Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
The Disneyfication of New Orleans
Three years after Hurricane Katrina, a more glamorous image of black America is presenting itself to the world in the person of Barack Obama. Meanwhile, in New Orleans, America's story of black urban poverty is still unfolding, largely beneath the radar of the global media.
In August and September 2005, areas like the largely black Lower Ninth ward, almost entirely invisible to the hordes of tourists who flock to New Orleans every year, attracted worldwide sympathy as the levees broke. Now they have been all but forgotten. While tourists long ago repopulated the French Quarter, 57% of New Orleans' black population - against 36% of whites - have yet to return to the city. Many never will. This is because since Katrina, developers have clubbed together with the authorities to complete New Orleans' makeover into a playground for wealthy tourists.
As house prices soar and homelessness rises, the authorities are quietly doing away with the city's remaining stocks of affordable housing in moves that the UN has recently claimed constitute human rights violations. The fact that these demolitions will overwhelmingly affect black people has led some to call this ethnic cleansing.
Looking back, these developments should come as no surprise. The sympathy that met Katrina's immediate aftermath was short-lived. In August 2005 it was poor African-American residents, statistically the least likely to have the means to evacuate the stricken city, who bore the brunt of the storm damage. Viewers all round the world watched in horrified fascination as conditions in the convention centre and Superbowl deteriorated. News reports did focus on the government's apparent abandonment of its own people, but a hysterical and arguably racist undercurrent was almost compulsively drawn to rumours of rape and murder - nearly all of which turned out to be untrue.
As residents evacuated the city, and before the floodwaters had even receded, the future of New Orleans and its residents was being spoken about in no uncertain terms. "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans", declared Republican congressman Richard Baker soon after the storm. "We couldn't do it. But God did." Alphonso Jackson, the then US secretary of housing and urban development, made the racial implications of the gentrification process perfectly clear when he predicted that the reconstructed New Orleans would be a whiter city.
In the three years since, race and class stereotypes have paved the way for New Orleans' so-called "revitalisation". "We don't need soap opera-watchers right now", claimed the city council president, Oliver Thomas - perpetuating the view that New Orleans' high unemployment rate can be tracked to individual laziness as opposed to the systemic discrimination affecting most of America's inner cities. At the same time, those same forces that demonise poor and particularly black families - for their apparent "dysfunction" - are actively preventing the regrouping of some of the most close-knit black communities in the US.
The city is now in the process of phasing out the low-cost housing, public transportation system, and public health facilities that have supported the existence of low-income residents in New Orleans for decades. The US department of housing and urban development and the housing authority of New Orleans say that they wish to de-concentrate poverty in areas that were previously hotbeds for crime and drug abuse. Currently though, there are only plans to replace one-third of the units available for low-income renters. And as Audrey Stewart of the Loyola Law Clinic explains, the result is:
... thousands and thousands of homeless people camping out, under bridges, we have folks staying with relatives and friends - I see that all over my neighbourhood, five, six, seven, eight people living in these tiny houses. We have people getting kicked out of Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency] trailers with nowhere to go.
Many displaced New Orleans residents, black and white, are now calling for the "right of return" - and are in the process creating a dynamic grassroots movement that threatens to disrupt the relative calm that has eased the passage of the city's controversial reconstruction programme. This is just the kind of movement that Barack Obama spent the first part of his career organising for South Side Chicago, and it may turn out that his ability as president to respond to this call proves decisive.
Obama has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration's recovery and reconstruction programme, and his restoration plan for the region includes housing displaced residents who wish to return to the city. This time last year, Obama expressed concern that New Orleans would once again become the scene of the nation's broken promises, and told residents, "I can promise you this: I will be a president who wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night with the future of this city on my mind." He said:
... racial discord, poverty, the old divisions of black and white, rich and poor, it's time to leave that to yesterday.
But as the presidential campaign intensifies, Obama is increasingly under pressure to "transcend race". If this insidious demand should persist into an Obama presidency, it could seriously hinder a sustained focus on so racially charged an event as Katrina and its disastrous aftermath. What's certain is that the longer the world looks away, the more likely it is that a Disneyfied "new" New Orleans will mean the loss of a city that boasts one of the most complex cultural heritages in the world.
Three years on from the storm, during an election year that has focused attention on a spectacular symbol of African American success, it seems that once again, no one is looking in the direction of a black America that has experienced only the rough end of the American dream.
