Call it genocide
8th July 2014 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
Did you know that the Recovery School District, the same recovery school district ushered in by a wave of post-Katrina firings of thousands of New Orleans Public School personnel, completely dismantling a public school system that was already struggling only to hand over the discarded pieces to the highest bidders or well-connected businessmen, is now trying to build a new school for Black kids on the old Booker T. Washington High School site, which sits atop a toxic landfill polluted with at least eight deadly metals?
Do you care?
The site, which once housed the Silver City Dump, has been found to contain the following toxic metals — antimony, arsenic, barium, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury and zinc.
Although this issue is bigger than Louisiana’s battle over Common Core, the use of corporal punishment in the classroom and efforts to change TOPS scholarship requirements, it has gotten considerably less attention from the media and elected officials.
More than seven decades ago, school officials in New Orleans built a public school for Black children, Moton Elementary School, in eastern New Orleans on toxic soil. That was during the glory days of Jim Crow law and domestic terrorism. Fast forward to 2014, the 60th anniversary of the landmark case of Brown. v. The Board of Education, and the state-controlled Recovery School District is doing everything in its power to build another school for Black and poor children on a toxic landfill, this time on the site of the former Booker T. Washington High School. So much for racial progress and learning from the lessons of the past.
The saddest part about it all is that the powers that be are using people with melanin to deliver this death sentence to future generations of Black children. They hired a Black RSD superintendent, Patrick Dobard, to make it appear that there is nothing racist or sinister about what is being done. Dobard, you may recall, is the same RSD superintendent who was shown on local television newscasts walking Black kids to school on the first day of class several years ago. The powers that be are also using RSD spokesman Dana Peterson, the husband of Louisiana Democratic Chair and state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, to deny that the RSD is doing anything that is detrimental to the health, development and well-being of the children who will attend the school.
What you won’t hear Dobard, Peterson or state Education superintendent John White explain is why school officials are so adamant about building this new school on a toxic landfill when it could have easily been built on the site of the current Walter L. Cohen Senior High School.
The short answer is land-banking. Someone or some entity has had their eye on that valuable tract of land on which Cohen sits just two blocks off St. Charles Avenue and have been waiting for decades to get their hands on it.
Just like someone had decided while Black people were still scrambling to survive after Hurricane Katrina that John F. Kennedy High School would not be allowed to return to its City Park campus. And like people who live outside of the Black community decided that O.Perry Walker and L.B. Landry senior high schools would be merged despite the objections and concerns of parents, students, administrators and the community.
Jim Raby, president of the Cohen Alumni Association, environmental activists and others committed to preventing the RSD from building this school upon a toxic landfill have shared information about the plight of these students and area residents with members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education but have gotten no reaction or a commitment to standing up for these children and their families.
Among those who reportedly said nothing is BESE member Kiera Orange Jones.
Oddly, sadly and tragically, she’s not alone. The overwhelming majority of local elected officials — Black, white, red, brown and yellow — have said and done absolutely nothing about the issue.
Most of the people we put into public office are too self-absorbed, power-hungry, myopic or scared to step up and make a difference.
If Black and poor kids have to be exposed to a laundry list of toxic metals to make others rich, so be it.
The proof is in the pudding and some of you have already seen how little the state Dept. of Education, Recovery School District and others care about siphoning millions of dollars out of the city’s already chronically underfunded public school system or using poor and Black children in New Orleans like educational guinea pigs.
How can any human being do and say nothing when he or she sees such a monumental injustice unfolding before their very eyes? Whether you have kids or not, how can anyone allow any child to go to a school built on a toxic landfill? How do we look anyone in the eye after doing nothing, and how do we look at ourselves in a mirror?
How do we claim to want to improve public education or end the senseless violence in New Orleans while allowing children to attend schools built atop dangerously high levels of lead, mercury, zinc and other toxic metals?
How do you say you believe in a Higher Power but not feel compelled to move to do something to right this wrong? How do we call ourselves human but exhibit so little compassion or concern for the plight of others?
As you hang out with old friends and make new ones at Essence Fest or spend time with loved ones over the July 4th weekend, please remember that the lives, health and well-being of some of the city’s children and residents are being willfully and blatantly placed in peril by people who clearly have no qualms about violating the civil, constitutional and human rights of some of the city’s poorest residents.
The road to hell and the road to Manifest Destiny are paved with good intentions.
From the beginning of time, oppressive groups and imperialist powers have claimed no responsibility for the strife, chaos and despair that followed. Columbus didn’t know that his voyages would forever alter the history of indigenous populations in what is now North, Central and South America. Human traffickers didn’t know the trans-Atlantic slave trade would rip apart the lives of tens of millions of African men, women and children; President Andrew Jackson didn’t know that giving Native Americans blankets used by smallpox patients would nearly decimate the population of the indigenous peoples of this land,; wealthy landowners didn’t know that chattel slavery was morally indefensible and would create a chasm that would likely never be restored…
What can you do? What will you do?
This article originally published in the July 7, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
