Feast or famine
3rd November 2014 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
There’s a lot of change and social and economic upheaval going on in the southeast Louisiana region these days.
On one hand, things are looking up. For the first time in a very long time, the words economic growth and expansion are being used in the same sentence with the Crescent City. Filmmakers and producers apparently love it here, as do an increasing number of recording executives, artists and celebrities. The real estate market is doing brisk business and the outlook is bright…if you know the right people, have the right last name or grew up in the right part of town.
If you don’t have the right connections, credentials and pedigrees, God bless you.
With all that money and discretionary income blowing into New Orleans, retailers are scrambling to find real estate in “secure” (read safe) zones like Mid-City, the CBD and the Magazine and Freret Street corridors. With concerted efforts by authorities to keep the right people in New Orleans safe, business is booming.
Nowadays, you’re seeing whites whose families left New Orleans during the dawning of the Historic Civil Rights Movement to find refuge across the lake or upriver moving back into the City That Care Forgot. You also have young white professionals flooding New Orleans in search of high-tech jobs or better opportunities in the film and/or healthcare industries.
All of that new money in “the jungle” has led to an explosion of new restaurants, high-rise apartments and condos in the CBD and Warehouse District, in addition to the renovation of downtown music and entertainment venues like the Saenger Theater, Joy Theater and The Orpheum.
New Orleans is a lot of things to a lot of people. It is at once funky, exciting, hip, culturally rich and alive. It is a mystical, magical city that worms its way into the hearts of even the most straight-laced visitors and convince them to take a shot at learning how to do the wobble, sample beignets at 4:00 a.m., smoke a hookah pipe or take a few sips of a Hurricane or Huma Huma.
Make no mistake about it, the living can be easy in New Orleans.
But for most of the people who make this city the magical, compelling little kingdom by the sea that it is, the living is anything but.
Taxes are high, along with water service fees and energy bills. Wages are low and showing no signs of rising.
New Orleans is a city where far too many children are deprived of a decent education, where the business community has no qualms about exploiting cheap labor and police officers routinely get away with violating the constitutional and human rights of an overwhelming majority of the people who call New Orleans home.
Even in the midst of a federally mandated NOPD consent decree designed to completely overhaul the police department.
It is a city where Black and white elected officials see nothing wrong with building a new school for Black children above a toxic landfill and here out-of-state school executives get paid wads of cash to treat Black and poor children like prison inmates.
On top of that, the three-tiered local school system is still under-educating and miseducating the masses of Black youth and ensuring that they are forced to struggle to survive on meager paychecks from dead-end jobs or risk everything by giving in to the lure of the illegal drug trade.
For the record, both of these paths destabilize communities of color and enrich the white business community. In the tourism-driven service industry, cheap Black labor allows multinational hotel chains and world-class restaurants to maximize profits while the steady flow of Black people to prison continues to feed the highly privatized and ever-expanding prison-industrial complex.
The most powerful weapon in the struggle for justice and democracy in New Orleans is the truth. Knowing the truth, speaking the truth and harnessing the revolutionary power of being true to ourselves and our history will put us squarely on the path to enlightenment and liberation.
Denying the truth about ourselves, who we are and our position in the world will only continue to lead us along this downward spiral toward self-doubt, economic exploitation and confusion,
If we are hungry enough for freedom, we will find the strength, resilience and sense of purpose required to make the necessary sacrifices and changes to one day know what freedom, justice and self-determination feel and taste like. If we are content to continue to exist as only a shell of our former selves, we will find ourselves still lost in the wilderness 100 years from now.
Which path do you choose?
This article originally published in the November 3, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
