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115 12. THE RACE CARDS OF RECOVERY NEW ORLEANS IS ONE OF THE SADDEST RACE STORIES IN THE nation. The cumulative and historic race issues are enormous, and little has been done to change them. New Orleans may be a glamorous place on its face. But beneath the glitter a devastating poverty festers that Katrina made all too public. The poverty rate in Louisiana is the nation’s second worst. In New Orleans itself, 38 percent of all black kids live below the poverty line, and among fourth graders, only 44 and 26 percent read and do math at their grade performance, according to Phyllis Landrieu. As one former New Orleans public school principal and community leader said to me, “you don’t need no readin’ ’n’ ’rithmetic to make a bed.” The school dropout rate is higher than 50 percent, and the adult illiteracy rate is 33 percent. African Americans make up more than a third of the families in the state, and nearly half the people in the poor category live in New Orleans. Of the 245 largest cities in the nation (populations over 100,000), it was the sixth poorest at the time of Katrina and eighth in 2009. More than one-fifth of the city’s residents affected by the hurricane lived in poverty. Black incomes are less than half those of whites: the New Orleans Gini coefficient, the measure of income inequality between blacks and whites, is among the highest in the nation. New Orleans is ranked as one of the most violent cities on the planet, with the vast majority of the violence occurring in black communities. The chances of a black male going to prison in New Orleans are 20 times higher than going to college or university. And in Louisiana as a whole, most of the 37,000 men and women behind bars are black, and most are under forty years of age. 116 Chapter 12 I walked regularly in my first neighborhood in Central City. One morning just after I arrived, I was strolling on the wide median strip where the trolleys ran. Post-storm, the area looked like a dust bowl. On this morning, I happened to come up behind two older white males who were walking their dogs and talking in very audible tones. They didn’t acknowledge my presence. I listened as they discussed the additional guns and other armaments they planned to stock for the next hurricane. “We weren’t prepared this time,” said one, loudly to ensure that I heard. “We shoot niggers on sight.” They laughed. I felt uncomfortable, so I moved off the trolley path to the sidewalk. As I did so, the other man said, also in a loud stage whisper, “Shit, man, you oughta see all the guns, grenades, and stuff we got in Mississippi. People there are prepared.” I stopped listening. Later in the day, I said to the mayor, “Race relations are rough here.” He smiled and said, “you’ll see.” The week I arrived in New Orleans, Tulane president Dr. Scott Cowen told the Times-Picayune in response to my appointment that if I couldn’t solve the race problem, I couldn’t succeed with a city recovery. When reporters asked me about Cowen’s statement, I responded simply that I didn’t yet know how central race relations would be to the recovery. I asked what other institutions were doing about the problem; after all, the race problems didn’t come in with Katrina’s waters. No doubt I was viewed and hired as a potentially nonthreatening agent amid the racial strife. It might have been hoped that I could transcend racial lines or be accepted, as an outsider, as a neutral party. But as it turned out, both sides seemed to use my actions against me and sometimes even against their own aspirations. I found it hard to fathom why collaboration at some level didn’t emerge and why, to the people I met and the press, the recovery seemed less important than the personalities involved. In New Orleans, with its history of creoles and other mixed bloods, the racial-political dynamics are nuanced. The lighter you are and the straighter your hair, the higher you stand on the social and economic pecking orders. The poorest residents have historically been the least likely to own an automobile , and the most likely to live in the wards most devastated by the hurricane and floods. The victims shown in...

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