Strip away the Mardi Gras revelry and you’ll find a mostly black, dirt-poor city
Source: Toronto Star
by RICHARD GWYN
Now we see that there was more to New Orleans than topless bars, colourful brass-band funerals and costumed Mardi Gras revellers. It took a hurricane and flood to kill the city, but it was already weak with a powerful sickness.
A city is much more than its buildings and topography, more even than just its people. It is also a network of relationships that weave a unique, place-specific social fabric and in New Orleans that fabric has shredded like so much cheap gauze.
What could be going through the minds of people who survive an almost biblical tragedy, find themselves in a hellscape of the dead and the dispossessed and promptly decide to go looting? Obviously, not much: Stealing a rack of fancy clothes when there’s no place to wear them or a television when there’s no electricity does not suggest a lot of deep, subtle forethought.
That I have to watch black people emerging from half-flooded stores with armloads of expensive sneakers is heartbreaking. Yes, I could come up with caveats. I could point out that these outrages are being perpetrated by a small minority. I could make a case that the looting has been overplayed. But it’s still heartbreaking and the fact that looters also emptied pharmacies and gun stores is downright frightening.
I won’t make excuses, because while these idiots are taking luxury goods, they are occupying the attention of police and guardsmen who ought to be out looking for victims — poor, black victims — still stuck on roofs or in attics. But I do want to understand how people could live in a city all their lives and have so little sense of civic responsibility, how “We’re all in the same boat” can be so completely obliterated by “I’m getting mine.”
And so I’ll start with a bit of hyperbole, a quote from Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld: “While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression …”
That’s hyperbole because Rumsfeld was speaking, in April 2003, of the looting that followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. No one in New Orleans was brutalized the way that Iraqis were under the murderous dictator. But I do take his point that “pent-up feelings” might provide some insight, so here’s where such feelings might be coming from.
New Orleans is two cities, according to census data: a relatively affluent, small, lovely city that’s mostly white, and a poor, big, unlovely city that’s almost all black. Overall, the city is two-thirds African American; it ranks as the ninth-poorest big city in the nation. It is also one of the most violent, now making a bid to reclaim the “murder capital” designation it held for many years.
In the Lower 9th Ward, an almost all-black neighbourhood, only 6 per cent of residents are college graduates, according to figures from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center; the national average is 22 per cent. Average household income in that neighbourhood is $27,499 a year, not even half the national average of $56,644. One-quarter of the Lower 9th Ward’s households earn less than $10,000 a year.
A map showing where black people live in the city agrees almost perfectly with a map showing where poor people live — and also agrees quite well with a map showing the lowest-lying neighbourhoods most affected by the flooding. In other words, blacks were less likely than whites to have the means to escape the city before Katrina hit — less likely, even, to have the education to fully understand what was about to happen — and more likely to live in areas that would be inundated.
No wonder the multitudes stranded on roofs, wading aimlessly through flooded streets and huddling in the Superdome are almost all black.
None of this excuses or even explains the looting. But it does make clear that the New Orleans of our imagination — the birthplace of jazz, the great melting pot, the roguish city — coexisted with a New Orleans of great anger and resentment.
If you went there for Mardi Gras, you saw nothing but happiness and brotherhood. But Mardi Gras comes just once a year.