Revolution #017, October 9, 2005, posted at revcom.us
Before Hurricane Katrina, Black people made up about 70% of the population of New Orleans. On September 29, in an interview with the Houston Chronicle, Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson predicted the rebuilt city will be only 35-40% Black and said: "New Orleans is not going to be as Black as it was for a long time, if ever again."
This is right in line with Bush’s plan for "rebuilding New Orleans"--a strategy for turning devastation into profit (see Revolution #15). This is a plan with billion dollar construction contracts, new zoning laws, no environmental protections and even lower wages--a plan where it isn’t profitable to rebuild neighborhoods and new housing for the hundreds of thousands of Black people displaced by the hurricane.
This is a system and a ruling class that looks at hundreds of thousands of poor Black people losing their homes as an opportunity to try and "solve" the intense social contradictions of poverty and racism by literally getting rid of a huge population of poor Black people. This is what’s behind Louisiana Congressman Richard Baker’s statement, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did it."
There is intense bitterness and anger among the people in New Orleans about how they were depicted and treated like criminals. One man still in New Orleans told Revolution reporter Michael Slate,
"They say they trying to help us, they say they came with buses for us. They didn’t. Don’t believe them. Instead of having people to help us, they gonna ship army guys down here to take what we got, to punish us cuz we wanted to survive.."
There is also a deep sense that the government’s neglect and abuse is part of a bigger, conscious and even more oppressive plan. One woman still in New Orleans told Slate,
"Since it’s a lot of minorities here, it is a lot of Black people here--do you want us all just to die? Is this a bigger part of the plan that we don’t know about or something? ‘The more of them that dies, the less we have to worry about.’"
Author Mike Davis, speaking about the destruction of public housing in the years before Hurricane Katrina, pointed out,
"There has been a kind of policy of triage, where you tear down two of the largest public housing projects in the city--the famous Desire project and St. Thomas in the Warehouse District--to make room for a Wal-Mart and gentrification. You re-house only a portion of the population--a minority--and the other residents are basically thrown out onto the streets, with the expectation that they would leave the city." ("The struggle over the future of New Orleans," September 23, 2005)
And what is happening to the hundreds of thousands of Black people evacuated after Katrina? These are the people HUD Secretary Jackson says won’t (or won’t be allowed to) come back to New Orleans.
The whole world saw the absolutely inhuman way people were treated at the Terrordome and how thousands of people were left to sit on their rooftops for days with no food or water.
Now evacuees from New Orleans are being treated as criminals or potential criminals--shuttled off to destinations unknown, often far away from familiar surroundings, almost always separated from their families.
People in Baton Rouge, Houston, and cities scattered throughout the country tell of how they pleaded with officials to let them get to areas where they knew they had family they could reunite with. But they were told they had to go wherever the bus they got on was taking them. People who had relatives in cities like Baton Rouge and LaFayette were often driven right through those towns--but no stops were allowed--and people were taken against their will to locations in Texas, Arkansas, and elsewhere. The authorities are running background checks on people coming into their state and at least one man, shipped to Rhode Island, was arrested because he had an outstanding warrant.
Centers set up to house people in Houston, Baton Rouge, and elsewhere are like heavily guarded detention centers. In Baton Rouge, the River Center, which is the main downtown civic center, was surrounded by scores of police cars blocking all the streets, with military vehicles forming a perimeter around the police cars. Heavily armed soldiers, police, along with FEMA agents and federal, state, and local officials of every type swarmed around the area. Police from states as far away as Michigan were sent in to help institute a clampdown and "maintain control."
Every time people left the center for a walk or some fresh air, they had to wait in long lines to pass through a metal detector and have their IDs and whatever they were carrying checked. Strict curfews were put in place. People had to wear ID wrist bands that identified them as being in the centers and people felt watched and feared everywhere they went.
The mountain of lies and rumors spread by government officials and the media, vilifying Black people coming out of New Orleans, has run wild in the cities and towns people have been sent to. One young woman said the way they were treated made her think that it is as if the people of New Orleans "have a disease inside us, and everyone else is supposed to be afraid of us."
News stories have made it seem like the government is taking care of everyone, that the evacuees are all being given new homes, jobs, and emergency money. But this too is a lie.
FEMA is putting harsh new regulations on people as they are being "relocated" into apartments in different cities. People were promised, , and some people got, $2,000 debit cards. But anyone with a sense of reality knows this amount comes nowhere close to what is needed by a family that has lost everything and is trying to survive in a strange city. To add insult to injury, FEMA has put people through endless delays, hours of standing in line after line, and humiliation after humiliation to get even this puny amount.
People are being promised apartments, and six months rent in cities like Houston. But in case after case, after being bussed around the sprawling metro area for hours, people are taken to areas far from the city center. They don’t have cars and would almost certainly be unable to find jobs they could get to. And once they get to the places where they are supposed to be able to live, they are often told they aren’t eligible if they have any kind of arrest record or unpaid rent on their apartments in New Orleans. This abuse is happening to the people being sent to a potential place to live. But most of the evacuees aren’t even being offered this.
Among the masses there is a real feeling that the efforts to gentrify New Orleans that have been going on for the last 20 to 25 years played a big role in the lack of planning for a disastrous hurricane. And now the policy of dispersing evacuees, whether deliberately or not, serves this plan by encouraging people to not return to the city.
The people must never forgive and never forget the murderous atrocities that have been, and continue to be, committed against the people of New Orleans. What is called for is solidarity with the people made victims of both Hurricane Katrina and the Bush regime’s abuse--and resistance and protest against the neglect, abuse, lies, racism and repression that is continuing against the people evacuated out of New Orleans.