New Orleans is a relatively small American city that sometimes seems not to be part of the United States at all. Until Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was glamorized by images of Black jazz and White dissipation. After Katrina, as if a curtain had been ripped away, it was revealed as a particularly extreme example of the continuing subjugation of the descendants of enslaved Africans.
New Orleans is now two cities: one White and prosperous; the other Black and poor. Caste is presented in a most literal manner in New Orleans: White neighborhoods are on higher ground than the predominately Black neighborhoods of the city. This became a crucial difference after the hurricane, when the ill-constructed levees broke, as the authorities knew that they would, and the lowest-lying parts of the city were flooded 20 feet deep, many of their inhabitants drowned, others driven out of the city.
Reconstruction, as well, was conducted on racial lines, abetted by and abetting private profit, almost as if the ill-constructed levees, the botched emergency measures, and the vulture reconstruction were intended to alter the demography of the city. Which is what happened. Post-Katrina, the Black population declined by 119,000 people, more than the current White population of the city, half of whom did not live there before Katrina.
Those remaining Black residents of New Orleans, especially men, die much younger than White residents of the city. White life expectancy is 76.2 years; Black life expectancy is 67.4 years, except in the city’s poorest, Blackest neighborhoods, where life expectancy is 54.5 years, nearly a generation shorter than that of their White fellow citizens.
Income disparities in New Orleans are also quite extreme. White per capita income in the city is $43,022 and quite concentrated at the top: a quarter of New Orleans White families have incomes over $150,000 a year. And fifteen percent of White families (3,154) have incomes over $200,000 per year (as compared to 6% nationally). At the other end of the income distribution, the poverty rate for White people in New Orleans was 13.5% in 2010; just 7% of White residents of New Orleans receive Food Stamp/SNAP benefits and only 8% of White children under age 18 live in poverty. This picture of prosperity contrasts with the poverty of African American New Orleans. Black per capita income is $15,243; only 2% of New Orleans Black families have incomes over $150,000 a year, hardly any have incomes over $200,000. The poverty rate for Black people in New Orleans was 30% in 2010, more than twice the White rate. Twenty-eight percent of Black residents of New Orleans receive Food Stamp/SNAP benefits; that is, four times the proportion of White New Orleans residents. Forty-six percent of Black children under age 18 live in poverty, nearly six times the White rate. More than half, 53%, of Black families with children and no husband present, live in poverty, more than twice the percentage of similarly constituted White families in the city.
This extreme downward compression of Black incomes in New Orleans is a manifestation of the limited types of employment opportunities for African Americans in the city. In White New Orleans 55% of the civilian employed population are managers, business and professional people, 14% work in service populations. In Black New Orleans, just 24% are managers, business and professional people and 28% work in service occupations. Black New Orleans serves White New Orleans. You might say it has always been thus. There are just fewer, poorer, African Americans in New Orleans these days.
Wealth, the “real” property of housing and financial assets, is crucial to the well-being of people living in a non-socialist economy. Wealth is a cushion against adversity (such as a hurricane or unemployment) and is crucial for intergenerational economic mobility. As with incomes, there are stark disparities in wealth between the Black and White communities in New Orleans. More than one-third, 37%, of White households in New Orleans had interest, dividends, or net rental income in 2010, as compared to 7% of Black households. The largest asset of most American families is an owner-occupied house. Vincanne Adams has documented the catastrophic effects of Katrina and the privatized “recovery” actions, which have left many families without the homes in which they had lived for generations. The wealth of the average White household in New Orleans is at least twenty times larger than that of the average Black household. This is not a difference of class; it is a demarcation of caste.
There is little intergenerational family income upward mobility in New Orleans’s Black community. The odds are two-to-one against a Black child in New Orleans doing much better in life than that child’s parents. In New Orleans’s Black community 60% of the children are born into the bottom national quintile in income, 80% in the bottom two. Two-thirds of New Orleans’s Black Americans are at the poverty level in income with little wealth and little hope of improving their situation.
Why is that? The forces at work to enforce the subordinate caste status of African Americans in New Orleans, as elsewhere, depend on the education system and the criminal justice system. It is just that matters are more extreme in New Orleans than in most other places, more out in the open, easier to understand.
To begin with education. Levels of educational attainment are correlated with income, wealth, economic mobility and probability of incarceration. Nearly a quarter of New Orleans Black adults, ages 25 and over, do not have a high school diploma. The corresponding percentage for White residents is 6%. More than half, 56%, of White residents of the city have a Bachelor’s degree or higher, as compared to only 15% of Black residents. The comparative lack of educational attainment of the New Orleans Black community is a limiting factor for the economic condition of that community and, given the unusually high degree of educational attainment of the White community in the city, is significant for the disparities between those communities.
The structure of public education in New Orleans is approaching the condition of the famously complicated Schleswig-Holstein Question in nineteenth-century European politics, of which the British statesman Lord Palmerston is reported to have said: “Only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One is dead. The second became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.” The New Orleans public schools, like those of New York City, began as charity institutions for the poor, which in New Orleans meant, for the most part, the city’s Black residents. Other children were sent to private schools among which those of the Roman Catholic Church were prominent. By the early twenty-first century the New Orleans public schools not only served a predominately African American student body, they supported large numbers of African American staff and teachers. After Hurricane Katrina the state government took the opportunity to introduce “an experiment” in which the majority of public schools were removed from the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) and placed under the supervision of a so-called “Recovery” School District (RSD). Thousands of (Black) employees of the school district were fired, devastating the Black middle class. Now OPSB and RSD contract out the education of the city’s children, in large part, to independent charter schools. This situation is made all the more unusual by the provision of vouchers by the state, transferring funds to private schools, some of which are church-run, many others of which are not recognized by the State’s own Department of Education. 18% of New Orleans Black students are enrolled in private (including Catholic) schools, as are 79% of White students, leaving the public schools (including charters) 88% Black, not much changed from the day when the schools were a private charity.
