The geography of dissent: New Orleans and Palestine

From the Gulf Coast to the West Bank: New Orleans and Palestine: January 19, 2007

I'm still in New Orleans. It's so much like Palestine it's eerie. It's a different kind of devastation than right after the storm. Some of the worst wreckage has been cleaned up -- there are no longer throngs of people camping out on the I-10 Causeway or waterlogged bodies lining the streets. Now it's the emptiness that is most striking. Some parts of the city are like a ghost town.

We walked down street after street the other day, canvassing in the Seventh Ward, and it was hard to find anyone at all. There's an extreme sense of shell shock. Every time we found someone there was a strange feeling that they were the only ones left after a bomb had hit.

Most of the people we saw were construction workers. A few bulldozers were depositing the gutted remains of people's homes in dumpsters. It reminded me of Palestinian bulldozers cleaning up the remains of houses after the Israeli army destroys them.

In one of the streets, we stood in a crater the width of the road, maybe a foot deep, which had been there since the storm. Out of the empty street, so empty and so stark it could have been a backdrop to a film, a man appeared. It was hard to tell which was more surreal, the human being emerging from the wreckage or the wreckage itself. Under the clear sky and the beating January sun, he told us about watching his neighbor's two-year-old drown, about the FEMA trailer parks and his own destroyed house, his eyes far away, looking through us as he spoke. "But everyone's got a story," he added, almost reverently, as though that fact were itself larger than his own story. He was back to rebuild, one of the first in his neighborhood to return.

It doesn't feel at all like a year and a half has passed since the storm. The city is half the size it was -- from a population of 485,000 to around 250,000. [1] Most of the missing residents are black and poor or working class; a city that was once 67 percent black is now estimated to be less than 50 percent black. [2] The city has been talking for years about tearing down the projects to build casinos, condos, and golf courses, but now they have a convenient means for going about it. This is gentrification accelerated exponentially.

The lower Ninth Ward, which was 98.7 percent black and had the highest rate of black home ownership in the country, is now mostly flattened. [3] This is even more significant given the neighborhood's history. It was built up mostly by people who fled the French Quarter's auction block or the plantations. They fled to the swamp, where white plantation owners were less likely to look, and learned self-reliance techniques from each other and the indigenous community there. This is the history of community and struggle that is under attack.

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