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Abstract
The Katrina catastrophe served to consolidate many long-term trends in the Gulf Coast region, particularly in New Orleans. Among these are a massive demographic shift following World War II that confined poor Black Americans within the older city boundaries, a changing economy marked by deindustrialization of the city and transfers of employment and resources to the suburbs, the decline of the welfare state which had supported many of the structurally unemployed/underemployed until relatively recently, the rise of a tourism economy, and the automation of particularly key industries such as shipping, refining, and chemical manufacturing. The disaster was structured by these long-term socio-economic transformations and consolidated through a punctuated moment of continuity called hurricane Katrina. In this sense, Hurricane Katrina merely brought the situation up to speed. Throughout this essay I explore some of these transformations while also touching on the politics of reconstruction; a Shumpeterian process whereby local economic elites are seeking to make an opportunity of the destruction by monopolizing the planning process and rebuilding the cityscape in a fashion more amenable to the accumulation of capital. Equally powerful and related are the gentrifying forces at work in New Orleans. The city has also become the wellspring for a powerful number of social movements seeking racial and economic justice, however. While we can trace these trends back across time and place in New Orleans, and while we can say that Katrina “exposed” or “brought to the surface” much of the structural racism operating in our society, the future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is by no means determined.
Notes
Falk, William S, Rooted in Place: Family and Belonging in a Southern Black Community, Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Social scientists have been reconsidering the dynamics of racial succession in neighborhoods, noting that ecological approaches that focus entirely on spatial variables like the number of Black residents on a block, or the particular patterns of Black residence in relation to whites, and so forth, are inadequate to explain how it is that certain neighborhoods become all white, or non-white (for instance, see—Gotham, Kevin Fox. “Beyond Invasion and Succession: School Segregation, Real Estate Blockbusting, and the Political Economy of Neighborhood Racial Transition.” City & Community, 2002, 1, 1, Mar., 83–111). Nevertheless, the decline of black neighborhoods like the 9th Ward are due to structural racism in American society, no matter how complex it is.
Brinkley, Douglass, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Harper Collins, 2006, 45.
Additionally, the legitimacy—however shaky—of the welfare state during this era (and up until at least the 1980s) meant that social investments and social consumption protecting places like the 9th Ward from catastrophic flooding were uncontroversial and ensured. The levees were funded, and so were welfare programs for the growing population of dislocated workers (supernumeraries) pushed out of work by rapidly transforming monopoly sector industries, most of whom were Black Americans who lived in places like the 9th. See James O'Connor's Fiscal Crisis of the State for a detailed theoretical treatment of how this political-economy that sustained social investment/consumption in levees, city services, and welfare (broadly defined) is inevitably outpaced by a fiscal crisis that leads to cutbacks, the sort of which weakened New Orleans infrastructure and put much of its population in a position of critical vulnerability. O'Connor, James. Fiscal Crisis of the State. St. Martin's Press, 1973.
For a more historical treatment of environmental racism in New Orleans (particularly the segregation of poor Blacks into the “bottom of the bowl” and the back-swamps, see—Colten, Craig E. An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. Louisiana State University Press, 2005. And also, Lewis, Peirce F. New Orleans: The Making of An Urban Landscape. Cambridge: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1976.
Quoted in Remnick, David, “High Water: How Presidents and Citizens React to Disaster,” The New Yorker. October 3, 2005.
Bridges, Ruby, Through My Eyes: Articles and Interviews Compiled and Edited by Margo Lundell, New York: Scholastic Press, 1999.
Inger, Morton, Politics and Reality in an American City; the New Orleans School Crisis of 1960, New York, Center for Urban Education, 1969.
As of July, 2006 many of the public schools in New Orleans remain closed. In their place have sprouted up dozens of charter schools. Prior to Katrina the New Orleans public school system resembled many other inner city districts; it was chronically under-funded and highly segregated. Bill Quigly, lawyer and professor at Loyola University of New Orleans says that, “[p]ublic education in New Orleans is mostly demolished and what remains is being privatized. The city is now the nation's laboratory for charter schools—publicly funded schools run by private bodies. Before Katrina the local elected school board had control over 115 schools—they now control four. The majority of the remaining schools are now charters. The metro area public schools will get $213 million less next school year in state money because tens of thousands of public school students were displaced last year.” Quigly, Bill. “Ten Months After Katrina: Gutting New Orleans.” Dissident Voice. July 1, 2006. http://www.dissidentvoice.org/
Ciravolo, G. Leighton, The Legacy of John McDonogh, Lafayette, LA: The Center for Louisiana Studies, 2002.
Lewis, Peirce F, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, Cambridge: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1976.
Winant, Howard, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
US Census, www.census.gov
Thomas Ingersoll describes New Orleans as an urban core surrounded by rural plantations, a situation of such proximity and almost conflicting roles that the city became a microcosm of America as a whole torn between rural and urban life, slavery and wage labor, industrialism of the factory, and the plantation. Ingersoll, Thomas N. Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South 1718–1819. University of Tennessee Press, 1999.
The “bottom of the bowl” refers to some of the lowest lying grounds in the city—literally in the center of New Orleans, far below sea level.
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Note that I am not arguing Katrina was a greater disaster because of the storm's characteristics. Rather, Katrina was a greater disaster in the sense that the disaster was the sum of several parts, both natural (the storm) and social (the political system, economic structure, race relations, poverty rate, condition of infrastructure, etc.).
Logan, John and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987.
Times-Picayune, “Nagin sets guidelines to plan rebuilding,” Wednesday, July 5, 2006. http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breaking/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_localbreakingnews/archives/2006_07_05.html
Saulny, Susan, “New Orleans Sets a Way to Plan Its Rebuilding,” New York Times. Thursday, July 6, 2006.
Wallace Roberts & Todd, LLC, “Action Plan for New Orleans: The New American City,” Bring New Orleans Back Commission, Urban Planning Committee, January 11, 2006.
As I write this piece I sit on the porch of a double shotgun home in the Faubourg-Marigny neighborhood. I moved in a week ago. According to my neighbor who is a longtime resident, the flood waters only covered the street by a few inches. The worst damage in this section of the city was to walls and roofs from the wind.
See Rodriguez, Joseph A. “Rapid Transit and Community Power: West Oakland Residents Confront BART.” Antipode 31:2, 1999. Rodriguez summarizes some of the literature critical of BART's claims that it would benefit low-income communities along its lines and also describes the Black community's political opposition to various aspects of the BART project including its overall purpose, impacts on Black business districts, and union racism that locked out non-whites from high paying construction and operation jobs.
Baker's words, first reported by the Wall Street Journal were, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did.” Washington Wire, Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2005.
Filosa, Gwen, “HUD demolition plan protested: Residents say they're being shut out of city,” New Orleans Times-Picayune. Friday, June 16, 2006.
Blumenfeld, Larry, “America's new jazz museum! (No poor black people allowed),” Salon.com. http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/feature/2005/10/12/jazz/index.html. Accessed on July 7, 2006.
However, one planning/architectural firm working on the 9th Ward through the New Orleans Neighborhood Rebuilding Plan is Stull and Lee, an African American firm with experience in designing racially conscious architecture that is sensitive to poverty and economic development in places like West Palm Beach, Florida for instance. The official planning process may not be all that bad for the 9th Ward after all. See Stull and Lee Inc. “A Community Vision for the Future of the Lower Ninth Ward: Presentation of Initial Sketch Plan Alternatives.” June 17, 2006. http://www.nolanrp.com/index.php. Accessed on July 6, 2006.