In the movie, “The Forgotten” starring Julianne Moore, the memories the living have of people who have died start to mysteriously disappear. And not only memories, but all artifacts and physical traces that they ever existed. Only a few people are left with any recollection of what has been lost.
Outside the walls of theaters and home entertainment centers, however, there is a real group of people who could also rightly lay claim to the title “the Forgotten.” These are the displaced people of Katrina still suffering at the hands of an uncaring, do nothing Bush administration. Indeed, many former New Orleans residents are still not allowed by their government to return to their homes in New Orleans, because to acknowledge their presence would be “inconvenient” to the powers that be. Indeed, the federal government is proceeding with plans to demolish undamaged public housing units in order to keep poor, predominantly African American residents of New Orleans from returning to repopulate the city.
NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 7 — Public housing officials decided Thursday to proceed with the demolition of more than 4,500 government apartments here, brushing aside an outcry from residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina who said the move was intended to reduce the ability of poor black people to repopulate the city.
Residents and their advocates made emotional, legal and what they called common-sense arguments against demolition at the housing authority meeting. “The day you decide to destroy our homes, you will break a lot of hearts,” said Sharon Pierce Jackson, who lived in one of the now-closed projects slated to be razed. “We are people. We are not animals.”
She and others questioned why the Department of Housing and Urban Development would destroy affordable housing in New Orleans, saying it is essential to the city’s recovery.
C. Donald Babers, the federally appointed administrator running the Housing Authority of New Orleans, did not respond to that question in tersely approving the demolitions.
As we speak HUD is still proceeding with its plans to destroy these homes so that developers can move in and “gentrify” the area, while actively preventing former residents from returning to those homes.
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Mary Ann Wright has been waiting to return home to the Lafitte public housing development in New Orleans for 20 months, but the federal government stands in her way. She’s used to waiting for a federal response to Hurricane Katrina. After all, she was left in the floodwaters like thousands of other low-income African Americans. […]
When the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans was lifted, residents of public housing, many of whom left with only the clothes on their backs, returned to find most of their homes locked and boarded up. This closure was not due to hurricane damage or flooding. In fact, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology architect’s assessment in October 2006 showed no structural damage and minimal interior damage to most of these buildings because these all-brick structures were built to withstand such storms.
The federal government might as well have put an ad in the paper: “Blacks Not Wanted.” One month after Katrina’s landfall, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who is charged with providing housing to the poor and eliminating discrimination, stated that New Orleans “is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.” Worse, just days after the storm, Rep. Richard Baker, R-La., proclaimed, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
Then, HUD, which controls New Orleans public housing, announced that it would demolish 5,000 units of public housing, reopen 2,000 units by August 2006 (to date only about 1,200 have been reopened) and redevelop additional units. No date certain, just a promise of future mixed-income housing developments. […]
Residents of New Orleans public housing know this history too well. Over the past 10 years, 6,000 public housing units have been closed despite a waiting list of thousands. In 2000, 700 families were displaced for a “mixed-income” development. When HUD seized the storm as an opportunity to build more mixed-income developments, residents responded in kind; filing a lawsuit protects people’s right to return.
The city, developers and the feds are planning the largest urban renewal and black removal in U.S. history. While it’s clear that blacks were hit hardest by Katrina, there is no aggressive plan to bring them home.
Residents of New Orleans public housing want to go home now, not in five to 10 years. Most are depressed, some talk of committing suicide, others have high blood pressure and several elderly residents have died.
You get the sense the Bush administration would just as soon prefer that all of these people would simply disappear. How else to explain a policy of active neglect, a policy that is literally killing people. While the House of Representatives has passed a bill to “assist in the provision of affordable public housing” in the areas affected by Katrina and Rita (H.R. 1227: Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Act of 2007), the Senate has yet to hold a floor debate or schedule a vote on similar legislation, and it’s unlikely any reconciled legislation which might pass the Senate and the House could survive a veto by President Bush.
Meanwhile, many of these forgotten Americans are still housed in chemically contaminated trailers by FEMA, which refuses to do anything about the problem, or even acknowledge that any such contamination is a concern.
Louisiana lawmakers are once again calling on FEMA to look into complaints of formaldehyde contamination in travel trailers, 86,000 of which remain in use along the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita forced people from their homes in 2005.