- Posted in
16 Comments so far
Show AllKatrina/Rita have shown that you should never build cities below lake or sea level. It may take Gustav to finally prove it once and for all. You can't fight Nature.
NO response to the article ?
Making what's left into a white-man's playground is OK, we just need to force out most of the poor and black ( because we "should never build cities below lake or sea level" ).
Nothing about forcing the rich white owners and profiteers out, also ? H M M m m , how repuke_lican of you !
BTW, we can both fight Nature and elitist Repuke_licans -- humankind's been doing that for millenniums
Namaste
Obama sez, "I can promise you this: I will be a president who wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night with the future of this city on my mind."
Oh really? Obama is all that concerned is he? You could have fooled me.
Disney defication deserves a place in New Orleans along with everything else.
//
This whole thing is a damn shame if you ask me-It just shows how much things have not changed at all.
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
~Philip K. Dick~
Well, first of all, being half white Obama isn't your average black person. And coming from a well-to-do family, living abroad during his childhood, attending private schools, and getting JD from Harvard further distances Obama from the average black person in the US !
So why would anyone think that Obama becoming President would have much of a positive impact on blacks in the US ? The only one I can think of would be the impact on young people, to see even a half black man achieve the presidency inspires others to seek political office and perhaps even run for the top office.
The story's timing is unfortunate. As of this writing, Gustaf is taking a bead on New Orleans. Gustaf is not guaranteed to be a category 3 -- it could be a 1 and it could be a 5. The city's levee system is still 17 feet above sea level in an area notorious for 39 foot storm surges, and the city's levee system is still old as the hills and built by an incompetent or corrupt Army Corps of Engineers. Southern Louisiana is sinking back into the sea due to dredging of a single river channel, so New Orleans is further exposed to hurricane damage than it was half a century ago.
The ninth ward simply isn't a safe place to live. It never was, even though vast numbers of poor people lived there three years ago.
Yes I think it's a shame that the poor live in the most dangerous spots. I can't abide the author's belief that the ninth ward should be restored to its former glory. I feel sad for the developers who Disneyfied the city, now that a hurricane is on the horizon. I can also feel sad for the residents who were embezzled out of their inheritance. Somehow it reminds me of the scuttlebutt that prize fighter Jack Johnson wasn't allowed to cruise on the Titanic's maiden voyage because he was a black man.
Anna Hartnell says "Obama is increasingly under pressure to "transcend race"...
Obama never even dreamed of "transcending race."
He played the race card against Hillary Clinton again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again, and the only reason that he isn't playing the same card against McCain is that he tried to play it with his bullshit about McCain attacking him because he "didn't look like the other Presidents on dollar bills," and this ploy failed to resonate with the rest of the country the way it had silenced all criticism among Democrats.
Jacob Freeze
Beyond the nonsense about Barack Obama "transcending race," I also disgree with Ms. Hartnell's concentration of the racial element in non-evacuation of the Ninth ward ahead of Katrina, and everything that followed.
The people who were abandoned to Katrina in New Orleans were an incredibly specific demographic: They didn't have cars.
Everybody who could drive away drove away, and in New Orleans the people who didn't have anything to drive were predominantly black, but there are plenty of poor white people in Louisiana and the rest of the Old South who would have been abandoned just as mercilessly if they had happened to live in the Ninth Ward instead of their stinking red-clay poverty zones in Alabama or on their burned out cotton farms in Georgia.
Jacob Freeze
A friend of mine has been living in a trailer in NOLA since shortly after Katrina hit and her home was destroyed. (She bought the trailer herself.) She can't get the feds to release the money for her to rebuild, after they admitted that the funds were designated for home-owner reconstruction. "Arrogant Republican jerks," is the mildest thing she has said about Bush's bureaucrats, although, come to think of it, she used an eight-letter word much harsher than 'jerks.'
logansafi [August 28th, 2008 1:12 pm] and atheist [August 28th, 2008 4:06 pm], if you saw Obama's acceptance speech last night, then you know he specifically mentioned rebuilding New Orleans and helping the survivors of Katrina, and I think he'll do it.
We already know McCain won't.
Never let the elites get their ways. Unfortunately, they know how to con the white voters against the black voters and it has been working. But like PaulK said, depending upon how bad Gustav turns out, everyone's a loser in NOLA.
