Poverty and control

9th March 2015   ·   0 Comments

By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor

There’s a new report out that says poverty is hanging a dark cloud over the Crescent City’s future and significantly impacting the life chances of many of the children who are born here. Among other things, the report from the New Orleans-based Data Center says that poverty is impeding the healthy brain development of New Orleans children and significantly increasing the likelihood that these young people’s lives will be burdened with trauma and learning challenges.

This report is hardly shocking news to those who live in New Orleans and have fought for decades to convince city and education officials to address the needs and concerns of children from low-income and working-class families. Unfortunately, for the most part, those pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

The gains Blacks have made in public education in New Orleans since Brown v. The Board of Education have been undermined by high-stakes testing that penalized overcrowded and underfunded schools, the mass firing of thousands of New Orleans Public School System ad­min­istrators, educators and other employees after Hurricane Katrina, a hostile take­over of the New Orleans Public Sch­ools by the state of Louisiana and the recruitment of Black candidates to replace principled Black elected officials who fight for racial justice, equity and inclusion.

It is not any less sinister or white supremacist because the plan to create a national model for educational apartheid was made possible with the collusion and assistance of Black elected officials

Despite the many press conferences heralding a new day in public education in New Orleans and the offering of more options, New Orleans students continue to struggle and must still contend with moldy facilities at schools like John Mac before its doors were shuttered, treatment of students like prison inmates or new military enlistees at George Washington Carver High School, and the construction of a new school for Walter L, Cohen Sr. High School atop a toxic landfill that used to be know as the Silver City Dump.

Despite all of the problems associated with lead poisoning that this city and its elected officials have witnessed, the overwhelming majority of the city’s elected officials have said absolutely nothing about the dangers of building this school at a site contaminated with lead, mercury, zinc and at least five other toxic metals.

All the while, it has been about control, control of what these schools are able to do in the community and control of the public bidding process that yields millions of dollars to the contractors selected to serve these schools.

After years of charter school conversion, life has still not gotten any better for most of the city’s young people.

Adding insult to injury, some of the businesses that have reaped huge financial benefits from the takeover of the school system have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to nonprofit groups in New Orleans, many of whom are run by people who are not invested in saving the city’s poorest children and pay themselves six-figure salaries to pontificate about the problems low-income children face in New Orleans.

Welcome to the 2015 Hunger Games, brothers and sisters.

According to the Data Center report, 39 percent of the city’s children live in poverty, 17 percent more than the national average.

That’s criminal, especially in a society that dares to call itself civilized.

According to the report, poverty is literally killing our children.

“Scientific research shows that child poverty can lead to can lead to increased trauma in young people’s brains and now scholars assert that poverty may be the single-greatest threat to children’s healthy brain development,” the report, authored by senior fellow Vicki Mack, said.

Anyone who has paid attention to the way things have always been done in New Orleans knows that nothing is ever left to chance here. Every effort is made to secure the future for the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of former slaveowners while the great-grandchildren of former enslaved Africans are mired in poverty, substandard education, dead-end jobs, violence and hopelessness.

The public education system prepares Black children for lives of servitude in the tourism and service industries or mass incarceration.

The stench and weight of oppression in New Orleans is literally stifling.

For those who still don’t get it, the system is designed that way to prevent what happened in St. Domingue (Haiti) once the spirit of revolution took root and what happened during the 1811 slave revolt upriver from New Orleans from ever happening again. A concerted effort is underway to break the spirit of Black people.

With elected officials and appointed bureaucrats as the stewards of this 21st-century concentration camp, New Orleans has become Ground Zero for white supremacy, who are showing the rest of the nation and the world how to extract cheap labor and cultural gems from people of African descent while ensuring that Blacks remain dependent on their former white masters for jobs, career advancement, social status and survival.

Poverty is so much more than a condition under which the overwhelming majority of the world’s people languish. It is a tool of the oppressor that is used to control, manipulate, terrorize and divide the masses.

It is a tool that prevents oppressed people from harnessing their collective power through the creation of businesses and institutions that meet their needs and a way to limit the resources available to fight against racial injustice, classism, sexism and taxation without representation.

Without economic empowerment, Black political candidates find themselves begging some of the same white business owners who have contributed to the problems witnessed in the Black community for campaign contributions. When that happens, what we get is what we got right now: Compromised elected officials with little reason to represent the interests and concerns of the Black community.

Poverty, and a lack of economic opportunities, have left tens of thousands of young people vulnerable to dead-end, low-wage jobs in the tourism or service industries or the snares of the prison industrial complex.

The rising cost of living in New Orleans, from water and utility bills to property taxes and rental rates, have further burdened low-income and working-class families. Heads of household are often forced to work several jobs but have nothing to show for it at the end of the day.

That leaves many young people with very little daily structure or adult supervision and more exposure to negative peer pressure.

Depriving many of the city’s children of a solid education ensures that they will be undereducated or mis-educated, which would make them easier to control and manipulate. It would also prolong and strengthen a cycle of poverty that dates back all the way to antebellum times in New Orleans.

Even before Black children were allowed to attend schools in New Orleans, there was a lack of commitment on the part of the ruling class to providing the kind of education that would develop dynamic, independent-thinking people.

For generations, Black high school and college graduates who somehow managed to get a decent education despite all the roadblocks placed in their path were forced to leave the city to pursue economic opportunities commensurate with their educational training.

They, like Blacks displaced by Hurricane Katrina, have been replaced with whites from other parts of the country or Blacks who often buy into the notion that poverty, unemployment and literacy are chronic problems in New Orleans because local Blacks are lazy, shiftless and unambitious.

That makes it easier for transplants to the city to buy into the notion that Blacks are wholly responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves and support the status quo.

It also makes it easier for transplants and other people of good will to say and do nothing when they witness up close and personal the oppression, exploitation, mis-education, criminalization, incarceration and extermination of Black people by the powers that be.

You can call it what you want, but I call it genocide.

This article originally published in the March 9, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.