Goodbye New Orleans...We Hardly Knew Ya

New Orleans is dead. Long live New Orleans.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that "New Orleans is back," pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents--including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans--are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home. In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, "New Urbanists" and neo-Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

As I discussed in an earlier post, the vast majority of Katrina evacuees from New Orleans have so far not returned home mostly because they have no ability to. According to Mike Davis, this is all according to plan:

The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course, runs deeper and is nastier than mere concern with civic probity (America's most corrupt city, after all, is located on the Potomac, not the Mississippi). Underlying all the circumlocutions are the same antediluvian prejudices and stereotypes that were used to justify the violent overthrow of Reconstruction 130 years ago. Usually it is the poor who are invisible in the aftermath of urban disasters, but in the case of New Orleans it has been the African-American professional middle class and skilled working class. In the confusion and suffering of Katrina--a Rorschach test of the American racial unconscious--most white politicians and media pundits have chosen to see only the demons of their prejudices. The city's complex history and social geography have been reduced to a cartoon of a vast slum inhabited by an alternately criminal or helpless underclass, whose salvation is the kindness of strangers in other, whiter cities. Inconvenient realities like Gentilly's red-brick normalcy--or, for that matter, the pride of homeownership and the exuberance of civic activism in the blue-collar Lower Ninth Ward--have not been allowed to interfere with the belief, embraced by New Democrats as well as old Republicans, that black urban culture is inherently pathological.

Thus:

While elected black officials protest impotently from the sidelines, a largely white elite has wrested control over the debate about how to rebuild the city.

For those African-Americans who manage to return despite the circumstances, this lack of concern with their circumstances has them to returning to neighborhoods that are relatively lawless and dominated by criminals:

In a city that once led the nation in homicides per capita, crime has long been a leading indicator of New Orleans's health and prospects — an unavoidable part of the equation for a walk around the block or a trip to the grocery store. That diminished greatly after the storm, when several hundred thousand people were evacuated. But there are signs that the past may be returning, with a new twist. Police officials say the landscape of abandoned houses, stretching block after block, after Hurricane Katrina is being incorporated into a revived drug trade, with the empty dwellings offering an unexpected convenience to dealers returning from Houston and Atlanta.

In other words, New Orlean's African-American evacuees have been left largely to make their own way homes, and if/when they manage to get home they find a city whose priorities do not the reconstruction of their neighborhoods...or them. I won't speculate what the disaster that befell New Oreleans has meant to most on the right. For the average American it seems largely to have faded from public consciousness. But for some on the left, the disaster has exposed the breadth and extent of poverty and racism that remains in our nation, like kicking over a log to find insects squirming underneath the placid exterior. I for one am far too cynical to have subscribed to the notion that this exposure would lead to any sort of dramatic change. I did however think that with enough attention, we might be able to rebuild the city more in the way it should be; a bright, modern, safe American city that isn't dominated by crime and poverty for it's African-American residents. Unfortunately it appears the only ones still paying attention are the ones who want to rebuild a bright, modern, safe American city without African-American residents. I can't tell you the number of times I read on other liberal bloggers the failure of the "MSM" to cover an important story. While this is true from time to time, the truth of the matter is in this instance the "MSM" is covering the story-or at least trying to-while the rest of the liberal blogosphere has apparently moved on. I won't accuse some other liberal bloggers of caring only as long as or to the extent that this tragedy could be used against Bush, but when conservatives make such accusations it's hard to refute them when 90% of the posts I read about New Orleans/Katrina invoke Bush as the boogey-man. I'm not asking for outrage; I'm just asking for visible concern. The only way to make sure the New Orleans is rebuilt in a way such that it welcome home all of it's residents, is to keep the light shining on what's going on there. But for stories in the NY Times, The Nation and various other media outlets, all I hear is...silence.