Race and demographics
Dec. 6th, 2005 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
infrogmationAnother myth about Post-Katrina New Orleans I've heard from national media is that there are now no Black people here or hardly any.
I live and spend the most time in the Uptown portion of the city, a large chunk of the city developed in the 19th century that is probably as ethnically and economically diverse as anywhere in the Metro area. It's still that way around here.
Most of the time the bigest differences noticiable in the population is just the general absence of lots of people. Something like 3 out of 4 of the Pre-Katrina population isn't back yet. Along areas like Magazine Street, this isn't so noticiable, as both it's an area that's a couple steps ahead of much of the city in recovery due to less damage, and because so many people from other parts of town are there to patronize the businesses. There are crowds, lines, and traffic jams. However elsewhere the diminished population can be very noticiable.
The shift I've most noticed is the large number of Latino workers in town. New Orleans has long had a fair sized Hispanic population (Honduran, Mexican, Cuban, and other nations around the Gulf/Carribean predominating), but I've been hearing much more Spanish spoken lately.
I've heard some local commentators suggest that Post-Katrina New Orleans is likely to switch from 60% to 40% African-American. Remains to be seen.
The one place since I've been back that just seemed overwhelmingly white was Sunday evening in Marigny, catching the Jazz Vipers at Cafe Brasil; it seemed like about 4 African-Americans in a crowd of about 200. I don't know if that was a difference in the neighborhood, or something to do with the demographics of appeal of the band.
A related media myth is protraying the African American population of New Orleans as if it were almost all desperately poor underclass. Despite being in the "deep south", New Orleans has long a significiant African American population who were educated, who were professional, and who were home owners.
The good sized area of the city from Gentilly Ridge to Lake Pontchartrain, lowland within the city limits, was mostly undeveloped swamp at the start of the 20th century. After World War II, it was drained and filled with subdivisisions of homes representing the Post-War American Middle Class Dream. This was the height of Louisiana's Jim Crow era, and unlike the long mixed 19th century portions of the city, there were seperate "white" and "colored" subdivisions built. NPR had an excellent story on one such development the other day, Return to New Orleans: Pontchartrain Park, described as like growing up in a "Negro Leave It To Beaver" world.
I've heard out of town commentators say ignorant things about how no one should want to rebuild a ghetto. Most of the area flooded was no damn ghetto.
.....
The city is full of piles of ruined possession piled out on curbs to be hauled away, providing sometimes uncomfortably intimate glimpses of other Orleanians, neighbors and strangers alike.
I've almost always been carrying my little digital camera with me since I've got back. Some things I see-- maybe it has to do with my changing mood at the time, I don't know-- I feel I can't photograph; it's just too much. Then sometimes, some things, I just feel compelled to photograph-- to doccument, because this is what things are like here now.
In this later category is this photo I took in Gentilly of the pile in front of the home of people I know nothing about. Perhaps this was occupied by an old New Orleans family who moved here from their old shotgun house in some older part of town like Marigny. Or perhaps this was one of the many homes bought by a working class New Orleanian who worked long and hard, scrimped and saved, through the adversity of the Jim Crow era, to be able to raise their family in a home of their own. Maybe the mortgage was all paid off by the time Katrina came to put the floodline almost to the top of the doorway. No, I have to remind myself now, it wasn't the hurricane, it was a preventable man-made disaster caused by major incompetence, possibly criminal, by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Orleans Levee Board, that flooded 80% of the city.
It's a passing glance at one of the thousands of sad stories in the city.
I live and spend the most time in the Uptown portion of the city, a large chunk of the city developed in the 19th century that is probably as ethnically and economically diverse as anywhere in the Metro area. It's still that way around here.
Most of the time the bigest differences noticiable in the population is just the general absence of lots of people. Something like 3 out of 4 of the Pre-Katrina population isn't back yet. Along areas like Magazine Street, this isn't so noticiable, as both it's an area that's a couple steps ahead of much of the city in recovery due to less damage, and because so many people from other parts of town are there to patronize the businesses. There are crowds, lines, and traffic jams. However elsewhere the diminished population can be very noticiable.
