September 30, 2005

A 'WHITER' BIG EASY?

A Bush Cabinet officer predicted this week that New Orleans likely will never again be a majority black city, and several black officials are outraged.

Outrage for stating the obvious or outraged that poor black people are taking a horrible situation and using it to their advantage and finally doing what they should have done years ago; get out of New Orleans?

Mr. [Alphonso R.] Jackson, whose remarks were reported by the Houston Chronicle, said New Orleans might reach a population of 375,000 people sometime late next year with a black population of about 40 percent at the highest, down from 67 percent before Hurricane Katrina sent a storm surge that overwhelmed New Orleans levees and flooded 80 percent of the city.

In the storm's aftermath, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat, charged that relocating evacuees across the country was "racist" and designed to move black people, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic, out of Louisiana. The state elected its first Republican senator, David Vitter, in nearly a century in 2004.

Both the preacher and the congresswoman suggested that the residents be housed at the closed England Air Force Base at Alexandria, La., to keep them closer to home.

Yes, we must keep them on the plantation. Wouldn’t want them realizing there’s a better world outside of their slave shacks in the 9th Ward. It’s all about how a person votes, see? We can’t be lettin’ our good little voters get away.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times is referring to La Nueva Orleans. (Registration might be required.)

NO MATTER WHAT ALL the politicians and activists want, African Americans and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, will. And when they're done, they're going to stay, making New Orleans look like Los Angeles. It's the federal government that will have made the transformation possible, further exposing the hollowness of the immigration debate.

So, like Los Angeles except with humidity and swamps. Parts of Los Angeles are like a cesspool and that’s sort of like a swamp, so I guess it’ll only be the humidity that sets the two cities apart.

What’s it going to be? Could it be that Katrina wiped the slate clean? Maybe wiped away the product of centuries of oppression? Isn’t it a better idea to allow the city to grow naturally? If it’s like most growing cities in the United States it will likely see a huge increase in Latino (largely Mexican) residents, but it seems to me that a good mix of people is healthier than going back to the past and recreating entrenched political corruption, poverty, and hopelessness.

I expect there to very soon be a severe shortage of underpaid and exploited workers in SoCal.