I'm from New Orleans, and live there now, though I was on the Mississippi Gulf Coast when the storm hit. Like so many others, I lost pretty much everything.
I for one am sick to death of the whining and the pandering to a very small minority of professional complainers. And I say this without the slightest shred of racism or remorse. My experiences in this city and this region back me up.
New Orleans is not the hardest hit area in the Hurricane Katrina zone. Biloxi, Gulfport, and the rest of the Mississippi beachfront cities are several magnitudes worse off than we are here in New Orleans. It's one of the reasons I moved back here, New Orleans is a functioning city with some of it's sections mostly undamaged and many more rebuilt or rebuilding. The beachfront cities of Mississippi are still a wasteland of empty slabs and for sale signs. Almost nothing is left, and three years later almost nothing has come back, either.
No one is picking on the poor black New Orleanians. It's a myth. There are good and plenty of black people here in this city, and they have jobs and homes just like I do. I work for one of them, who is a business owner who owns several locations providing banquet and party catering and space to an african american clientele, a clientele who certainly isn't on welfare living in projects. They have money, and they spend money, and they get it by working for a living and being a productive part of a vibrant economy. And virtually every one of them have nicer cars than I do, and certainly more money. Again, they work for it.
The welfare class exists across racial lines, and is not a result of anything but their own failure to better themselves. Laziness is an attitude, and if you'd lived in Mississippi in some of the places I have you'd know that there are white communities that are just as infected with it. It's just not as easy a media story to sell.
Stop pretending the project-dwelling welfare class is in any way representative of the black population of this city. It's not. It never was. A few bad apples get all the attention, but there are just as many trailer trash whites as there are project trash blacks. Again, the latter just make for better media.
And if fighting racism is the goal, you couldn't do a better job of undercutting your own goal if you try. Thanks to all the incessant whining on the behalf of the welfare class, a great number of mass-media poisoned ignorant americans think that all of New Orleans is one big project filled with welfare-tit-sucking losers just waiting for a chance to spread looting and anarchy through the streets, not just of our town, but theirs if we ever have to evacuate.
We're not. Most of the black people here are good, honest, hardworking folks who love their homes, and their families, and are more than ready to repay kindness or even a little bit of basic human respect with gratitude, because they don't see it near as often as they should.
Stop pretending you're doing them any favors by highlighting the bad apples in their midst, and harping on them so long and loud that others think the bad apples are the only kind there are. Start focusing on the good and honest and decent black citizens of this city, the ones who keep this economy running. They're the ones who deserve the attention and the help.
This city doesn't need back the people who can't and won't hold jobs. All they do is rob funds from people who really deserve to be helped.
Oh, by the way, Gustave isn't even in the Gulf yet, it's still south of Cuba. It is nothing short of ridiculously premature to say it's headed for New Orleans, or anywhere else for that matter. It's literally impossible to know. Nor is there any way to know how strong it will be when it makes final landfall, wherever that might be.
Do you get this? It's absolutely 100% too soon to tell. They will not be able to narrow down the path for several days more, and the projected path and time of landfall can and probably change significantly and even radically between now and then.
The storm is NOT "headed for New Orleans". It's headed SOMEWHERE in the Gulf region. Maybe that's New Orleans, maybe it's not. Maybe it'll be a strong storm, maybe it won't. Faye made no more than Category 1. Some storms never reach hurricane strength at all. And nobody is sure exactly why.
The technology does not exist to precisely predict the strength and course of a tropical storm / hurricane. There's still far too much we don't know about all the variables that affect the outcome.
Some of you are talking like it already hit.
Good point. Maybe Gustave will gather strength to Cat 5 once its out into the Gulf, then turn east and obliterate the wealthy city of Boca Raton. I wonder how long it'll take to rebuild there.
-- ekaton --
Now I've never been to NOLA, but I am aware of its rich culture and social problems prior to Hurricane Katrina.
Imagine if we had reparations, free health care/education, were proactive in regards to global warming, and planned for disasters like Cuba and Holland do.
Imagine a NOLA with the same culture and the same people who were there before, but without the crime, poverty, and the spectre of disaster looming with every storm.
I guess there's too much money in misery and gentrification. The poverty, crime, and drugs keep the prison makers fat and give the elites a reason to allow for their lucrative, periodic, and baneful cleansings.
Anymore, I keep imagining hurricanes as dragons being reined by white-haired men in suits.