KEEPING POOR BLACKS OUT OF THE BIG EASY
Don't Be Surprised Who Shows Up in New Orleans

From CounterPunch:

So, as Sonny Landreth puts it in his song "Levee Town," "Don't be surprised at who shows up, down in the Levee Town." As the waters recede, poor neighborhoods will be swiftly redtagged for the bulldozers and their erstwhile occupants scheduled for permanent expulsion. The post-Katrina "reconstruction" of New Orleans promises to be the first really big outing for the Kelo decision. Kelo? It will be recalled that on June 23 of this year, the US Supreme Court's liberals, plus Souter and Kennedy, decreed that between private property rights on the one side and big time developers with city councils in their pockets on the other, the latter win every time, using the weapon of eminent domain in the furtherance of "public purpose." As Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her dissent, "the spectre of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton. Any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory." Or any black neighborhood with some simulacrum of the Garden District.

And

The scarcely suppressed class war in New Orleans was always what gave the place, and its music, its edge. And why, at least until now, the Disneyfication of the core city could never quite be consummated. Barely had the hurricane passed before Speaker of the House Hastert caught the Republican mood nicely with his remarks that the city should be abandoned to the alligators and Barbara Bush followed through with her considered view that for black people the Houston Astrodome represented ne plus ultra in domestic amenities.

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This essay doesn't even get into the fact that many poor African-American New Orleanians won't want to come back if their lives end up being better wherever they ended up after evacuating. The destruction of New Orleans does, indeed, present a big opportunity for developers and racists to re-color the city in their favorite shades of white, but, conversely, it also presents a big opportunity to address the longstanding poverty issues facing blacks there for many decades: from the enormous amounts of federal money now flowing into the Crescent City, large chunks of it should be earmarked for revitalizing schools, job training, black entrepreneurialism, public health and child care, and public transportation to allow citizens to get to their jobs more easily. Poor New Orleans blacks should also be given low or no interest loans so that they can buy their own houses. In other words, all this reconstruction money can easily be used to entice the Big Easy's cultural backbone to return.

I've got a bad feeling, however, that's not going to happen.

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