(I couldn’t post this to Daily Kos, so I’m posting it here first.)
We’ve all been media-saturated with what I call New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s “chocolate” statement. You know: the free-form speech he gave on the King holiday, that he wanted to see New Orleans turn back into a “chocolate city,” a term that means that he wants to return New Orleans to its pre-Katrina black majority population. Milk chocolate has nothing to do with it. And of course, that God, rather than manmade actions like poor environmental and urban planning and global warming, has it in for New Orleans (and by extension, the Gulf States and Florida) because of the evil the U.S. does around the globe, particularly in Iraq.
Previously, Nagin has pleaded with former residents to return to a polluted and ruined city before it was deemed safe. He begged that blacks come home so that Latino workers who are helping to clean up and rebuild the city won’t “take over.” To all of these demands, however, blacks have not responded in kind.
I’ve said before that Nagin is a rank opportunist and someone trying to play both sides in an increasingly fractious class and racial situation. This time, in trying to play to the Amen Corner in the black community, his tightrope-walking strategy has been exposed for what it really is.
Ask yourselves this question:
If Ray Nagin really has the welfare of New Orleans blacks and poor in mind, then why has he made developers like Joseph Canizaro, head of the Bring New Orleans Commission (BNOB) and made Pres Kabacoff and Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council (who ebulliently made comments to the Wall Street Journal about remaking the city) members of that same board? Wikipedia has the lineup.
Canizaro, in particular, was responsible for the bulldozing of the St. Thomas Housing Development in the 1990s when it got in the way of his plans for a WalMart. Fifteen hundred souls were dispersed when the St. Thomas project was razed. It had been located in the Garden District on high ground. Community activists like BNOB co-chair Barbara Major as well as civic leaders were bought off at the altar of “progress.” Many of the St. Thomas residents were still homeless by the time Katrina hit and others eventually went to the Ninth Ward where they were again dispersed–or drowned.
So don’t think that Nagin hasn’t been bought. He has, since the beginning, when not-so-clandestine meetings were held with these same movers and pressurers about the reconstruction and restoral of the city, as indicated in my diary 24 Questions About the Murder of the Big Easy. For those who need their brains refreshed:
- What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city?
- Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the “forty thieves”–white business leaders led by Reiss–reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?
- As politicians talk about “disaster czars” and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed “new urbanism” in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive participation of the city’s ordinary citizens in their own future?
To answer No. 24, hardly any plan at all.
It’s been up to the folks themselves from having to rescue themselves from the water, to having to bring themselves back to New Orleans after being flung hundreds away in other states. And for the folks to join forces and organize themselves against being shunted off with less, with their property taken away using eminent domain.
At the end of the day, being a part of the reconstruction plans may have kept Nagin in power with whites who are now, for the first time in decades, in the majority in New Orleans
However, Nagin is still answerable to those middle-class and working poor blacks still living in or who wishing to return to New Orleans. Those people are not necessarily willing to give up their land and property without a fight and who can see through to the game being dealt. This includes members of his own class, the black Creoles, who are under pressure as well and are being forced out of New Orleans. Under Nagin, however, it is dog eat dog. They all want Nagin to do something. They want to believe that he is not really in the pocket of those who want to ethnically cleanse New Orleans and redeem it from black control. But he is in the developers’ pocket, and he won’t do anything except get on a bully pulpit. Hence yesterday’s shooting from the lip.
Nagin feels that he has to show that he is still answerable to black aspirations or goals, which has been the burden of many urban black mayors. So to show his solidarity, or his blackness as it were, Nagin decided to pander to black New Orleanians, taking the name of the true American saint and martyr, Martin Luther King Jr., to give credence to his remarks.
I saw Nagin “preach.” And my mouth forgot to close. Frankly, if the shade of MLK, Jr. is still hovering over us, he has more to worry about close to Atlanta, where his Center and his very bones may be up for sale. But I digress: I was not impressed with Nagin’s calling on God when he has contributed in his own way to insuring that the masters of the universe were going to take over in New Orleans. As I have said before, the aftermath of Katrina has been strictly manmade.
Nagin is going to be apologizing forever for that speech.
Whites are ticked off at him for allegedly causing more polarization; but really, that polarization was in place even before Katrina came ashore. Fact is, whites don’t want a return to the status quo: a majority black city. For them, blackness means crime, anarchy and drugs. They want to flex muscle. They want to limit reintegration of black residents in New Orleans. I think the white business community is going to realize that they really don’t need Nagin anymore to placate anyone–blacks, liberals/progressives, Washington. Sooner rather than later, they will slough him off; while the true activists and their supporters will have continued to fight against the BNOB and have won some victories despite Nagin playing lightning rod…and golf.
And I truly believe that this incident is not impressing his dwindling natural constituency at all, or causing them to stand up for him in large numbers. Like any other Christian wingnut, Nagin criticized New Orleans blacks for their shortcomings that he said even offended the Deity. (So Katrina was their fault after all.) He even criticized and blamed them again for not being prepared for the hurricane. This is not something that is going to endear him with many blacks, who despite their religiosity know full well what their social, political and economic problems are and what they would like to see changed, and they know that housecleaning does not stop at their front door.
This “preaching” is not unlike that of the new police superintendent Warren Riley who swayed the black SCLC ministers who confronted him because of the recent police shooting of a schizoid black man. Riley’s got a few skeletons shaking in his own closet: he once refused to assist a woman who begged him for help against another police officer that he knew, and the woman was murdered. Folks are probably taking a broad hint: don’t be played and taken off track by this kind of thing.
The difference between Dr. King and Ray Nagin is that I think King knew, by the time of his death, what full economic rights for blacks was about and what it meant. It certainly did not mean patronage or fighting over scraps. Without economic rights, there would be no black communities from which the Word could spread, no base from which civil rights for blacks could continue and flourish. There would only be redlining and low paying jobs and benefits and poor schools.
Ray Nagin does not possess the same understanding as King. Nagin had the luxury of moving his family to safety and going on a Caribbean vacation, while many of his constituents languished, hungry, disoriented, dying, terrorized and homeless. A few black politicians choose to invoke King–or his martyrdom–when their asses have done wrong. Black people have fallen for it, because half or a quarter of King is considered better than no King at all. Black folks usually close ranks around their own at a time of attack. But Nagin is not a black Moses or even a Joshua. He has chosen long ago to side with the moneychangers rather than with the folks. Whenever his bubblehead comes into view on TV, remember that. He’s their monkey. And he can lie like a monkey, too as Wikipedia states:
In an interview with black commentator Tavis Smiley originally broadcast on January 13, 2006, Nagin reportedly said that he has never been a Republican and is a “life-long Democrat.”
As we all know, Nagin was a Republican until it suited his purposes to turn Dem. Now that he’s a Dem, it suits him to play Republican. Nagin even supported Bobby Jindal over Kathleen Blanco, and only gave lip service to Kerry in 2004. At this rate, I’m sure many New Orleans blacks yearn for former police superintendent Richard Pennington, who didn’t kiss anyone’s ass. Eddie Compass was Nagin’s good friend, but incompetent, and because of this, corruption and double dealing returned to New Orleans.
Any way you look at Ray Nagin, blacks and poor lose in New Orleans. His “chocolate statement” therefore, was nothing less than pulling a race card
And for that and for his rank incompetence and piss-poor leadership during Katrina, Ray Nagin deserves whatever he’s gonna get.
Thanks also to duranta on Booman Tribune, whose sources are infinitely better about those movers and shakers and the fall of public housing in New Orleans. Plus she is there at ground zero, so to speak.
