Thomas
Jessen Adams
Source: Jacobin
Abrasion School children
It’s
one of those ironies that New Orleanians tend to especially appreciate. Today,
on the tenth anniversary of the failure of the federally maintained levees, the
keynote speaker at the annual Rising Tide Conference on the Future of New
Orleans will beDeRay
Mckesson [1].
Presumably,
Mckesson’s invite was the result of his impressive work publicizing Black Lives
Matters issues and protests across the country in the past year. But before
McKesson became an activist in that movement, he was a standard-bearer for
Teach For America and the New Teacher Project — education “reform”
organizations that played a crucial role in aiding and abetting the destruction
of New Orleans’ black middle class and propagating a pedagogical philosophy [2] that apes the worst
of culture of poverty [3] rhetoric.
Such
seeming incongruities are rampant this month in New Orleans, as they have been
for the last ten years. Developers, urban planners, corporations, nonprofits,
self-proclaimed activists, politicians, education “reformers,” hip consumers,
middlebrow magazines, anarchists, urban farmers, bicycle enthusiasts,
authenticity seekers, and “change agents” continually celebrate the city’s
supposed rebirth, resilience, reform, rebuilding, re-whatever.
But
it’s worth stepping back to consider whether such ironies are truly ironic, or
rather just symptomatic of a larger condition that has plagued New Orleans —
and the rest of the nation — over the past decade.
Since
the levee failures, New Orleans has been ground zero for what on its face looks
like a diverse cohort seeking to use the Katrina-produced “blank slate [4]” as a canvass [5] on which to enact their vision of twenty-first century
reform. Black and white, gay and straight, wealthy and riddled with student
debt, seventh-generation New Orleanian and recent Brooklyn-migrant, Republican
and anarchist — little to nothing at the level of what the cultural studies
aficionados might call positionality unites them.
Dig
deeper though, and they share certain commonalities, commonalities integral to
the only positionality that matters in the context of
Katrina’s devastation and the resulting ten years of dislocation and
upward redistribution of wealth: their political commitments and actions.
Indeed,
what appears to be a motley group with every conceivable background and
ascriptive subjectivity is, upon closer inspection, a class. It is a class well
past the point of consolidation and one whose prerogatives have indelibly
shaped the city’s rebuilding — dictating for whom New Orleans has and has not
been rebuilt, all the while postulating and profiting from an ahistorical
construction of authenticity, organic community, and ascriptive affinity as the
basis for representation.
Mckesson
is a particularly interesting case because he crystallizes these issues so
well. One may ask how a dogged determination to end police violence against
African Americans can be reconciled with a vision of education reform that
cares nothing for questions of structural political economy, school funding, or
the control of teachers over their classrooms, and instead supposes that the
problem is that not enough teachers come from elite Northeastern colleges and
universities; too many of them are old, lethargic, and evidently devoid of that
pinnacle of neoclassical economics, “human capital”; and that poor students
need to be cured of their Moynihan [6]-style tangle of pathologies.
The
answer of course, is that they are not incompatible at all.
A
deep and abiding commitment to dismantling a heavily militarized
criminal-justice infrastructure does not necessitate that the committed
individual oppose a national attack on democratic control over schools, the
devaluation of teachers and their labor, an emphasis on market choice as a
solution to structural inequality and disinvestment, or a base-level
assumption that poverty and inequality are the results of damaged psyches and
behavioral traits supposedly endemic to poor communities.
Instead,
Mckesson’s appearance in New Orleans is a perfect encapsulation of the city’s
last ten years. The “grand experiment” perpetrated on New Orleans teachers,
students, and schools has always been done in the language of social justice,
antiracism, and multiculturalism.
So
has the broader grand experiment of the “new” New Orleans. New Orleans has not
just been reconceived and reimagined — it has been rebuilt to serve and further
specific material and ideological interests. It is a city increasingly designed
not to produce equality but to give opportunity to the “worthy” while driving out [7] as many “unworthy” as possible. (The exception of course
being those needed to staff the low-wage hospitality [8] and service industry,
along with those whose labors [9] produce the city’s appeal as something timeless and
supposedly outside the market and the profit motive — an appeal that is one of
market culture’s most valuable commodities in contemporary capitalism.)
Any
serious reckoning with the last ten years must start with the following facts
about post-Katrina New Orleans.
Approximately
100,000 people, mostly African American, have not returned to the city.
Real-estate values have doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled in some
neighborhoods; rents have more than doubled in many neighborhoods; and the
city’s public housing, well-built and largely unaffected by the floodwaters,
has been turned over to private developers [10] and razed in favor of
mixed-income complexes designed to eliminate the supposed pathologies of the
poor while making developers a handsome profit. Meanwhile, countless publicly
owned properties have been gifted to high-end, well-connected developers for a
song.
Wages
have stagnated to the point where the city is the second most unequal in the
nation. Public transportation [11] is even more nonexistent
than before the flood (no small feat).
Much-touted
education “reform” has proven unsuccessful [12] even when judged by its
proponents’ favored metric, high-stakes standardized tests, and has both
incentivized schools to give up on the city’s most disadvantaged children and
produced a generation of New Orleanians educated with the sole purpose of
passing a standardized test. Effected through the mass firing [13] of veteran African-American teachers, the decimation of
the traditional public school system also eviscerated the city’s black middle
class. And finally, the removal of education policy from democratic control
placed it in the hands of a variety of corporate-backed organizations.
