NYCweboy

Notes on New Orleans

I just got home from six nights in New Orleans - a mix of business and pleasure (the city would have it no other way), traveling with the man and meeting with non-profit folks and public housing resident-activists.  On my first morning there I joined several residents and activists in solidarity at another's hearing at NO's Criminal Court.  Some thoughts on that are here.

My relationship with New Orleans is a tense one - the intensity of the inequity is something this uptight, machine-politick-reared New Englander cannot abide.  My work there takes me through a morning at the Criminal Court, and I pass another listening to another former resident weep over the loss of her home and sitting with her through one family crisis after another.  In an effort to escape from the despair, I trundle over to Magazine Street and spend hours wandering the boutiques full of relatively inexpensive, funky and fun dresses (I marvel at the affordable and independent designs they have down there - I'm not aware of any equivalents up here in MA).  But it's difficult to overcome the cognitive dissonance of watching families cope with trauma and injustice and then pay an excessive amount for two sandwiches and glasses of wine with the man at an overpriced (if delicious) bakery shop decked out in fantastic pinks and blues.  Surreal is often a word folks use to describe their experiences in post-Katrina New Orleans, and they're not wrong. 

I finally verbalized that one of the things I can't stomach about the city is its lack of government - I live in a city with a strong mayor and a city and state with a long history of liberal patronage and paternalism (we have our own public housing up here, for example).  This sentiment, of course, made me feel both like a loser and a teeny bit fascist - but at every turn it seems like there's a new outrage - and the civil and non-profit sectors can only do so much.  I hope Pelosi et al. are listening slightly more carefully than they've been during this whole FISA nonsense.

But despite my links o' grief above, with each passing day I relax a little bit there.  Drinks with friends help.  As does excellent food.  And hot, humid weather (I may be alone on this one) and lush parks and foliage.  And the endless little new stores opening up here and there.  And the sheer breadth of experience I have there, in a way that my rather cloistered world here in MA cannot match - for better and worse.  It's a rarefied city, and writing about it off and on for three years now (I know, I'll never be from or of there!!) - well, I'm starting to feel a little cliched.

August 29, 2008 is the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  The city is slowly returning, but unevenly and precariously.  The Democratic Convention ends on August 28. Gulf Coast organizations and their national allies are pressing Sens. Obama and McCain and the Democratic and Republican Parties to prioritize Gulf Coast recovery in the upcoming administration.  Because while the scale of Katrina's devastation is exceptional, its physical and social aftermath is strikingly less so.

I leave you with an excerpt from a Times-Picayune piece on New Orleans volunteers helping out after the Iowa floods:

Unlike the brackish water that surged over the New Orleans area, the Cedar River's fresh water spared the green grass and flowers. Except for the vegetation, though, the vacant neighborhoods could be Gentilly or Old Metairie or Meraux after Katrina.

In the Cedar Rapids neighborhood of Time Check, named for merchants' 19th century practice of honoring the postdated paychecks of railroad workers, references to the 2005 hurricane are ever-present.

"I sat at home. I watched TV. I saw the pictures of Katrina. But you just don't get it until you're actually living it," said Janette Schorg, who drove last week from Davenport, Iowa, near the Illinois border, to help her parents muck out their two-story home of 40 years.

It just angers me every time I drive into Cedar Rapids that it goes from beautiful to a war zone," Schorg said.

Some residents admit the recent flooding has forced them to reconsider their notions of New Orleans.

"We all watched during Katrina and said, 'Why would people live in a bowl?' " said Bill Polton, whose 85-year-old father lives just three blocks from the levee that runs along First Street Northwest, on the Cedar River's west bank.

"Well, here we are sitting in almost the same scenario," Polton said. "Nobody realized how far the flood plain would go."

- Redstar

Shameless Self-Promotion: Redstar Election Edition

While Weboy prepares for tonight's movie extravaganza (he likes to arrive early, get settled, there's a post in here somewhere in which he lays it all out) - I thought you all might want to take a look at the brilliance I've been leaving behind at The Hillary 1000.  I'm not sure how many of you are partisan enough to pop over there regularly.

Check out this post about that Boston Globe article criticizing public-private affordable housing developments done on Obama's watch in Chicago and how it relates to Obama's donors failing to live up to his pledge to help retire Clinton's primary debt.  I found the Globe piece "salacious" and overreaching, but also think it, along with this donor problem, points to a problematic lack of follow through by the Senator.  (There's also a worthwhile link in there re: Obama's urban policy proposals.)

