawana Jasper are fighting for a future in New Orleans.
(Many more testimonials can be found at Voices from the Gulf).
And we can help. We can pressure politicians to have public housing in New Orleans reopened. We can throw whatever small weight we have behind the Gulf Coast Civil Works Project that envisions hiring the citizens on the Gulf Coast to rebuild their city, instead of shuffling more money to large contractor who import sub-living wage labor to do the work.
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Responses to “Katrina, two years on; or, a large-scale experiment in gentrification.”
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on 30 Aug 2007 at 5:11 am 1. christian h. said …
Apologies to James for bumping his great post down. Don’t stop commenting!
This is important, though. It’s also important not to fall for diversionary tactics, as in: “the public housing in New Orleans was a disgrace, it shouldn’t be reopened without major changes. We need to develop the perfect city, with mixed housing, and better schools… etc.”. Who wouldn’t agree? But this is unlikely to happen. It certainly won’t happen before former residents decide they’ll never get the chance to return and give up - at that point, the “mixed housing” can miraculously disappear from the plans.
Here is an article in Socialist Worker on many of the same issues, they also have links to other resources.
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on 30 Aug 2007 at 11:30 am 2. James Killus said …
Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.–Voltaire
I believe this statement to be the essence of modern political dispute, the dark force underlying the culture war. It is responsible for the fractious nature of democratic politics–the demand for perfection destroying the capacity for alliance–and the unified nature of authoritarian politics–what unifies them is their hatred of the good.
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on 30 Aug 2007 at 11:33 am 3. Oaktown Girl said …
There few other very important things about New Orleans that Americans don’t understand. Many of the homes that were lost were homes that were owned by the occupants, not rented. In fact, I believe New Orleans had the highest percentage of home ownership by African Americans in the country. Most of those homes were in the low lying areas that got destroyed when the levees broke, while most of the White-owned homes were on higher ground. As this relates to gentrification, the agenda is to do everything possible to keep Black people from returning and rebuilding - including refusing insurance claims and engaging in a corruption-riddled rush job on demolition:
Iris Gladney is fighting to keep her home standing. Her house is brick and shaded by a large cypress tree. She has a contractor’s report verifying its structural stability. She met this week with Road Home officials to finalize her restoration funds.
Yet her house is listed for demolition and the dozers are chewing through houses only blocks away.
Another thing Americans don’t understand is that New Orleans had a huge Black Middle/Professional class – doctors, lawyers, business people, artists, etc. Nearly all have been displaced, as well as their clients:
“The impression is that just poor people were displaced, but Katrina has had a devastating effect on the black middle class, too,” said Willard Dumas, a dentist who serves as the Bunch Club’s recording secretary and now lives in Baton Rouge. “You spend 45 years building a life and then it’s gone. Your home was flooded; your business was flooded. And this happened not only to you but to practically everyone you know, so your patients or clients are gone, your friends are scattered, and your relatives are somewhere else.”
(snip)
Those black professionals are scattered across the South, finding new jobs, establishing new medical and legal practices and businesses. The longer they are gone, the greater the worry that they will not come back — leaving New Orleans, a majority-black city before Katrina, without a core of African American leadership.What has been happening in post-Katrina New Orleans was identified by Robert D. Bullard back in 2006 in his 20- Point Plan article, and is being followed to a tee.
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on 30 Aug 2007 at 11:41 am 4. Oaktown Girl said …
OK - I got the links fixed in my comment above. (Rush job at work).
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on 30 Aug 2007 at 4:57 pm 5. Seattle said …
I’ve been trying to think of what to say on this topic all day. The news has been flooded with “it still sucks in New Orleans” or “it still sucks to be from New Orleans” articles. I think I saw one exception in the NYT, but that would fall in with the gentrification theme of this post.
Unfortunately, from my undoubtably under-informed and biased viewpoint, New Orleans, Lousiana and Corrupt Local Government all are pretty well synonymous. Therefore to a certain degree I figured the clean up would not go well for a portion of the population not privy to the old boy network of priviledge in that city. Also, the statistic sticks in my mind that New Orleans was decreasing in population for decades before the flooding, so the gentrification seems like people jumping at opportunities that the storm and nonequity threw in their laps.
At this point I figure it will probably take a decade or more to recover from that storm at this rate, and New Orleans will never be what it was. If a flood like that hit Seattle, I don’t know what I would be doing 2 years later.
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on 07 Sep 2007 at 4:56 am 6. christian h. said …
I am hoping that last comment is meant to be ironic?
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on 07 Sep 2007 at 5:50 am 7. JP Stormcrow said …
I am hoping that last comment is meant to be ironic?
I am afraid that I can find no internal evidence of such intent. R. Gutierrez may chime in and attempt to convince me, but in the meantime all I that see is a hateful screed.
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on 07 Sep 2007 at 8:44 am 8. Oaktown Girl said …
JP - indeed. The MOJ is fairly tolerant of divergent opinions, not of hate speech. So, bye-bye.
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on 26 Sep 2007 at 4:57 pm 9. christian h. said …
I know this is late, but here is a piece by Bill Quigley at Counterpunch on HUD and New Orleans that fits well with our discussion.
