“take land from many neighborhoods–Lakefront, Ninth Ward, Gentilly–and relocate rich, poor, middle class to denser settlement on higher ground.”
Racist fuck.
16 Matching Annotations
- Sep 2020
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www.thenation.com www.thenation.com
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He insists low-lying parts of the city shouldn’t be rebuilt. His proposal is extremely controversial, with displaced residents understandably invoking their “right of return” and with most members of the reconstruction committees reluctant to reintegrate wetlands into the city after Mayor Nagin got burned for suggesting that the Ninth Ward might not be rebuilt.
This is racist without offering housing, relocation, and emergency management support to those impacted.
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The Brookings Institution reports that thirty-eight of greater New Orleans’ forty-nine poorest districts flooded. In the city proper, 80 percent of the flooded neighborhoods were majority nonwhite. Segregation–environmental, socioeconomic and racial–resulted in segregated suffering.
Aint nothing new.
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Swamps disappeared, both because of urban reclamation and because levees diminished wetlands by keeping floodwaters from recharging the ecosystem.
Obsession with productivity.
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But when developers started building tract housing on drained land in the city and nearby suburbs, New Orleanians became stratified, with poorer people of color often concentrated on low land and affluent whites typically occupying higher ground, if not the ‘burbs.
Segregation
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there wasn’t room for people to move into socially segregated enclaves.
Bullshit
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Rich, poor, white, nonwhite–all were neighbors.
This is a white supremacist logic that implies equity/equality/sugar coats the realities of what occurred. Jim Crow racist segregation. Physical proximity in a racially segregated southern city, does not mean folks were neighbors in the way this notion implies equity.
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Sorting space had two other byproducts. First, more segregation: racial and socioeconomic this time.
Incorrect language.
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The Army Corps of Engineers still refused to add wetlands to its arsenal. Instead, it built New Orleans a spillway that could shunt part of the river into Lake Pontchartrain–and, through the 1950s, continued to raise the levees.
This refusal to collaborate with ecology is not only a phenomenon that represents a lack of understanding of the effectiveness, validity, and function of wetlands; but is also represents a lack of prioritizing communities that would most benefit from such attention and alternatives to the "levees only" approach.
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The Army Corps of Engineers still refused to add wetlands to its arsenal. Instead, it built New Orleans a spillway that could shunt part of the river into Lake Pontchartrain–and, through the 1950s, continued to raise the levees.
Forcing nature to operate differently, rather than learning how to collaborate with the ecology.
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That year the city dynamited a levee fifteen miles downstream, lowering the engorged river and destroying Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes. The city had purchased its safety by sacrificing its poorer neighbors. (This event has fueled rumors in the Ninth Ward, where some residents and evacuees believe the levee fronting their district was destroyed after Katrina to protect wealthier, whiter areas.)
Environmental Racism at its finest.
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The second, penned by a future head of the Army Corps of Engineers, was more palatable at a time when wetlands were deemed wasteland.
River Studies. How grim; to view sacred wetlands as waste, is a denial of the role of multiplicity and variance in ecosystems. It is a projection of ableism unto land; an illusion of deficiency as the notion of a "lack of productivity" gets projected unto the wetland.
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without better levees other proposals–“world-class public education,” improved housing, burnishing the city’s “cultural ambience
levees as needed for other forms of improvement.
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New Orleanians historically have done this by segregating spaces: at first not socioeconomically or racially but environmentally.
This sounds like a lie. Of course it would have always been segregated socioeconomically and racially, and to presume a pre-racist segregation is denial. All happening in simultaneity.
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Scholars call this the disjuncture between “site”–the actual real estate a city occupies–and “situation”–an urban area’s relative advantages as compared with other places.
Spreyer asked us to note this as a significant definition offered up by Kelman.
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From New Orleans’ founding near the mouth of the Mississippi in 1718, the city has banked on geography to sweep it to greatness.
naiveté
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