It's No Accident

Since you most likely have the day off today, you can take a few minutes to at least skim the Institute for Southern Studies report, One Year After Katrina: The State of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (pdf). Except that now it is more like a year and a half since Katrina.

From the point of view of a typical big-city politician in the United States, the results of Katrina actually look pretty good. As the report mentions, the mean household income in the New Orleans area jumped to $64,000 from $55,000 before the storm. By the standards of "economic development" strategy in just about any city in the country, that's a stunning success. Our urban leaders are determined to reduce poverty in their cities -- by moving all of the poor people out. We are all supposed to applaud this sort of thing, because the old poor neighborhoods are such decrepit, dangerous and depressing places (and God knows they are!). When Clinton and the Republicans got rid of AFDC, they were soon hailing the "success" of welfare reform because so many people had been moved off the rolls; the fact that people remained poor was a matter of no consequence. Similarly, you can reduce poverty in your city by gentrifying it, attracting middle- and upper-income people and clearing slum neighborhoods in one fashion or another. You get to count this as a success no matter what happens to the poor people who formerly lived there. In the real world, you the mayor or planning commission chairman have not made poor people in your city any less poor; you have only replaced them with other, more affluent people. But believe me, no one is going to check, because no one cares. Or maybe the poor people do, but they don't count -- just like the thousands of people who (it is now safe to say) have been permanently displaced from the Gulf Coast.

Here's another fact about New Orleans from the report: the pre-storm population of the metro area was 36% black; it is now only 21% black. Katrina is an extreme example, but this principle applies just about everywhere in the country: the conventional thinking about "economic development" in US urban areas is a fundamentally racist way of looking at the world. Like politics in general in this country, every word of terminology is loaded and every unspoken assumption is entangled with the corrosive -- yet stubbornly enduring -- legacy of white supremacy. That's the state of "The Dream" this Martin Luther King Day, and if he were alive he would not be the official and harmless symbol he is now; he would still be spending a lot of time getting arrested, and he would probably be the favorite bête noire (literally!) of Fox News.

Technorati tags: Katrina, urban renewal, Negro removal, Martin Luther King Day, racism, white supremacy