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.