Ten Years After Katrina

New Orleans: Still Racist Hell

The following article is based on reporting from New Orleans by Workers Vanguard contributor Ruth Ryan and a visiting WV team.

At events marking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was visited by U.S. presidents past and present. Clinton, Bush, Obama and other capitalist politicians showed up to try to lay to rest the still-vivid images from 2005: 1,800 dead, black residents stranded on rooftops and roadsides, tens of thousands abandoned at the Superdome, hundreds jailed at Camp Greyhound, dozens shot at by cops in the streets, and the surviving population corralled at gunpoint in the Convention Center. After these televised images horrified the world, survivors were eventually bused and airlifted out so “order” could be established in the vacant city by an occupying army of cops and National Guardsmen. Katrina refugees were treated like criminals for one reason—they were black and poor.

If the powers that be were criminally slow to the rescue, they were lightning quick in throwing up barriers to keep poor black people from ever returning home. The moment the city was emptied, politicians from both capitalist parties set about to dismantle institutions that might aid and abet the return of the black population, with Louisiana Democrats taking the lead. A stop was put to the cleanup at Charity Hospital, and it was permanently shuttered. Some 7,000 unionized teachers and public school employees were fired. All the big housing projects were fenced off and bulldozed. The city’s wealthy Bourbons got what they wanted: a smaller, richer and whiter New Orleans. Around 100,000 black residents never returned.

Speeches at the commemorative events and dozens of articles in the bourgeois press were full of praise for the “resilience” of New Orleans residents and the extent of the city’s recovery since the storm. The official message was that things have been made right. According to Democratic mayor Mitch Landrieu, “Nobody can refute the fact that we have completely turned this story around,” while Forbes magazine crowed: “The metro area has made an impressive comeback” (26 August).

The social disaster that unfolded in the wake of Katrina was entirely man-made, exposing the raw reality of race and class in capitalist America. The same can be said of the recovery, which has overwhelmingly benefited the local business elite and government officials. Dollars have been spent, to be sure. An expanded levee protection system cost more than $14 billion. A new $25 million championship golf course is under construction in City Park. Tourism has rebounded, and the number of restaurants is up from 800 to 1,400. But the truth is, poor and working black people have been excluded from this nominal recovery in countless ways.

A case in point is the lack of access to health care. Since Katrina, there are fewer hospital beds and doctors in black areas of the city, where medical treatment was shoddy before the storm. The University Medical Center (UMC)—a state-of-the-art, 34-acre medical complex that opened in August—includes a Level 1 Trauma Center and 446 beds, but only 250 of them are available for use. In contrast, Charity had 700 beds and, true to its name, if you had no money, you didn’t have to pay. Work conditions are bad at the new “white elephant” hospital, as WV learned from a longshoreman whose wife works at UMC and used to work at Charity.

The city’s longstanding economic inequality has widened. The median household income of New Orleans blacks is less than half that of whites: $25,000 versus $60,000. The total number of jobs is down almost 10 percent since Katrina, and employment has shifted ever more into minimum-wage service and tourist industry jobs. Retail, fast food, hotel and restaurant work have supplanted shipbuilding. Today, the biggest employers are non-union hospitals, notorious for low wages and tyrannical management.

At every turn, black people face obstacles to making a living. Poverty-wage workers can rarely afford cars—they depend on public transport to get to work. Federal money has been funneled into expansion of streetcar lines in tourist areas, but ten years after the storm, bus service is only at 35 percent of its previous level.

Segregation and the concentration of poverty have been re-established far away from jobs, transportation, shopping and services. Before Katrina, public housing was centered around downtown, near job locations. Project residents may have held minimum-wage jobs, multiple part-time jobs and split-shift jobs, but at least they could get to work. Today, an expanded Section 8 voucher program has largely replaced public housing, with residents displaced to remote apartment complexes like those near the swamplands of New Orleans East. Meanwhile, the old projects have been replaced with beautiful new “mixed income” units mostly renting at unaffordable market rates.

Before the storm, the now-empty Lower Ninth Ward had one of the highest home ownership rates in the city. The federal Road Home program was purportedly launched to help homeowners whose residences were destroyed, but it turned out to be a bureaucratic nightmare of racism, denial and piecemeal payouts. With $119 million in funds still unreleased, the program is popularly derided as the “Roadblock Home.” Except for a handful of “Brad Pitt” houses built by the actor’s foundation, the Lower 9 is a kingdom of snakes, rats and grass, a reminder of a black diaspora kept far away from home.

Katrina gave the U.S. capitalist rulers the chance to push through a pilot project for the dismantling of public education on a citywide scale. Charter schools rushed in after the public schools were shuttered and the teachers union busted. Experienced teachers were replaced with fresh college grads earning a miserly $15 an hour. Now, over 90 percent of students in the city attend charters.

Their backers boast of results, but an op-ed published by the bourgeoisie’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, noted “growing evidence that the reforms have come at the expense of the city’s most disadvantaged children, who often disappear from school entirely” (22 August). No surprise—the charters cherry-pick students, maneuver artfully to exclude the disabled and expel black youth ten times more often than whites. Special schools set up for those expelled amount to a pipeline for black youth into the juvenile prison system.

As always in New Orleans and across the country, the police, courts and prisons are terrorizing the black population. Despite a recent Department of Justice investigation and consent decree, children continue to be housed alongside adult prisoners in the scandal-ridden Orleans Parish Prison. Of New Orleans juveniles arrested so far in 2015, a full 99 percent have been black, according to the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights. The government’s response to this outrage has been more jails, with a new juvenile facility completed earlier this year. A massive new adult prison complex has been built for upwards of $145 million. In this sick society, a conviction or even an arrest is often a bar to a decent job.

If Katrina’s aftermath proved anything, it is that the capitalist class views poor black people as a surplus population to be condemned and imprisoned, if not killed outright at the hands of one of their thugs in blue. Just one month ago, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a decision overturning the conviction of five New Orleans police officers in the infamous Danziger Bridge incident. Six days after Katrina, the depraved cops opened fire on unarmed people crossing the bridge in a desperate search for food and water, killing two and wounding four of them. All in a day’s work, says the appeals court.

New Orleans is a particularly stark expression of the normal workings of racist American capitalism’s “justice” system. The U.S. imprisons more per capita than any other country in the world, and Louisiana ranks highest among the 50 states, with twice the national rate. And within Louisiana, New Orleans has the highest rate of any jurisdiction. The Urban League reports that almost 90 percent of the city’s prisoners are black.

But black people, whose racial oppression is woven into the very fabric of American capitalism, are hardly powerless. Despite the destruction of industrial jobs and erosion of union strength, black workers continue to be integrated into strategic sectors of the proletariat, including manufacturing, much of which is now located in the South, and longshore in New Orleans and elsewhere. Won to a revolutionary program, black workers will be the living link fusing the anger of the dispossessed masses with the social power of the multiracial proletariat under the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party. When the working class shatters the racist capitalist order through socialist revolution, the old Crescent City, one of the most cultured and complex cities on this continent, will begin to shine like a diamond on the banks of the Mississippi, unfettered by the profit system that today pulls it down in the mud. What we wrote in a Spartacist League statement (reprinted in WV No. 854, 16 September 2005) at the time of Hurricane Katrina is just as true today: “As New Orleans shows, the choice is clear: socialism or barbarism.”