The shift I've most noticed is the large number of Latino workers in town. New Orleans has long had a fair sized Hispanic population (Honduran, Mexican, Cuban, and other nations around the Gulf/Carribean predominating), but I've been hearing much more Spanish spoken lately.
I've heard some local commentators suggest that Post-Katrina New Orleans is likely to switch from 60% to 40% African-American. Remains to be seen.
The one place since I've been back that just seemed overwhelmingly white was Sunday evening in Marigny, catching the Jazz Vipers at Cafe Brasil; it seemed like about 4 African-Americans in a crowd of about 200. I don't know if that was a difference in the neighborhood, or something to do with the demographics of appeal of the band.
A related media myth is protraying the African American population of New Orleans as if it were almost all desperately poor underclass. Despite being in the "deep south", New Orleans has long a significiant African American population who were educated, who were professional, and who were home owners.
The good sized area of the city from Gentilly Ridge to Lake Pontchartrain, lowland within the city limits, was mostly undeveloped swamp at the start of the 20th century. After World War II, it was drained and filled with subdivisisions of homes representing the Post-War American Middle Class Dream. This was the height of Louisiana's Jim Crow era, and unlike the long mixed 19th century portions of the city, there were seperate "white" and "colored" subdivisions built. NPR had an excellent story on one such development the other day, Return to New Orleans: Pontchartrain Park, described as like growing up in a "Negro Leave It To Beaver" world.
I've heard out of town commentators say ignorant things about how no one should want to rebuild a ghetto. Most of the area flooded was no damn ghetto.
.....
The city is full of piles of ruined possession piled out on curbs to be hauled away, providing sometimes uncomfortably intimate glimpses of other Orleanians, neighbors and strangers alike.
I've almost always been carrying my little digital camera with me since I've got back. Some things I see-- maybe it has to do with my changing mood at the time, I don't know-- I feel I can't photograph; it's just too much. Then sometimes, some things, I just feel compelled to photograph-- to doccument, because this is what things are like here now.
In this later category is this photo I took in Gentilly of the pile in front of the home of people I know nothing about. Perhaps this was occupied by an old New Orleans family who moved here from their old shotgun house in some older part of town like Marigny. Or perhaps this was one of the many homes bought by a working class New Orleanian who worked long and hard, scrimped and saved, through the adversity of the Jim Crow era, to be able to raise their family in a home of their own. Maybe the mortgage was all paid off by the time Katrina came to put the floodline almost to the top of the doorway. No, I have to remind myself now, it wasn't the hurricane, it was a preventable man-made disaster caused by major incompetence, possibly criminal, by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Orleans Levee Board, that flooded 80% of the city.
It's a passing glance at one of the thousands of sad stories in the city.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-07 02:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-07 10:26 am (UTC)That's because they're all _here_ now! Want 'em back?
:)
"Most of the area flooded was no damn ghetto."
Another aspect of that as a relative newcomer's observations is that compared to all the cities I've been to, New Orleans never seemed to have one primrary section of "ghetto" in the same manner as in other western cities. It's the only city I've ever been in that one could find a prosperous neighborhood on one block, then a very poor one on the next and so on. In other places in New Orleans I've been have had a real scattered pockets of different neighborhoods or a real melding of blacks and whites in the same neighborhood such as where my in-laws live, in Algiers.
Another note: I work with a lot of people up here either that grew up in the 9th Ward or still had relatives living there and most of them are white.
North Shore refugeee population
Date: 2005-12-08 03:13 am (UTC)Any of 'em who thinks there should be a New Orleans and is willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work on rebuilding, send 'em down.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 02:34 am (UTC)I've noticed that here on The Coast as well, but that influx began before The Storm. It has simply accelerated since then.