Check out these two pieces breaking down Obama's campaign donors, by gender, organization and industry. 

And my H1K co-blogger Red Queen and I were interviewed by The Black Snob about our preferences for Obama as former Clinton supporters.  The Black Snob just won The Best New Political Blog and The Best Political Blog Overall by Black Politics on the Web, so you might want to leave her a shout-out while you're over there. I LOVE TBS, though clearly she wasn't up against our man Weboy in that race!

- Redstar

The GOP Continues to Starve Cities

This article is chock full of infuriating bullsh*t about GOP machinations to stall a much overdue housing relief bill. Congress expected to have it on Bush's desk by now, but now the GOP wants to investigate Dodd's mortgage from Countrywide and the White House has threatened a veto based on $4M in grants to cities to deal with neighborhoods with high foreclosure rates.

Seriously, it's like Bush doesn't even live in this country, or have a basic understanding of our political economy. He claims that banks will benefit and not homeowners, forgetting that many of these neighborhoods have struggling homeowners living alongside - effectively trapped - foreclosed and abandoned properties that can trigger a downward spiral in (often, already struggling) communities. Aid to cities and towns to provide upkeep and oversight of these neighborhoods is a terrific component of these housing bill, and something some municipalities have undertaken already. (Yep, that link is 15 months old, and Bush wants to veto this bill over a paltry, desperately needed $4M. WHAT. AN. ASSHOLE.  Sigh.  Par for the course.)

I hope Barney Frank, MA's righteously awesome, out-and-proud (and Clinton supporting) Representative forces the GOP's hand on this and gets this thing moving, but frankly, I've got little reason to feel optimistic.  How about you?

- Redstar

Lower 9th Ward Photo Essay

I'd been wanting to write about LA's Gov. Bobby Jindal, who's been popping up around the intertubes lately as a possible VP candidate for McCain, a former biology major who's performed exorcisms, and the leader of the state that just passed by a landslide the teaching of intelligent design in local schools.  But honestly, you should just read this post at Firedoglake.  It's got all details of the horrendous, humorless, dangerous irony of Jindal's Reaganesque conservative rise against the backdrop of Katrina.

My contribution? A dear friend's work-in-progress photo essay of the "recovery" of the Lower 9th Ward, captured from January 2006 through August 2007 (and the second anniversary of the storm).  It will be updated next month.

I guess LA school children will be learning how God leveled New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina to punish those homosexuals after all. 

From McCain/Jindal '08, may G-d save us all. 

- Redstar
x-posted at The Redstar Perspective

In Obama's Speech on Cities, its 1996 Again

In his speech at the U.S. Conference of Mayors annual meeting, Sen. Obama spoke of the need for a “new” approach to urban policy, but he failed to offer any. Instead, Obama embraced 1990s metropolitan rhetoric favored by centrist, neoliberal DC groups ($) such as the Brookings Institution. (In 1996, Brookings re-christened its urban policy group the Metropolitan Policy Program. )

Metropolitan policy, now the dominant mode of urban thought in DC, responds to the reality that poverty, an aging housing stock, and other traditionally “urban” problems are spreading out into “inner-ring” suburbs. Yet, metropolitan rhetoric sprung from persistent urban challenges such as concentrated poverty that reached record levels in the early 1990s. Policy solutions, in their efforts to make cities attractive to the tax-paying middle-class, sacrificed large numbers of urban households struggling to cope. Solutions included “de-concentrating” urban poor communities and “revitalizing” those areas by providing mixed-income housing and proximate amenities, and theoretically positively influencing the fewer remaining low-income residents with middle-class values and models.

Research on almost two decades of de-concentration has been mixed at best.  Residents who move out nonetheless remain in high poverty areas, many who are relocated are lost in the process so their outcomes are unknown, relocation is always disruptive, and it has a disproportionate negative impact on young boys. (Some research shows positive impacts for young girls, due to increased safety from physical and sexual violence.) No doubt, some programs can be done well.  The Seattle Housing Authority provided a one for one unit replacement when they redeveloped their projects, which is a good start. But HUD discourages this kind of expensive attempt at equity and since their HOPE VI mixed-income housing programs were launched in 1992, tens of thousands of deeply affordable units have been lost nationwide.

No wonder poverty is spreading to the suburbs.

Important Question on Friday Afternoon

Is Madonna's new album really as good as Confessions on a Dance Floor???

- Redstar

Beat Down

After an hour on the phone with the man, I'm realizing as this day comes to an end how beat down I'm feeling by the subtleties of discrimination in all its nefarious forms.