University
of New Orleans — a once-proud public university that regularly educated between
15,000 and 17,000 largely working-class students a year and produced
cutting-edge research across various fields of human inquiry — has been so
hollowed out that the very question of its continued existence is a cruel
parlor game played every year by faculty and a student body cut nearly in half.
Of
the $6.4 billion that was to be distributed [14] by the private
infrastructure consultancy firm ICF International to help homeowners rebuild,
only $1.5 made it to residents. Meanwhile, ICF’s stock price has almost
tripled. The money that did reach residents was doled out in a manner
reminiscent of redlining, increasing capital in the hands of the wealthiest New
Orleans property owners — disproportionately white — while decreasing it in the
hands of the poorest —disproportionately black. Not a cent was allocated at any
level for renters to return, nor were any rental market controls put in place
to aid in their homecoming.
The Avondale
Shipyards [15], which paid middle-income wages
and was formerly the region’s largest private employer,
unceremoniously closed its doors in 2013 after suffering a slow and hardly
noticed death.
A perfectly functional hospital [16] that was an important
symbol of local identity and provided the city with a strong tradition of
low-income and indigent care wasn’t reopened after the storm. Yet the city
bulldozed a relatively unflooded, working-class neighborhood and spent $1.1
billion to build a shiny new hospital on the promise that it would attract
high-income employees from out of state — whose income would, they insisted,
trickle down.
The
majority of the direct producers of New Orleans’ vaunted culture — its
musicians, artists, culinary workers — make poverty wages. An even greater
majority of their support staff — the dishwashers, bartenders, taxi drivers,
maids, etc. who provide the labor infrastructure for New Orleans’ culture to be
sustained — live on well below poverty wages.
Louisiana
continues to lead the nation in incarcerated residents, the majority of who do
their time in for-profit prisons. New Orleans has effectively criminalized [17] homelessness even while
its percentage of homeless residents has risen to the second highest in the
nation. The list could go on and on.
The
political and social divisions that exist within the city are not simply red
herrings that obscure the causes of this growing dislocation. The divisions
themselves are the legitimating agents of this inequality.
To
put it bluntly, New Orleans has become a tremendously profitable model city for
global capital. Yet the lines of debate within the city virtually never break
down along the question of who stands to make money and who stands to be
further disenfranchised.
Equally
as problematic, the grand experiment itself has furthered the ideological
hegemony of this expropriation well beyond the confines of Orleans Parish.
Countless self-identified liberals, progressives, and social justice advocates
around the country and the world tout the city as the exemplar for
education reform, film tax incentives, the development of a cultural economy,
corporate-backed non-profit solutions to social problems, entrepreneurial
culture, and such revolutionary developments as locally produced food, DIY art
projects, and resistance through performance and consumer culture.
It
is in this manner that New Orleans’ new ruling class has come to govern with
absolute hegemony.
Homages
to culture and culture-bearers; neighborhood and cultural preservation as end-goals;
emphases on proportional racial representation, whether on the city council or
in victimhood at the hands of terroristic police; social entrepreneurship, the
notion of “doing well by doing good,” and “social justice” outsourced to
corporate-backed nonprofits; advocation of urban amenities like bike lanes and
locally sourced food markets; even taking down white supremacist monuments and
renaming streets bearing the name of treasonous insurrectionists — all of this
is perfectly compatible with the dislocations and expropriations of the last
decade.
Indeed,
these gestures are not simply compatible with the status quo, but serve to
refract dissent and contentious politics into questions of subjectivity and
identity that in fact provide a bulwark for the prerogatives of New Orleans as
a city increasingly divided between those who it has been purposely rebuilt for
and those who it has manifestly attempted to exclude.
More
than anywhere else in the last ten years of American history, New Orleans
exemplifies how equality and justice become functions of equitable distribution
along lines of race, city nativity, gender, etc. — rather than evils to be
defeated in and of themselves.
Charter
school hucksters like Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White and
millionaire businesswoman Leslie Jacobs; multi-millionaire developer and
destroyer of public housing Pres Kabacoff and his legion of aspirants [18]; politicians ranging from
former mayor Ray Nagin to current mayor Mitch Landrieu, along with the vast
majority of the city council; former city councilman Oliver Thomas (who
famously hoped to rid the city of “soap opera watchers” following the
flooding); musical ambassador and public library embezzler [19] Irvin Mayfield; Teach for
America and the New Teacher Project; actor, organic food
provider-cum-profiteer, and would-be real-estate developer [20] Wendell Pierce; virtually
every neighborhood association in the city; urban planning and revitalization
groups from the local St Claude Main Street to the national Urban Planning
Institute; elite interest groups like Tulane University, New Orleans Tourism Marketing
Corporation, and Downtown Development District; countless more minor nonprofit
hacks and wannabe power brokers.
All
have played, and love to play, the game where justice and equality are defined
along the lines of representationality, diversity, and multiculturalism.
It’s
an easy and profitable game for them to play. Far too often, though, it’s also
an easy game for the rest of us to play. We proclaim ourselves resilient. We
speak of a rebirth. We glorify resistance through the market. We proclaim our
culture and neighborhoods transhistoric and emphasize imagined forms of
authenticity. Wecelebrate [21] groups disconnected from conceivable institutional power
mechanisms demanding equitable representation.
Our
politics — in New Orleans and all across nation — becomes about morality tales
of injustice based on subject position, racial representation, or authentic
embeddedness in some imagined organic community. It fails to recognize the
cause of these injustices — the profit motive and a dire lack of institutional
means to curtail it. And at the end of the day, it reinforces the rules of a
game that at best allows for a more equitable distribution of inequality.
See
footnotes on Jacobin Magazine site.
