Race and the high ground in New Orleans.

The night before Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans was a city of almost 500,000 people, two-thirds of whom were African-American (black). It was typical of many U.S. urban centers today, after years of government-is-the-problem governance: its schools and social services were falling apart. More than 142,000 people were living in poverty, of whom 84 percent were black, and most of whom still labored from sunup to sundown without making a living wage. Many blacks were unemployed; more than 13 percent officially, and a far higher share if one counted those permanently "discouraged." (The national average was 4.9 percent in August 2005, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). In New Orleans, "poor" and "black" were virtually synonymous.

For those who worked and who could not find work alike, there was the constant threat of incarceration, often for the most minor of infractions. Louisiana is the prison capital of the United States, with the highest state per-capita incarceration rates: 173,000 people locked up out of a population of 4.5 million people. Blacks account for 32 percent of Louisiana's population but 75 percent of the prisoners.

The most flood-vulnerable area of the city, the Lower 9th Ward, was 98 percent black. Other neighborhoods below sea level included Eastern Orleans (over 80 percent black), and the lowlands of Mid-City, Bywater, and Gentilly, all with high percentages of black residents. Even in the central city area, whites lived on the land above sea level: the Garden District (89 percent white), Audubon (86 percent), Touro (74 percent), and the French Quarter (90 percent). People in New Orleans know that the class and race distinctions in the city correspond to the sea levels of the residents. The poorest are forced to endure the risks of life below sea level because that is where the most "affordable" housing is.

On August 29 a black city, called by activists the most Afro-centric city in the United States, was almost literally blown off the face of the Earth. At least 1,836 people were killed, 70 percent or more of them black. The bungled and chaotic evacuation effort scattered more than a quarter of a million black people to the winds. The majority went to Shreveport and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; and Atlanta, Georgia, but New Orleans activists say that the dispossessed and dispersed members of the black community are in 44 states. Many of them are still trying to find their way home.

Rebuild to Redress

These facts will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of racism in the United States. The wholesale devastation of Hurricane Katrina fell most heavily on the poor and black, just as the impact of natural disasters worldwide falls most heavily on those with the fewest resources to cope.

But Katrina has also created an opportunity to rebuild New Orleans in a radically different way that could redress the deep inequalities embedded in the city's patterns of housing, education, and employment. The desperate need now is to guide the rebuilding effort into the right channels before it is hijacked and steered back toward restoring and cementing the pre-disaster status quo.

There are already worrisome signs. In June the AFL-CIO committed $1 billion for affordable housing in the Treme District, one of New Orleans' oldest and most heavily black neighborhoods. This is great news (in fact it should be met with a commitment of at least $50 billion more in federal funds to build low-income housing), and you'd expect the city's opinionmakers to welcome it. Yet the response has often been one of hostility and racial animus. Consider Pres Kabakoff, for instance, whom The Nation writer Mike Davis called "the developer, gentrifier, and local patron of the New Urbanism." Kabakoff has complained for years that New Orleans had too many poor people. (The poor would agree--the question is, where are the living wage jobs?) And just when a project was launched to scratch the surface of the city's housing disaster, Kabakoff told U.S. News & World Report, "You can overload the city with affordable housing. It's important that we don't end up with concentratedly poor neighborhoods."

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To nip this tendency in the bud will require a strong commitment from local and federal government--a commitment that so far simply has not been made. This places the burden on social movements, such as the People's Hurricane Relief Fund and dozens more in New Orleans, and on all Americans to reshape the debate and build a movement to support the commitment. That movement must focus on the key elements of a plan to seize the opportunity handed to us by Katrina to rebuild New Orleans as the city it is meant to be.

The first of those elements is the right of return already mentioned. Obviously people must have places to come back to, so this means that the federal government must set up a network of decent, temporary housing, at least at the level of trailers, and begin a massive program to construct affordable permanent housing. There must also be a serious income support program, beginning with cash grants of, say, $10,000 for each hurricane survivor.

Second, New Orleans must be rebuilt based on racial and spatial equality. It is unacceptable that black people are given the choice to move back to the most vulnerable neighborhoods or not move back at all. The federal government has the power, under both eminent domain and civil rights statutes, to take over all the homes in highland neighborhoods (with compensation) and create a lottery system to determine where future residents, including all 250,000 returnees, will live. As the city addresses its long-term structural problems, black people need access to higher-elevation neighborhoods and white people need to share in the risks of the city's design, with a multiracial coalition redesigning the city in the safest way possible.

Third, the U.S. Department of Justice should prosecute local and state officials for violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), which they have ignored because Republican political strategists understand only too well the profound implications of this massive demographic shift. Since the presidential elections of 1968 there has been an electoral "white backlash" against blacks and the Democratic party for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the use of the Justice Department to enforce their provisions--and the white South has gone Republican ever since. Even so, New Orleans blacks used their votes to elect Democrats Ray Nagin mayor, Mary Landrieu to the U.S. Senate, Kathleen Blanco to the governorship, and Bill Clinton to the presidency with Louisiana's Electoral College votes in 1992. Republican strategists assume the "loss" of the black population could lead to a gain of at least two additional congressional seats, another seat in the Senate, the next governorship, and the placement of Louisiana firmly in the hands of the conservatives for future presidential elections.

