The Washington Post reports that C. Ray has run on at the mouth again:
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin has suggested that the slow recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina — which has prevented many black former residents from returning — is part of a plan to change the racial makeup and political leadership of his and other cities.
“Ladies and gentlemen, what happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere,” Nagin said at a dinner sponsored by the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group for newspapers that target black readers. “They are studying this model of natural disasters, dispersing the community and changing the electoral process in that community.”
He apparently feels that as a result of his now-infamous “chocolate city” remarks on Martin Luther King Jr Day in 2006, “everybody all around America” woke up, and wanted to “make sure” Nagin “didn’t go any farther”.
While it’s true that last year’s comments upset many people, the biggest reaction by far seemed to be, “What an idiotic thing to say!” — but even allowing for Nagin’s tendency to lose himself totally in the moment, this is over the top.
After Nagin’s last major gaffe I wrote:
What happened to Nagin on Monday was more than his mouth disconnecting from his brain. He finally succumbed to the pressure he’s been under from his “black” constituents — the folks who haven’t trusted him or didn’t vote for him because he wasn’t “black” enough.
For months, every single thing he’s done has been analyzed in terms of black and white. We’ve heard, in excrutiating detail, about the racial composition of every meeting, panel, and commission he’s been involved with. He even had the daring audacity to meet with some “white” business-people in Dallas right after the storm. Horrors!
Nagin’s been walking a fine line that mixed-ancestry people have tried to walk for generations… because they’re not “black” enough, and they’re also not “white” enough.
I’m less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt this time around.
If saying dumb things can be considered a “plot” to ruin a city, then the architect behind New Orleans’ ongoing problems is Nagin himself.
When I lived in DC, you could still here people muttering about “the Plan,” the secret plot by white residents to take power from the black majority in the city and kick African-Americans out. (Demographic trends are actually going to make DC no longer majority-black in the not too distant future.) This kind of paranoia is eternally popular, it seems.
As for the Plan, well, nobody ever invited me to the cabal’s meetings, so I can’t really say what the details are.
(In DC, the only thing taken power and local control from the black residents was the same thing taking power from everybody else in the city – the federal government and the ill-conceived “Home Rule” act of the 1970s.)
In the mean time, half the state is losing their insurance. Mine got canceled this week…because I’d held it for under three years. I have a friend whose insurance was upped
(continued from above) $5000 at her renewal this year. And it sends everyone on their way to the Louisiana Fair Plan…or out of state. Can the state plan support such a large percent of the population? I suppose that is what insurance is meant to do, make people pay if they want to live in risky places. But, if things had been done right here…would it be such a high risk place? Would I be contemplating leaving right after moving back into my home? Nagin, unfortunately, is no more than an amusing sideshow to reality in New Orleans.
If they wanted to restore New Orleans’ original population, couldn’t they have hired the original residents to rebuild the city rather than bring in outside contractors? It seems to me that by cutting hundreds of thousands of former Orleanians FEMA checks to live elsewhere while cutting others a check to build the city, Nagin has a point in that the city’s former residents were encouraged to disperse elsewhere. If they really wanted to encourage the city’s citizens to return home, they could’ve done a hell of a lot more.
Tom, I’m not sure whether you’re talking about contractors who hire people, or the workers themselves.
If it’s the latter, then part of the problem is housing — or rather, the lack thereof. There are people of all ethnicities who came back as quickly as possible and threw themselves into the process. To do so, though, required a place to live. And related to that — everyone is not skilled in the construction trades.
Furthermore, there are multiple layers to this. Do you mean city / state-level contracts? Or home rebuilding? Because home-rebuilding depends on a home-owner having the funds to pay workers… and in many cases, those funds are entangled in the Road Home web.
M — what the hell kind of an excuse is that to cancel someone’s insurance? I’m stunned.
You’ve summed it all up. If things had been done right…
If they wanted to restore New Orleans’ original population, couldn’t they have hired the original residents to rebuild the city rather than bring in outside contractors?
ROTFLMAO!!! No – they actually wanted people who could and actually would do the work. The rest of the population will come back when they’re former houses are fixed and cleaned for them and they’re given a taxi ride from where they’re crashing now.
Thanks for your indignation, Polimom! What it is, though, is a legal excuse. The law allows them to do it, so they do.
Bandit, you obviously have no earthly idea of what it takes to return home in this climate. I’ve got all the advantages in the world compared to many of the displaced, and it still took me until December of 2006 to move my family back into our house. Walk a mile in those shoes before you judge. Would that it were just a taxi ride.