Rep. Bobby Jindal, R-Kenner, and Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., this week both urged FEMA to conduct broader testing than the 69 trailers it examined in Baton Rouge late last year and raised questions about the agency’s response to complaints.
Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, raised similar concerns in a letter to FEMA in August. The new round of inquiries was prompted by a “CBS Evening News” report last week about high formaldehyde levels in trailers in Mississippi. […]
Formaldehyde is frequently found in building materials. Exposure to its gas can cause respiratory problems, asthma attacks and sinus infections, and the Environmental Protection Agency said prolonged exposure might cause cancer.
Landrieu, chairwoman of a subcommittee overseeing FEMA, asked the agency in a letter Friday to test more trailers. She called it “unacceptable” for FEMA to house hurricane victims “in hazardous units that expose (them) to toxic substances.” […]
FEMA officials said they began receiving complaints of formaldehyde in trailers in early 2006 in Mississippi and moved quickly to address them. The agency distributed pamphlets and knocked on residents’ doors urging them to ventilate the trailers. In May 2006, FEMA said it delivered similar advisories in Louisiana after complaints cropped up.
The Louisiana pamphlet urged residents to watch for symptoms “similar to that of the common cold or flu” and said children and elderly people, or those with respiratory problems and allergies, were especially susceptible. It urged occupants to keep the humidity and temperature in trailers low and avoid smoking inside.
The pamphlet omitted any mention of cancer. Yet a FEMA advisory for its own workers, first reported by CBS, warned that cancer was a “potential injury” for those installing trailers. […]
FEMA’s tests last year of 69 new, unventilated trailers found the level of formaldehyde at 1.2 parts per million, 12 times the amount EPA says can cause vision and respiratory problems. The levels dropped to 0.3 parts per million after four days of ventilation, according to FEMA, still three times the EPA’s baseline.
Imagine living in such dangerous health threatening conditions. Imagine not being allowed to return to your undamaged homes. Then imagine discovering that your votes won’t be allowed to be cast in state and local elections because you and 86,000 of your fellow displaced citizens have been purged from the voting rolls by a Republican Secretary of State. Then stop imagining, because it is all true:
“One of the first things that Republican Secretary of State Jay Dardenne did after taking office was to immediately purge 86,000 voters from the rolls, 75% of which were Democrats. Now, he has engaged the assistance of the Republican Party Chairman to oppose legislation that would allow many of the displaced Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita storm victims from participating in the upcoming election process. That is downright UNAMERICAN! In the day and age of Louisiana where we have unprecedented financial surplus, the Republicans want to suppress voters rights based on funding as opposed to enhancing what has come to resemble the crown jewel of our society of choosing our leaders in government; the right not only to vote, but that the vote be counted and be based upon well informed information. Secretary Dardenne and Republican Party Chairman Villere should hang their heads in shame for working to inhibit the opportunity of storm displaced Louisiana voters from being able to vote their choice for their candidates.”
Can’t return to your homes. Forced to live in degrading, unhealthy conditions. Not allowed to vote. Forgotten by the national media. All this is the handiwork of George W. Bush, and his “base.”
But is is also the fault of our nation’s history of racism, racism that continues to taint our political and judicial institutions, as well as our mainstream news media. For make no mistake, if these people were all 20 something blonde, white co-eds (or simply white) this story would be front paged on every major newspaper, and the 24/7 cable news shows would be running continuing updates every hour on the hour regarding the “Katrina’s Refugees: Crisis in America.” Senators would be vying with one another from the well of the Senate in their rhetorical demanding justice for these poor souls.
But the victims of this ongoing tragedy aren’t middle class whites, they are poor, predominantly African Americans. So they slip through the cracks of official corruption and unofficial racism into a limbo that permits the many of the rest of us, safe and snug in our beds each night to watch American Idol on television, or surf the internet, safely and often deliberately ignorant of the ethnic cleansing of a once great American City.
They have been marginalized and victimized as our politicians and our mass “infotainment” media who have “moved on” to bigger and better stories to tell, or other outrages to “oversee.” And that is to our eternal shame. We have managed to do the worst thing imaginable to our fellow citizens who are suffering.
We have forgotten them.