The offenses against the VRA were in service to this strategy. In April 2006, prior to the mayoral runoff elections, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other civil rights groups asked the federal courts to postpone the elections on the grounds that the black population was disenfranchised. The courts denied the postponement. It would be an even more egregious breach of the VRA, and of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (the equal protection clause), if future elections were allowed in New Orleans or Louisiana before the massive dispersal of black voters is remedied through the right of return--to restore voting equality for blacks and whites. Given the hostility of the federal courts to any civil rights claims, it will take a new civil rights movement to place those legitimate demands in front of the public, the Congress, and the president.

Fourth, there must be a massive investment in the levee system. The New Orleans levee system has been a patchwork set of fixes that disintegrated under the force of Katrina, even by the Army Corps of Engineers' own admission. The 2006 hurricane season has already begun, but the U.S. government has invested only $800 million for emergency repairs--a stopgap that can only try to protect the population from Category 2 hurricanes (wind speeds up to 177 kilometers per hour).

Dr. Ray Seed, the chief of a team of scientists from the University of California at Berkeley that assessed the recent levee repairs, observed that "the overall New Orleans flood protection system must be considered suspect...." The team's report critiqued past efforts, saying that "people died because mistakes were made and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced cost."

In the Netherlands, where the population lives on average more than two meters below sea level, journalist John McQuaid observed in the New Orleans Times-Picayune last November that "Holland is a nation whose flood protection makes [New Orleans'] look primitive and slapdash.... Urbanized areas of the country--such as the Hague and Rotterdam--are engineered to withstand the kind of storm surge that comes only once in 10,000 years."

The Dutch spend $1.5 billion per year on flood defense. The comparable per-capita expenditure in the United States would be upwards of $30 billion, or far more, given its vastly longer coastline. The problem is political as well as technical; as McQuaid noted, "flood control is a national religion in the Netherlands. In 49 U.S. states, it's Louisiana's problem."

Relocation?

The above four items are the minimum that justice requires. (In passing, it's worth mentioning that Katrina also presents the opportunity to rebuild the city as both black and green--by reducing the number of cars on the road by half; demanding a doubling of federal mileage standards; creating auto-free zones, rush hours, and days, as Bogota and other cities have done; and building a low-cost or free "24/7" public transportation system using clean-fuel buses.)

But ultimately we must also face the question of whether New Orleans should be relocated. The immediate challenge is to rebuild New Orleans as a black majority city with a population of 500,000; this alone will involve massive reconstruction of the entire lowlands of the city, infrastructure investment, public housing, relocation allowances, and years of income supports. But climate scientists note that sea levels continue to rise, and that if climate warming proceeds unchecked the rise is likely to be catastrophic (see "Black Water Rising," p. 26). The long-term future of many coastal cities here and abroad may therefore involve relocation to higher ground. In the coming years, if radical changes in U.S. and international policies are not implemented, many coastal cities, no matter how well fortified, will be destroyed by powerful hurricanes super-sized by global warming. Still, the debate about whether to relocate New Orleans cannot take place in a democratic way until and unless all 250,000 dispersed black people are brought back to their homes.

What Will It Take?

During the last period of strong influence from the Left in U.S. society, there was a continuum of radical thought in which a series of programmatic demands were seen as part of a coherent movement. The civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war movements encouraged the development and expansion of Chicano, Asian/Pacific Islander, and indigenous movements, and the rise of the women's liberation, gay and lesbian, and environmental movements. That was in the 1960s.

Now, in contrast, a bipartisan consensus has succeeded in incarcerating 2.2 million Americans (1 million of them black) and invading a sovereign nation, Iraq, under false pretenses; and is pressing to deny a woman's right to abortion, criminalize 12 million Latino immigrants, and establish a national security state. Do we really believe we can build an environmental movement against global warming, with all the sacrifices and concern for the planet it will require, under these political conditions? It will take far more than facile talk of "new progressive coalitions" to achieve the counter-hegemonic ideological transformation we need.

The challenge of rebuilding New Orleans as a majority black city--only the fair thing to do, since that's what it was a year ago--and as a green city with the greatest hurricane protection and the strictest regulation of industry and autos, seems reasonable enough. Yet many reasonable ideas require revolutionary thinking and acting. As always, it is the black community, the most oppressed, the most constantly under attack, that has the historical opportunity to help lead all of us out of the wilderness, and into a new paradigm of urban and national design, if we are willing to create a popular tsunami of decency and conscience.

Eric Mann is the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles and the author of the just-released book Katrina's Legacy: White Racism and Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.