Professor Bill Quigly has written up a piece for the Louisiana Weekly that is a spot-on take on what our city is doing and not doing a year and a half after the Federal Flood.
Here’s a snip from the middle of the report:
“It is impossible to begin to understand the continued impact of Katrina without viewing it through the lenses of race, gender and poverty. Katrina exposed the region’s deep-rooted inequalities of gender, race and class. Katrina did not create the inequalities; it provided a window to see them more clearly. But the aftermath of Katrina has aggravated these inequalities.
In fact if you plot race, class and gender you can likely tell who has returned to New Orleans. The Institute of Women’s Policy Research pointed out “The hurricanes uncovered America’s longstanding structural inequalities based on race, gender, and class and laid bare the consequences of ignoring these underlying inequalities.”
The pre-Katrina population of 454,000 people in the city of New Orleans dropped to 187,000. The African-American population of New Orleans shrank by 61 percent or 213,000 people, from a pre-Katrina number of 302,000 down to 89,000. New Orleans now has a much smaller, older, whiter and more affluent population.”
We, “The 200,000″, aren’t the ones dragging out the rebuilding process of the Metro area, it’s that business and politicians are the big impediments to creating a healthy city. It is their expectations of big money and their bigotries that are at play here. The rest of us just want our lives and city back.