Six months of unrelenting images and stories of New Orleans evacuees as black, poor, and helpless has created the oddest impression of the city. One would think that the black community has achieved nothing positive – that everyone lived in the Ninth Ward, that all the people in NOLA who were not white were poor, unemployed/unemployable and criminal, or that the only successful neighborhoods were on higher-ground.
I beg to differ.
There’s some important information being overlooked in the journalistic zeal to highlight the plight of the poor evacuees, and I’m getting really tired of it.
Polimom is not trying to say this is fantasy (cuz there’s truth there, too), but I’m very frustrated that the black professionals – the middle-class backbone of this historical city – have been overlooked. From the Washington Post:
Many African Americans prosperous enough to pay dues to a social club and buy tuxedos and gowns for debutante balls lived in the predominantly black subdivisions of New Orleans East, a former marshland drained by canals that severely flooded after Hurricane Katrina. Mile after mile of suburban homes along its cul-de-sacs and man-made lakes as well as a similar neighborhood, Gentilly, are virtually empty.
The concern about the racial demographics of the future New Orleans (IMHO) should be centering up around this overlooked population: the doctors, restaurant owners, and other professionals who have lost not just their homes, but the vital businesses that drove the black economy.
Those black professionals are scattered across the South, finding new jobs, establishing new medical and legal practices and businesses. The longer they are gone, the greater the worry that they will not come back — leaving New Orleans, a majority-black city before Katrina, without a core of African American leadership.
Without this group – and it’s much bigger than the MSM has led you to believe – NOLA could end up with a racially and economically polarized population: the white professionals and middle class on the one hand, and the black poor. I can’t imagine a worse outcome.
Polimom hopes New Orleans will find a way to reach out to this group and encourage them to come home. Their city needs them desperately.
I am one of those black professionals who fled New Orleans.
Most people outside of New Orleans don’t understand how massive the 9th Ward is/was. From the lower 9, to New Orleans East, geographically it is probably the city’s largest politiical ward. It encompassed all types of New Orleanians–the employed, the unemployed, the professional, the laborer, the old, the young–all types of Cresent City dwellers. The rich, the poor, and those in the middle, lived within its boundaries. Homes valued at the same price as a 10 year old car and homes worth hundred of thousands, could be found here.
The Post and this blog site is most accurate when describing the exodus of the cities school teachers, doctors, lawyers, bankers, nurses, postal employees, truck drivers, secretaries, clergy, musicians, entrepreneurs, etc. out of the 9th Ward. They all resided here, now a vast wasteland of destroyed homes and dreams.
Remember the New Orleans Public School System “fired” more than 7000 employees. Many of them will find employment elsewhere at greater rates, making it more difficult to attract them back home. How can you rebuild a city with out children or their teachers.
It will take the deep love of family, community, and the culture of our city to motivate people to come back–especially the middle classes. Life will not be very easy in the “Big Easy” for many years to come. Those who stay and those who will return within the next couple of years will be true pioneers. Starting over. Rebuilding, hopefully, a better New Orleans.
I hope no other American will ever have to endure what we are dealing with at the present. New Orleans is my home–the place of my birth–my hometown. It was home because my heart was there, along with an extended family large enough to start our own city. Family and friends made it home–not perfect–but home.
One day it will again be home for me and my family and friends.
Terry,
That was beautifully said – thank you for your comment.
Someday, I think it will again be home for you and your family. Until it is, though – and for however long that takes – New Orleans will always be part of you.
Because everyone who is gone has a piece of the city with them wherever they are.