Notes from Inside New Orleans
By Jordan Flaherty
Friday 02 September 2005
I just left New Orleans a couple of hours
ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in - by boat -
to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine
the attitude of federal and state officials toward the victims
of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee
camps.
In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10
freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black
and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal
barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed
soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come
through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open
a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the
bus, with no information given about where the bus was going.
Once inside, we were told, evacuees would be
told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston,
Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you
boarded a bus bound for Arkansas, for example, even people with
family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed
to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had
no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had
people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could
not come within 17 miles of the camp.
I traveled throughout the camp and
spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National
Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one
could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many,
where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the
several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them
had been able to get any information from any federal or state
officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from
Australian TV to local Fox affiliates complained of an
unorganized, non-communicative mess. One cameraman told me
"as someone who's been here in this camp for two days, the
only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall.
You don't want to be here at night."
There was also no visible attempt by any of
those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent and
consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to
register contact information or find family members, special
needs services for children and infirm, phone services,
treatment for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash
can.
To understand this tragedy, its important to
look at New Orleans itself.
For those who have not lived in New Orleans,
you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital city. A place with
a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70%
African-American city where resistance to white supremacy has
supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid
beauty. From jazz, blues, and hiphop to secondlines, Mardi Gras
Indians, parades, beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice
on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and
dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the
world.
It is a city of kindness and hospitality,
where walking down the block can take two hours because you stop
and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls
together when someone is in need. It is a city of extended
families and social networks filling the gaps left by city,
state and federal governments that have abdicated their
responsibility for the public welfare. It is a city where
someone you walk past on the street not only asks how you are,
they wait for an answer.
It is also a city of exploitation and
segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population
of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year,
most of them centered on just a few overwhelmingly black
neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don't
need to search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days
after a shooting, the attacker is shot in revenge.
There is an atmosphere of intense hostility
and distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the NO Police
Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of
everything from drug running to corruption to theft. In separate
incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently charged
with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high
profile police killings of unarmed youth, including the murder
of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests for
several months.
The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over
50% of black ninth-graders will not graduate in four years.
Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child's education and
ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The
equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out
of Louisiana schools every day, and about 50,000 students are
absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black
men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former
slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and
over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city
where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are
low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.
Race has always been the undercurrent of
Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed
out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was
the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and
corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the
treatment of the refugees, to the the media portrayal of the
victims, this disaster is shaped by race.
Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but
with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have
defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina
approached, our Governor urged us to "Pray the hurricane
down" to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after
the hurricane, we tuned in our battery-operated radio to local
radio and TV stations, hoping for vital news, and were told that
our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic
began to rule, there was no source of solid, dependable
information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the
water level would rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized.
Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and media only
made it worse.
While the rich escaped New Orleans, those
with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind.
Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have
spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone who
loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this
tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.
No sane person should classify someone who
takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a desperate,
starving city as a "looter," but that's just what the
media did over and over again. Sheriffs and politicians talked
of having troops protect stores instead of perform rescue
operations.
Images of New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged
population were transformed into black, out-of-control
criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly
be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental
neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage
and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic; just as the
eighties focus on "welfare queens" and
"super-predators" obscured the simultaneous and much
larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs,
the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a
scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.
City, state and national politicians are the
real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, the danger of
flooding to New Orleans been widely known. The flood of 1927,
which, like this week's events, was more about politics and
racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly
the danger New Orleans faced. Yet government officials have
consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor,
overwhelmingly black city. While FEMA and others warned of the
urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals
for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush
administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to
fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists' warnings
of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as
the dangers rose with the floodwaters, the lack of coordinated
response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of our elected
leaders.
The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped
shape the elections of both a US President and a Governor and
ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long.
In the coming months, billions of dollars
will likely flood into New Orleans. Either this money can be
spent to usher in a "New Deal" for the city, with
public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new schools,
cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be
"rebuilt and revitalized" to a shell of its former
self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and
theme parks replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers
and corner jazz clubs.
Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a
hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment,
de-industrialization, and corruption. The damage from this
pre-Katrina hurricane alone will itself take billions to repair.
Now that the money is flowing in, and
the world's eyes are focused on Katrina, it's vital that
progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a
rebuilding with justice. New Orleans is a special place, and we
need to fight for its rebirth.
Source: www.truthout.com
-- Jordan
Flaherty is an Editor of Left Turn Magazine: www.leftturn.org.
posted 4 September 2005
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Floodlines
Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six
By Jordan Flaherty
Preface by Tracie Washington / Foreward by Amy Goodman
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was a tragedy.
What followed was a government-sanctioned travesty.
Flaherty, a white New Orleans resident and journalist,
interviews a number of locals about the recovery effort,
outlining a systemic pattern that includes restrictions of
service, human rights violations, and destruction of
property targeting the city's African-American majority.
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The behavior of the notorious New Orleans police
department towards this community is appalling, but
even more distressing is Flaherty's reporting on the
failure of the federal government to respond to the
needs of its citizens, and their use of paramilitary
mercenaries to enforce a pattern of brutal
occupation. To learn how profoundly the system
failed (and continues to fail) will be extremely
difficult for some readers, and Flaherty pulls no
punches in his quest to uncover failures,
highlighting how the systems in place for rebuilding
(foundation support, non-profit groups, military
intervention) remain woefully inadequate. Readers
will be compelled, depressed, disturbed, and angered
by what they find in this well-written report.
Crucial reading—Publishers
Weekly
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Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America
By Eugene Robinson
In this clear-eyed and
compassionate study, Robinson (Coal to Cream), Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist for the Washington Post, marshals
persuasive evidence that the African-American population has
splintered into four distinct and increasingly disconnected
entities: a small elite with enormous influence, a
mainstream middle-class majority, a newly emergent group of
recent immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, and an
abandoned minority "with less hope of escaping poverty than
at any time since Reconstruction's end." Drawing on census
records, polling data, sociological studies, and his own
experiences growing up in a segregated South Carolina
college town during the 1950s, Robinson explores 140 years
of black history in America, focusing on how the civil
rights movement, desegregation, and affirmative action
contributed to the fragmentation. Of particular interest is
the discussion of how immigrants from Africa, the
"best-educated group coming to live in the United States,"
are changing what being black means. |
Robinson notes that despite the enormous strides
African-Americans have made in the past 40 years,
the problems of poor blacks remain more intractable
than ever, though his solution--"a domestic Marshall
Plan aimed at black America"--seems implausible in
this era of cash-strapped state and local
governments.—Publishers
Weekly
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posted 29 March
2009
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