“F(ix)E(verything)M(y)A(ss)”

“Someone is getting rich”

“Our government cares more about foreign countries than its own”

-- graffiti in New Orleans

Down the main hall in the Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) at Texas A&M – Corpus Christi, the walls are plastered with the pictures and writings of young children.  One day a new project on the walls really caught my attention.  Entitled “Great Leaders Who Changed our World”, crayon pictures of Dr. King, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, and Jesse Owens stared at me, their eyes bright and dark, their bodies and clothes scribbled but colorful.

Under each picture was a brief biography of the person, written by the artist/student.  Of Dr. King, one child wrote  “Martin was born in a mean world ... white people kept being mean to black people ... we will remember him everyday we go to school when we see white children, black children, and brown children going to school together.”

On the opposite wall, a similar project demanded my attention: “How Segregation Changed.”  Alongside drawings of black and white children holding hands, the students wrote about how “whites had shiny fountains and blacks had dirty fountains ... so now we have a better world.  Like now a lot of black kids go to E.C.D.C. ... now kids can play.”  Another: "My best friend is black but I am white and we get along just fine."

The work of the children is inspiring, and, certainly to some degree, our society has taken significant steps to erode prejudice and racism.  These children live in a more accepting world than did our parents, and they seem to be aware of that fact.  Unfortunately, something as culturally and socially ingrained as white hegemony does not die without a fight.  Surveying the recent dislocation of much of New Orleans’ black population in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the city’s white elites’ (the Bush administration included) responses, one would think our country had harkened back to the dark days of African American disenfranchisement and abandonment.

This is the situation: 125,000 homes remain damaged and/or unoccupied and 80 percent of the African American population of the city is still in exile, outside of the city or the state.  In this electoral void, local business elites, led by conservative think-tanks, have commandeered most functions of elected government.  The New Orleans City Council has been effectively barred from the deliberations of mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts.  These groups, mostly white and Republican, “propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority black and Democratic city,” according to Mike Davis of The Nation (10 April 2006).

Bush and his cronies have left predominantly black neighborhoods like Gentilly without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business subsidies, or even a firmly delineated reconstruction plan for its residents.

Locally, white elites, in part assisted by influential blacks, are striving to consolidate their power over the city and especially over its black residents.  Mayor Ray Nagin, who is black, initiated the Bring New Orleans Back commission, which in turn excluded most of New Orleans’ elected black representatives.

The BNOB committee also invited the Urban Land Institute to participate; it recommended shrinking New Orleans’ socioeconomic “footprint” of black poverty in low-lying neighborhoods.  The Institute planned to accomplish this feat by buying out the majority of homes in those areas and turning that sector of the city into a “protective green belt.”  A visiting developer summed up the view of the white elites: “Your housing is now a public resource.  You can’t think of it as private property anymore.”

Anticipating resistance, the Institute proposed a rebuilding corporation that would bypass the city council, as well as an oversight board with power over the city’s finances.  Dubbed the Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation, it is characterized by journalist and author Mike Davis as a “proposed dictatorship of experts and elite appointees [that] would effectively overthrow representative democracy and annul the right of local people to make decisions about their lives.”  To give credit to the City Council, they adamantly rejected the Urban Land Institute’s proposal in the face of strong support from state and national officials.

Conservative analyses swiftly relegated Louisiana’s Democracy to a coffin.  “The Democrats margin of victory is living in the Astrodome,” Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation wryly noted.  His assessment seems accurate: Due to the Corp’s defective levees, “the Republicans stand to gain another Senate seat, two Congressional seats,” and probably the next gubernatorial race.

The Bush administration’s neglect in rebuilding the low-lying areas of the city does not seem so illogical when one understands that a large Democratic constituency, mostly poor blacks, remains in exodus.  Either way, Democratic Mayor Nagin is posturing himself as a black candidate in touch with problems effecting black communities, in anticipation of upcoming city elections. Unfortunately, as the New York Times observes, the atmosphere of the election hinges not on rebuilding efforts but on race (“New Orleans Election Hinges on Race and Not Rebuilding,” 4 April 2006.) Things are not so bleak, though; brave and committed residents of New Orleans have energized grass-roots movements to combat this galling display of racism and partisanship.  Since the mid-1990s the city has become the center of ACORN, a national organization of working-class homeowners and tenants 9,000 strong in New Orleans alone.

Many members reside, or did, in threatened black neighborhoods.  ACORN fought to unionize downtown hotels in the 1990s and undergirded the 2002 referendum to legislate the nation’s first municipal minimum wage.  Now they find themselves wrangling with many of the same elite figures who were opponents of hotel unionization and a living wage.  Essentially, it is ACORN’s goal in New Orleans to repair thousands of homes.  Time is an issue because if “you make it, you take it.  So [ACORN’s] members are voting with their feet,” said ACORN founder Wade Rathke.

Equally importantly, the organization went to court to insure that New Orleans’ displaced, largely black population would have access to out-of-state polling places for the upcoming city elections; a federal judge, however, rejected the plan.  To one ACORN organizer, it is “so obvious that there’s a concerted plan to make this a whiter city.”

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.

Powered by AkoComment 2.0!