White People Own New Orleans
As reported today by Christopher Cooper in the Wall Street Journal, rich white people are as determined as ever to own, control, and rebuild New Orleans in their own image. While a numerical minority in a city ostensibly committed to democracy, rich white people are sitting relatively high and pretty dry these days in New Orleans. Their neighborhoods were spared the rising waters, for the most part, and their homes are powered by generators and protected by a small army of private security contractors. City water service has even been restored in some of these exclusive areas. And it’s far from clear whether law enforcement is enforcing the city-wide evacuation order in rich white neighborhoods.
African American residents of the city have been scattered to the four winds, as far away as Dallas and Washington, DC. In their absence rich white business owners are meeting with officials and setting policy agendas to determine what kind of city New Orleans is after the rebuilding begins and ends. Even with their eyes turned toward a future they insist on determining according to their interests, one cannot help but be mindful of history:
More than a few people in Uptown, the fashionable district surrounding St. Charles Ave., have ancestors who arrived here in the 1700s. High society is still dominated by these old-line families, represented today by prominent figures such as former New Orleans Board of Trade President Thomas Westfeldt; Richard Freeman, scion of the family that long owned the city’s Coca-Cola bottling plant; and William Boatner Reily, owner of a Louisiana coffee company. Their social pecking order is dictated by the mysterious hierarchy of “krewes,” groups with hereditary membership that participate in the annual carnival leading up to Mardi Gras. In recent years, the city’s most powerful business circles have expanded to include some newcomers and non-whites, such as Mayor Ray Nagin, the former Cox Communications executive elected in 2002.
As many as 40 New Orleans “business leaders” (which means, if the past is any guide to decoding the language of the Wall Street Journal, “rich white men”) plan to meet with Mayor Nagin in Dallas tomorrow to “begin mapping out a future for the city”. Does anyone really need to point out that that future will be one in which white privilege and supremacy is even more deeply entrenched and retrenched into the public fabric of the city?
The WSJ doesn’t leave that point to chance, making clear that
The power elite of New Orleans…insist the remade city won’t simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.
Again, to translate into plain language, “teeming underclass” is code for “poor black people and Hispanics”. In case that doesn’t make the point clear enough, Mr James Reiss, one of the city’s white elite, said that the New Orleans of the future must be one where there are “fewer poor people”. He adds, “‘Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically
and politically,’ he says. ‘I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.’” One thing Mr Reiss says is true enough: he isn’t just speaking for himself when he describes his ambitions to racially cleanse New Orleans. He also speaks for George Bush’s administration and policies, he speaks for the white power elite which still runs not only New Orleans, and Louisiana, but the whole New Old South, as well as much of the rest of US society.
No, Mr Reiss, never fear: we know precisely who you are speaking for. The question is who’s listening to you and why?