"There are two types of power," said Linda Jeffers, addressing an accountability session of New Orleans mayoral candidates at the city's Trinity Episcopal church. "Organized money and organized people." Since Hurricane Katrina, the battle between those two forces has shaped the struggle to rebuild New Orleans. With mayoral elections on Saturday it is set to intensify.
The one thing both sides seem to agree on is that neither wants the city to return to the way it was before the hurricane. The people of New Orleans, most of whom are black and many of whom are poor, want schools that will educate their children, jobs that will pay a living wage, and neighborhoods where capital investment matches the large pools of social capital created by their churches and close-knit communities. Organized money has something else in mind: the destruction of many of those communities and permanent removal of those who lived in them, a city that follows the gentrification patterns of racial removal and class cleansing that have played out elsewhere in the US.
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The one thing both sides seem to agree on is that neither wants the city to return to the way it was before the hurricane. The people of New Orleans, most of whom are black and many of whom are poor, want schools that will educate their children, jobs that will pay a living wage, and neighborhoods where capital investment matches the large pools of social capital created by their churches and close-knit communities. Organized money has something else in mind: the destruction of many of those communities and permanent removal of those who lived in them, a city that follows the gentrification patterns of racial removal and class cleansing that have played out elsewhere in the US.
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Only this time, no one is watching. Like teenagers discovering sex, the American media developed an intense fascination with the mundane facts of American life following the hurricane: namely, the glaring disparities in race and class that persist and pervade. Having gorged themselves on the undeniable evidence of glaring disparities in race and class, they soon got sick and went to sleep.
Up in the mostly white and wealthy Garden District, the Boulangerie on Magazine Street offers a delicious choice of croissants. Down in the ninth ward they are still finding dead bodies - nine in March, some half-eaten by animals, plus a skull.
But there is no dramatic backdrop to the systematic and systemic exclusions of African-Americans this time around. It's as though corpses have to be floating down the street and thousands stranded without food or water before racism is once more worthy of note here. "I came down off my rooftop and I walked through the waters," said Jeffers. "And now I feel like they're taking me back on to the rooftop." The organized people of New Orleans keep trying to move to higher ground: the organized money keeps trying to sell the land from under their feet.
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