Seven years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has become a
national laboratory for government reforms. But the process through
which those experiments have been carried out rarely has been
transparent or democratic. The results have been divisive, pitting new
residents against those who grew up here, rich against poor, and white
against Black.
Education, housing, criminal justice, health care, urban planning,
even our media; systemic changes have touched every aspect life in New
Orleans, often creating a template used in other cities. A few examples:
- In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, more than 7,500 employees in city’s public school system were fired,
despite the protection of union membership and a contract.
Thousands of young teachers, many affiliated with programs like Teach
For America, filled the empty slots. As charters took over from
traditional public schools, the city became what then-superintendent
Paul Vallas called the first 100% free market public school system in
the US. A judge recently found that the mass firings were illegal, but
any resolution will likely be tied up in appeals for years.
- Every public housing development has either been partially or
entirely torn down. The housing authority now administers more than
17,000 vouchers – nearly double the pre-Katrina amount –a massive
privatization of a formerly public system. During this period, rents
have risen dramatically across the city.
- The US Department of Justice has spent three years in negotiations
with city government over reform of the police department. The historic
consent decree that came out of these negotiations mandates vast changes
in nearly every aspect of the NOPD and
some aspects
could serve as a model for departments across the US. But organizations
that deal with police violence, as well as the city’s independent
police monitor, have filed
legal challenges to the agreement, stating that they were left out of the negotiations and that as a result, the final document lacks community oversight.
- As the city
loses its daily paper, an influx of funding has arrived to support various online media projects – including
$880,000
from George Soros to one website. In a city that is still majority
African-American, the staff of these new media ventures is almost
entirely white, and
often politically conservative.
These funders – many of whom consider themselves progressive - have
mostly ignored the city’s Black media, which have a proud history of
centuries of local resistance to the dominant narrative. Publications
like
Louisiana Weekly covered police violence and institutional racism
when the daily paper was not interested. Wealthy liberals are apparently still not interested.
There is wide agreement that most of our government services have
long deep, systemic problems. But in rebuilding New Orleans, the key
question is not only how much change is needed, but more crucially, who
should dictate that change.
New Orleans has become a destination for a new class of residents
drawn by the allure of being able to conduct these experiments. For a
while, they self-identified as
YURPs
(Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals). Now they are frequently known
as “social entrepreneurs,” and they have wealthy and powerful allies.
Warren Buffet has invested in the redevelopment of public housing. Oprah
Winfrey and the Walton family have donated to the charter schools.
Attorney General Holder came to town to announce police department
reforms. President Obama has visited several times, despite the fact
that this state is not remotely in play for Democrats.
Many residents – especially in the Black community – have felt
disenfranchised in the new New Orleans. They see the influx of college
graduates who have come to start nonprofits and run our schools and
redesign our neighborhoods as disaster profiteers, not saviors. You can
hear it every day on
WBOK, the city’s only Black-owned talk radio station, and read about it in the
Louisiana Weekly,
Data News, and
New Orleans Tribune,
the city’s Black newspapers. This new rebuilding class is seen as
working in alliance with white elites to disenfranchise a shrinking
Black majority. Callers and guests on
WBOK point to the rapid
change in political representation: Among the political offices that
have shifted to white after a generation in Black hands are the mayor,
police chief, district attorney, and majorities on the school board and
city council.
In a recent cover story in the
Tribune, journalist Lovell
Beaulieu compares the new rebuilding class to the genocide of Native
Americans. “520 years after the Indians discovered Columbus, a similar
story is unfolding,” writes Beaulieu. “New arrivals from around the
United States and the world are landing here to get a piece of the
action that is lucrative post-Katrina New Orleans…Black people are
merely pawns in a game with little clout and few voices. Their primary
role is to be the ones who get pushed out, disregarded and forgotten.”
People hear the term “blank slate,” a term often used to describe
post-Katrina New Orleans – as a way of erasing the city’s long history
of Black-led resistance to white supremacy. As New Orleans poet and
educator
Kalamu Ya Salaam has said,
“it wasn’t a blank slate, it was a cemetery.” Where some new arrivals
see opportunity, many residents see grave robbers. In response, those
who find anything to praise in the old ways are often accused of being
stuck in the past or embracing corruption.
Hurricane Isaac has demonstrated that New Orleans is still at risk
from storms – although the flood protection system around the city seems
to be more reliable than it was before the levees failed and eighty
percent of New Orleans was underwater. But have the systemic problems
that were displayed to the world seven years ago been fixed by the
radical changes the city has seen? Is reform possible without the
consent of those most affected by those changes? These are polarizing
questions in the new New Orleans.
