New Orleans, LA

I am a news junkie. One of the topics that I spend a lot of time on is New Orleans news from places outside New Orleans. I like to see how other people see New Orleans. I especially like news about New Orleans from outside the US. The point of views can be fascinating. You can see the type of stuff I like on my other blog where I comment on an interesting New Orleans news headlines. I try to post at least one headline per day.

Along those lines, I found an article in The Hindu. The Hindu bills itself as Online edition of India’s National Newspaper. This particular article, After the floods, is written by Anjali Kamat and was posted on September 23, 2007.

I don’t want top say that the author got it wrong as much as I want to say he is misinformed. For one thing, he starts off with a picture labeled, “Now a Wasteland.” Excuse me, New Orleans is not a wasteland. True, there are plenty of areas that need work. Some areas haven’t even started work. Calling it a wasteland damages your credibility though.

With all of the half-truths and misinformation in this article, there is one comment that really stands out as being just plain ignorant.

Visiting the post-Katrina landscape of New Orleans is a bit like time travel. It’s a crash course in the long and shameful history of American poverty, injustice, slavery, and racial segregation. But it’s also a window into the future of what other cities in the United States and perhaps across the world could soon look like. That privatised, gentrified, and militarised future is unmistakeably bleak and terrifying.

After a statement like that, you would think the author would provide some information to back up the statement but not in this case. It’s a drive-by insulting aimed at New Orleans and all of the US.

But, as I said above, there are some very true statements in the article:

Two years after the flood, little has changed at the Lower Ninth Ward. The scene is eerily reminiscent of images from days after the hurricane.

Or this:

After two years of wrangling with the bureaucracy, owners who had finally received federal money to rebuild their homes returned only to find their houses demolished and their property seized by the city. Meanwhile rent prices had skyrocketed by almost 200 per cent.

The insane cost of living that is currently biting New Orleans is particularly vexing. Until there is additional housing, rent will remain high. With insurance and taxes out of control, I don’t see it getting better any time soon.

This following paragraph is a prime example of, almost paranoid, misinformation.

The city’s elite called Katrina a godsend that “cleaned up” the crime-ridden projects. But all Stephanie could talk about was how much she misses the sense of community at the projects. She now lives in Survivors Village, a rat-infested “tent city,” erected in protest by former public housing residents like herself, right across the street from her old home.

Who, in New Orleans, called Katrina a “godsend”? I think they got that from the K-Ville pilot episode.

Even though this article is mostly wrong or warped, I still like reading what people in other places are thinking. The downside to reading this is that I have to ask myself, “Is this the image New Orleans is broadcasting to the world?”

new orleans, katrina, news, india, hindu, image

You can hear a lot about racism in the news and when it’s in the South, the news person usually has an attitude of, “Well, the south is known to be racist.” If it’s in the north or west, everyone acts like it’s a shock.

I have lived all over the country while working as a consultant. The worst racism I ever saw was in New Haven Connecticut. Of course, not everyone was a racist, anymore than everyone in the south is a racist. I did see some very ugly stuff though.

The thing that amazed me was how secret and sneaky it was. In New Orleans, there was segregation. White lakefront and black lakefront, for example. I didn’t even realize that was weird until I was in my 20s. I thought that was just the standard. White lakefront wasn’t any better or any worse than black lakefront, it was just segregated by the Bayou St John bridge. That bridge was out of order all through my teens.

Anyway, my point is that the white people who didn’t like black people were pretty blatant and outspoken about it. The black people who didn’t like white people were just as outspoken. You knew where you stood.

In New Haven, it was sneaky. I was in an elevator with a guy I worked with. A black guy was in the elevator with us. When the black guy got off, my co-worker went off on a racist tirade that was embarrassing to watch. And the black guy hadn’t even said anything on the ride. I saw a lot of that.

Now, on to my point. I don’t really think much about racism. I try to avoid racists where I can. Color, religion, culture, etc just don’t drive my reactions. But hearing constantly about how the South was so much more racist than anywhere else has colored my views.

I had convinced myself that New Haven was an abberation and that the south really was that much worse. Turns out, that’s not true. At least not in the last and past behavior is the best indicator of future performance, as they say.

That’s why I was interested when I ran across this post on Orcinux, Truth & Reconciliation, Part II: James Loewen on Sundown Towns. I had never heard of a sundown town and that’s because it is a uniquely northern and western phenomona.

If you think the town you grew up in didn’t have a race problem because either a) it wasn’t in the South, or b) it was all white, Loewen — the author of “Sundown Towns” and an active Unitarian himself — has news for you.

“When I started researching this subject, I expected to find three types of sundown towns,” Loewen recalled. “I expected to find small towns that were all-white because they’d expelled their black populations; suburbs that were all-white because they excluded blacks (and usually Asians and Jews, as well) from the very beginning; and then a third class of places that were all-white simply because African-Americans never got around to coming there.

(more…)