This election season has driven home with brutal force what most of us who are non-white-able-bodied-straight-affluent-men experience on a regular basis: the subtle dismissals, devaluations, and discounting of our worth.  Clinton has been martyred for the rest of us, and many still want to debate whether there was sexism in the campaign, and if so, how bad was it really, anyway?  C'mon now.  I'm sure "likable enough" is just arrogance, pure and simple, not couched in a gendered context in a patriarchal society.  And surely Whoopi wasn't talking about colorism on that coffee-klatsch The View?  Is that what I just heard?  Colorism?  What's that?  Aren't they just gabbing, those black and white ladies?  We do live in a color-blind society, right?

GO CELTS!!!!

Yes, they really just had Donny Walberg of New Kids on the Block on the local ABC affiliate "hangin' tough" and reveling in the Celtics victory tonight.

Go Celtics!!

That is all.

:) :)

- Redstar

Bootstraps

On Father's Day, Obama spoke to a church crowd about fatherhood and personal responsibility.  While he was at his rhetorical finest, I've got endless problems with his tired lecturing about behavior, culture and helping the "deserving" poor - here, "fathers doing their part."

My first PhD general exam draft was a personal essay about how my white urban family epitomizes William  Julius Wilson's "underclass" - an extended family living in Dorchester and South Boston public housing that lacked the education, assets and connections to get out of the city when jobs and wealthier whites were doing just that.  20 years after the book's publication, the problems of inner-city joblessness are worse than ever, matched by an unprecedented incarceration rate (the "schools-to-prison pipeline").  Marriage rates are falling nationwide across all ethnic groups, we face a severe shortage of affordable housing, and poverty and inequality have steadily risen under Bush's watch.  Low-income communities of color shoulder a grossly unjust share of this societal burden, yet my white ethnic family endures the same challenges of joblessness or low-wage work, addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, homelessness, etc. 

I've got no patience for political pandering about poverty and social welfare.  With Obama our presumptive nominee, my ire is now directed his way.  Click here for my rant. 

- Redstar

All About Me

Warning: This post follows a truly sleepless night and risks rambling incoherence...

One thing I try to do as a blogger is not speak for others.  I do my best to draw on my own experiences, or on those described in research or by large sources of data (of varying degrees of scientific rigor) with which I'm familiar.  Several interrelated aspects of this Democratic primary are thus driving me mad:

• my frequent total loss of perspective over Clinton's (vs. Obama's) candidacy;
• the sense that I'm being stereotyped - however indirectly - in the crude brushstrokes used to paint Clinton (vs. Obama) supporters;
• the mismatch between criticisms of Clinton and those leveled by many of her supporters.

Part of the reason for last night's insomnia has been my growing frustration from the Clinton RFK remarks skirmish.  It began in earnest when I read Kevin's response at Slant Truth, in which he stated that regardless of her intent, it was his personal associations of the assassinations of black leaders that mattered to him. He added that he was further troubled by the racially segregated - and polarized - link networks he was seeing in response to her comments; i.e., whites were linking to other whites in support of their perspectives, and bloggers of color - including many African-Americans - were linking to one another in opinion solidarity.  When I read this, I thought Duh! Obviously. Anyone following this election, especially since early '08, has seen this cultural fracturing around the blogosphere, as we all interpret the candidates' actions, statements and alleged motivations and intent based on our personal and/or collective experiences and identities. 

Then I read a compelling analysis from Latoya at Racialicious, which I found to be strongly undermined by her absolutist language that (my emphases) "...there is no way Hillary was talking about herself when referencing the RFK campaign."  Latoya's voice is one I really respect in the 'sphere, yet so is Pocochina's, who convincingly argues that Clinton could be thinking of her own safety in referencing RFK, not to mention having RFK on the brain because it was a defining (generational) moment for her in her political development.  [UPDATE, 5/29/08: This paragraph has been edited, due to the helpful comments from Kai in the attached thread.  I have edited my description of Latoya's analysis, as well as removed my original interpretation of Pocochina's post, because I realized that I was actually projecting a lot into her argument that isn't actually there.  Ironic, I know...]

So who's right, here?  Who's interpretation is valid?  Hopefully you realize these are trick questions - obviously all of them are, as they are grounded in experience, identity, and each blogger's situated knowledge.  So what's a of-the-working-class-now-creative-class white feminist social-justice activist, Northeastern elite librul Clinton-supporter, Obama-agnostic like me supposed to do?  This is where the loss of perspective come in...