Notes From Inside
New Orleans
By Jordan Flaherty
LeftTurn.org
04 September, 2005
Friday, September
2 - I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from
the apartment I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee
camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials
towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one
of the refugee camps.
In the refugee camp
I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people
(at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind
metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers
standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop
at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades,
and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where
the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told
where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas,
or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas
(for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton
Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through
Baton Rouge.
You had no choice
but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come
to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of
the camp.
I traveled throughout
the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National
Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could
give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they
would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams
of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get
any information from any federal or state officials on any of these
questions, and all of them, from Australian TV to local Fox affiliates
complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman
told me "as someone who's been here in this camp for two days,
the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You
don't want to be here at night."
There was also no
visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort
of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on
buses, a way to register contact information or find family members,
special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment
for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.
To understand the
dimensions of this tragedy, its important to look at New Orleans itself.
For those who have
not lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital,
city. A place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the
world. A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremacy
has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty.
From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades,
Beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans
is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike
anywhere else in the world.
It is a city of
kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two
hours because you stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where
a community pulls together when someone is in need. It is a city of
extended families and social networks filling the gaps left by city,
state and federal governments that have abdicated their responsibility
for the public welfare. It is a city where someone you walk past on
the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an answer.
It is also a city
of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has
a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this
year, most of them centered on just a few, overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods.
Police have been quoted as saying that they don't need to search out
the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker
is shot in revenge.
There is an atmosphere
of intense hostility and distrust between much of Black New Orleans
and the N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been
accused of everything from drug running to corruption to theft. In separate
incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently charged with
rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high profile police
killings of unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which
has inspired ongoing weekly protests for several months.
The city has a 40%
illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate
in four years. Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child's education
and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent
of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools
every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given
day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in
Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual
farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It
is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying,
transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.
Race has always
been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that
was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence.
Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of
cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to
the treatment of the refugees to the the media portrayal of the victims,
this disaster is shaped by race.
Louisiana politics
is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political
leaders have defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina
approached, our Governor urged us to "Pray the hurricane down"
to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane,
we tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and TV stations,
hoping for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for
a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began to rule, they was no source
of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters
said the water level would rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized.
Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and media only made
it worse.
While the rich escaped
New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left
behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have
spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves
New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that
hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.
No sane person should
classify someone who takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a
desperate, starving city as a "looter," but that's just what
the media did over and over again. Sheriffs and politicians talked of
having troops protect stores instead of perform rescue operations.
Images of New Orleans'
hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control,
criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured
against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence
that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media
focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on "welfare queens"
and "super-predators" obscured the simultaneous and much larger
crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited
people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much
larger crimes.
City, state and
national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the
mid-1800s, its been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New
Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week's events, was more
about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated
exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently
refused to spend the money to protect this poor, overwhelmingly black,
city.
While FEMA and others
warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward
proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration,
in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood
control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as
a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodlines,
the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard
of our elected leaders.
The aftermath from
the 1927 flood helped shape the elections of both a US President and
a Governor, and ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long.
In the coming months,
billions of dollars will likely flood into New Orleans. This money can
either be spent to usher in a "New Deal" for the city, with
public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new schools, cultural
programs and housing restoration, or the city can be "rebuilt and
revitalized" to a shell of its former self, with newer hotels,
more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks replacing the former
neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.
Long before Katrina,
New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment,
deindustrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina
hurricane will take billions to repair.
Now that the money
is flowing in, and the world's eyes are focused on Katrina, its vital
that progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a
rebuilding with justice. New Orleans is a special place, and we need
to fight for its rebirth.
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Below are some small,
grassroots and New Orleans-based resources, organizations and institutions
that will need your support in the coming months.
Social Justice:
www.jjpl.org
www.iftheycanlearn.org
www.nolaps.org
www.thepeoplesinstitute.org/
www.criticalresistance.org/index.php?name=crno_home
Cultural Resources:
www.backstreetculturalmuseum.com
www.ashecac.org/
http://198.66.50.128/gallery/
www.nolahumanrights.org
http://www.freewebs.com/ironrail/
http://www.girlgangproductions.com/
Current Info and
Resources:
http://neworleans.craigslist.org/about/help/katrina_cl.html
Jordan Flaherty
is an editor of Left Turn Magazine.