Five Years After Katrina

New Orleans Racist Hell

The government’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 constituted a racist atrocity in which the horrors visited upon the black and poor people of New Orleans exposed the raw reality of race and class in capitalist America. There remains a wellspring of bitterness, especially among the black population, at the recollection of desperate families clinging to the roofs of their homes vainly appealing for aid, of dying victims left without food or water in the sweltering Superdome, of cops and National Guard troops shooting down “looters”—that is, survivors foraging for food. Responsibility for the crimes committed against the population of New Orleans must be placed squarely at the feet of the Democratic and Republican bourgeois politicians—from the Louisiana statehouse to the White House—who oversee the murderous racist capitalist system.

At the time, we wrote in “New Orleans: Racist Atrocity” (WV No. 854, 16 September 2005):

“It is not just that the victims in New Orleans were primarily black and poor, but a spotlight was thrown on the desperate conditions faced by black people across the country. New Orleans has its own peculiarities, including geography. But across the U.S., the mass of black people is forced to live in inner cities that are little more than rotting shells—from Newark and Camden to Detroit and Gary. No jobs, no health care, schools that are little more than prisons. This country’s racist rulers see no reason to spend money to maintain a layer of the black population that is increasingly seen as a surplus population.”

As a U.S. Senator in 2005, Barack Obama grotesquely declared that “the incompetence” of government officials at the time of Katrina was “color-blind.” As president he intones in a speech in New Orleans on the fifth anniversary of the disaster: “We are helping to make New Orleans a place that stands for what we can do in America.” What the capitalist rulers did, in the words of then-New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, was use the hurricane as an opportunity to eliminate the “problems that we had with blight, with crime, and…with the public school system.” In plain language, that meant: Get rid of the city’s black and poor population by tearing down public housing projects, blocking the rebuilding of neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward and shutting down public hospitals and schools. To enforce this program, the New Orleans Police Department did what it always does—and then some—by terrorizing the black population. And the attacks on the black poor went hand in hand with a concerted effort to bust the city’s unions.

One of Nagin’s first acts after the floodwaters were drained in 2005 was to fire all 8,000 public school employees. Unionized teachers, the vast majority of them black, were thrown on the scrap heap in an all-out drive to replace public schools with charter schools. Today, 70 percent of schools in New Orleans are charter schools, a far higher rate than any other city in the country. Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan—the spearhead of the administration’s attacks on public schools and teachers unions—ghoulishly crowed: “The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.” Also under the ax is the public University of New Orleans, where students demonstrated on September 1 against deep budget cuts. Students were viciously attacked by cops, who arrested two protesters on felony charges. We demand: Drop the charges against the protesters!

The capitalists took the “opportunity” created by Katrina to carry out longstanding plans to gut public housing in New Orleans, even though much of it was little damaged by the flooding. In 2008, local and federal housing officials teamed up to demolish four of the city’s largest public housing complexes, destroying more than 3,000 apartments that had been occupied before Katrina. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett was given the green light to build a for-profit housing development on the site of the former St. Bernard projects. Today, the city has a deliberately manufactured shortage of low-income housing, with a waiting list of 28,000 tenants for subsidized housing. On top of that, a federal judge ruled last month that a government program of financial aid for property owners to rebuild homes damaged by the hurricane had systematically discriminated against black people.

Conditions in the largely black Lower Ninth Ward, where more than three-quarters of the pre-storm population have not returned, were recently described by journalist Brendan McCarthy in a gut-wrenching report in the New Orleans Times-Picayune (29 August): “There is one sentiment shared among all: the neighborhood has been forgotten…. Snakes, stray dogs, rabbits, roosters, rats and cats roam the streets. The mosquitoes are ferocious. The neighborhood has no supermarket, no police substation, no pharmacy, no doctor.” Only one of the five schools in the area has reopened; the nearest hospital is on the other side of town. One dismayed resident told McCarthy: “There’ll probably be big condos here in five years.”

Meanwhile, the notorious New Orleans cops have been so flagrantly kill-crazy since Hurricane Katrina that newly elected mayor Mitch Landrieu was compelled to call on Obama’s Justice Department “to conduct a full review of the city’s Police Department” (New York Times, 26 August). The feds are investigating eight criminal cases involving accusations of “police misconduct.” These include the notorious shooting of six people at the Danziger Bridge, six days after the hurricane, two of whom were killed (see “Homicidal New Orleans Cops,” WV No. 959, 21 May). Two others are known to have been shot and killed by the NOPD, while at least eleven black men were hunted down by white “militia” patrolling the Algiers district with the support of the cops. These are among the “official” stories; it is unknown how many other atrocities—by cops or by racist white vigilantes—will come to light, if they ever will.

Whatever the outcome of these investigations, the purpose of such “reviews” is to refurbish the credentials of the forces of “law and order” and make them more effective in repressing the workers and the oppressed. Landrieu, and the local bourgeoisie he represents, simply want to make New Orleans “safe” for more capital investment and the lucrative tourist trade. New Orleans chief of police Ronal Serpas chimed in that a Justice Department investigation was “exactly what needed to happen.”

The anger of black workers and others in the face of the atrocities perpetrated by the bourgeoisie in New Orleans needs a class expression—i.e., integrated proletarian struggle against the racist capitalist order. In the aftermath of Katrina, we raised a series of demands that the unions should fight for, such as: a massive program of federally funded public works to rebuild New Orleans and the rest of the devastated Gulf Coast; union jobs at union wage scales; workers committees that could veto shoddy designs and construction before they endangered more lives. Such a campaign could have been an important step in the long-needed unionization of the South and, more generally, the revival of the declining union movement. But to unleash labor’s social power requires a fight to replace the labor bureaucracy with a class-struggle leadership that breaks the unions’ political ties to the capitalist state and bourgeois parties.

The workings of the capitalist economy have hit the New Orleans area hard. In the mid 1970s, the New Orleans ILA longshoremen’s union had some 7,000 members, with warehouses and food-processing plants along the waterfront providing many other union jobs. Today the ILA, once the center of labor and black power in the city, has fewer than 400 members. Earlier this year, the head of the Port of New Orleans crowed that port labor is now only half unionized. This summer, the bosses at Avondale Shipyard on the edge of New Orleans announced the closing of the facility, the largest manufacturing employer in Louisiana. This threatens to eliminate a multiracial workforce of 5,000 unionized workers, along with many jobs at smaller facilities supporting the shipyard.

What has happened in New Orleans is a stark indictment of the barbarous, irrational capitalist system and its insatiable drive for profit. The brutal racial oppression that found such naked expression at the time of Hurricane Katrina is fundamental to American capitalism and will not be eliminated short of the revolutionary overturn of that system. As we wrote in “New Orleans: Racist Atrocity”:

“The situation cries out for a socialist planned economy, in which natural resources and the technological and productive forces of society would be marshaled on behalf of human needs, not profit. What is urgently required is to build a workers party that can lead a workers revolution to rip power from the hands of the capitalist class and its political agents, right-wing Republican and liberal Democrat alike.”