On the Spring 2014 Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) test of English Language Arts at grade 8, results for the two public school organizations combined were something on the order of 4% “Advanced” and 15% showing “Mastery,” leaving 81% reading below grade level. Although the State Department of Education does not make results public by race, it is suggestive that the percentage of students not achieving mastery of this basic skill is just seven percent lower than the percentage of Black students in the system. In spite of the failure of the public schools in New Orleans to teach the overwhelming majority of students to read and write at grade level in grade 8, the State Department of Education reports that the Orleans Parish public schools graduated 1,137 students in 2011-12 and the Recovery School District graduated 1,134. Of those 2,271 graduates, according to the Department, 1,306 (58%) enrolled in college the next semester, 438 (19%) in two-year colleges and 869 (38%) in four-year colleges. The larger of the local universities, the University of New Orleans enrolled 1,259 first-time students in 2009, 200 of whom were Black, 82 of whom were African American men. In 2012 it graduated 328 students within 150% of normal time, 31 of whom were Black, 6 of whom were African American men. Southern University at New Orleans enrolled 437 first-time degree-seeking students in 2009, of whom 429 were Black and 167 of those were men. In 2012 it graduated 32 students within 150% of normal time, all of whom were Black, 10 of whom were men. Therefore those two institutions together enrolled 629 Black students, graduating 360, of whom 16 were Black men. If the state’s data on college attendance is accurate, it would appear that three-quarters of the New Orleans high school graduates who enrolled in four-year colleges attended those two schools and very few graduated within six years. (This accords with the fact that 58% of Black New Orleans residents ages 25 years and over reported to the Census that they had gone no further in their educations than a high school diploma.) Some graduating high school seniors went to other schools, some students in these schools came from other cities. There is a rough balance in these assumptions, given which, the data from the University of New Orleans and Southern University at New Orleans provides a reasonable gauge of the effectiveness of public education in New Orleans.
At which point we can turn to the issue of justice in Orleans Parish. Cindy Chang, writing in The Times-Picayune in 2012, reported that “Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts . . . Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s . . .
Among black men from New Orleans, one in 14 is behind bars; one in seven is either in prison on parole or on probation . . . In Louisiana, a two-time car burglar can get 24 years without parole. A trio of drug convictions can be enough to land you at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the rest of your life . . . Compared with the national average, Louisiana has a much lower percentage of people incarcerated for violent offenses and a much higher percentage behind bars for drug offenses . . . About 5,000 black men from New Orleans are doing state prison time, compared with 400 white men from the city. Because police concentrate resources on high-crime [i.e., Black] areas, minor lawbreakers there are more likely to be stopped and frisked or caught up in a drug sweep then, say, an Uptown college student with a sideline marijuana business.
An investigation of the New Orleans Police Department by the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, had found that: “NOPD’s failure to acknowledge the potential for stereotypes and bias to taint police work, on both an individual and an organizational level, and to take steps to prevent this, further cultivates an atmosphere in which discriminatory policing can occur unchecked.
Indeed, the limited arrest data that the Department collects points to racial disparities in arrests of whites and African Americans in virtually all categories, with particularly dramatic disparity for African-American youth under the age of 17 . . . in 2009, the Department arrested 500 African-American males and eight white males under the age of 17 for serious offenses, which range from homicide to larceny over fifty dollars. During this same period the Department arrested 65 African-American females and one white female in this same age group. Adjusting for population, these figures mean that the ratio of arrest rates for both African-American males to white males, and African-American females to white females, was nearly 16 to 1 . . . Nationally in 2009 . . . the arrest ratio of African-American youth to white youth, for the same offenses, was approximately 3 to 1 . . . Of the 27 instances between January 2009 and May 2010 in which NOPD officers intentionally discharged their firearms at people, all 27 of the subjects of this deadly force were African American.
There are 26,000 Black male residents of New Orleans between ages 20 and 40. If we believe that about 60% of those graduated from high school, that leaves, at a minimum, 10,400 who did not. This is the group, nationally, most likely to suffer incarceration “in their life course,” as Bruce Western puts it. As the average prison sentence in the U.S. is about five years, it would seem that over the twenty year span of that cohort, it is highly likely that all Black males in New Orleans who did not graduate from high school would at some point by age 40 have been incarcerated, on parole, on probation, with limited employment opportunities and greatly damaged social relations. All those and a good few other Black men in the city as well.
It is not therefore surprising that in 2010 the Census counted 3,090 African Americans in New Orleans in correctional facilities for adults—and just 1,761 in college/university student housing.
The nationally funded and privately profitable “recovery” of New Orleans has decimated the city’s Black community, clearing broad areas of the city of its Black population. The educational experiment on the Black population of New Orleans, charters, vouchers, “portfolio management,” has resulted in more than four out of five children unable to read at grade level in grade 8. Those who manage to graduate from high school, with an unusual and undocumented range of diplomas, are so ill-prepared for college that just a few hundred, nearly all women, graduate within six years. The rest of the men are available to jails and prisons, in some cases run as for-profit enterprises.
General Sherman, when asked how to treat an enemy, advised that “they should be left with nothing but eyes with which to weep.” Do we wish it said that post-Katrina New Orleans is how the United States of America treats its own citizens at their most vulnerable?
Thu Nov 13, 2014 at 8:33 AM PT: In 1999 median household income for Black families in New Orleans ($21,408) was 54% of that for White families ($39,722). In 2010 median household income for Black families ($27,107) was just 47% of median household income for White families ($57,245). The increase for Black families ($5,500) was less than a third of that for White families ($17,000).