We told you so
14th December 2015 · 0 Comments
By Edmund Lewis
Editor
For years, The Louisiana Weekly had been publishing stories with claims from businesspeople of color who said they are being systematically locked out of the bidding process for public contracts at City Hall or discriminated against in other ways by the City of New Orleans. But the City of New Orleans has routinely dismissed those claims, refusing to acknowledge even the possibility that the city’s program for disadvantaged business enterprises puts Black- and woman-owned businesses at a distinct disadvantage in this majority-Black city.
Essentially, the City of New Orleans was telling Black and female contractors and the Black Press that systematic discrimination in the DBE program was simply a figment of our collective imagination.
Then, all of a sudden last week, the City of New Orleans admitted to WWL News that there are problems with the DBE program that negatively impact minority contractors and their efforts to get their fair share of city contracts.
Interestingly, the City of New Orleans never actually took responsibility for the problems with the DBE program. It couldn’t possibly have been the fault of the same city leaders who had been denying for years that there were flaws and discriminatory practices in place that adversely impacted Black businesses.
In this case, the fall guy turns out to be the State of Louisiana and laws that make it impossible for females and Blacks to get a fair shake in the City of New Orleans.
At the same time, we are told that the City Administration is on the case and determined to right the DBE ship.
Are you buying any of that?
I’m certainly not.
After all, this is the same City Administration that took away the job security of many of the Black workers at City Hall while proposing to raise the minimum wage for City Hall employees.
This is the same City Administration that has blamed a local “culture of violence” for spikes in the city’s murder rate but gives all the credit for reduced murder rates to its NOLA For Life initiative.
This is the same administration that refused to give the citizenry of New Orleans any say in selecting a new police chief but has wrung its hands in frustration when the people of New Orleans show little faith in the police department.
This is the same City Administration that first praised the idea of a federally mandated NOPD consent decree but later said New Orleans didn’t need it because the city couldn’t afford it and the NOPD was already reforming itself.
This was the same City Administration that has refused to lift a finger or utter a word in opposition to the state-run Recovery School District’s efforts to build a shiny new school for Black children atop the former toxic landfill where Booker T. Washington Senior High School once stood. While the City Administration has said nothing about the new school, it has pretended not to notice how the city’s charter schools treat some of its Black students more like prison inmates than pupils and routinely pressure struggling Black students to drop out of schools so that it could look like local test scores and local schools are improving dramatically in post-Katrina New Orleans. It also celebrated the construction of a new community center atop the same Central City toxic landfill.
This is the new New Orleans.
In the new New Orleans, you could get arrested and booked on 17 counts of attempted first-degree murder even if you were hundreds of miles away in Houston, Texas. Is it any wonder why Joseph “Moe” Allen who spent 10 days behind bars in Orleans Parish Prison for a crime he didn’t commit, said he is never coming back to New Orleans?
Because some local elected officials do “The Wobble” and talk about the need to remove Confederate monuments around the city, we’re supposed to believe that the City of New Orleans loves Black people and has the best interests of Black folks at heart.
Sorry, again, I’m not buying it.
Not even after a report by The Campaign for Black Male Achievement said New Orleans is the fourth-best place for Black men in the U.S., trailing only Detroit, Oakland and Washington, DC. New Orleans reportedly scored high for its “city-led commitments to Black men and boys” and got major props for its NOLA For Life initiative aimed at lowering the city’s murder rate and “targeted funding supporting Black men and boys.”
Are you kidding me?
Tell that to the more than 50 percent of Black men who are unemployed and the inmates at Orleans Parish Prison, of which more than 80 percent are Black men.
Tell that to the many Black teens who are routinely racially profiled by NOPD officers and state troopers in the city or the Black defendants who are railroaded by New Orleans prosecutors or forced to remain in jail until they get tired or frustrated enough to accept a plea deal for a crime they didn’t commit.
Tell that to the families of Justin Sipp, who was killed by police on his way to work, and Wendell Allen, who was gunned down by a cop while standing shirtless and unarmed on the stairs of his home.
Tell that to the families of James Brissette, Ronald Madison, Henry Glover and all the others murdered or wounded by police in the days after Hurricane Katrina.
This simply is not a city where justice, democracy, fairness or equal protection under the law reign supreme.
It is a city that is always seeking to sell the masses a bill of goods to make them believe that things aren’t as bad as they seem.
One has to wonder how The Campaign for Black Male Advancement fell for the City of New Orleans’ brand of “sauteed okeydoke” and how much field research went into this No. 4 ranking of the City That Care Forgot.
We’ll likely never know how or why the city received such high ranking and how the ranking will be used to further deceive the rest of the nation about progress and advancement in post-Katrina New Orleans.
All power to the people.
This article originally published in the December 14, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
