One Man’s Carpetbagger Is Another Man’s Freedom Rider. The Outside Agitators in New Orleans.
A member of the protest of the month club in Oakland, California by Rahula Janowski.
The YouTube Riot
A retelling of the events in City Council chambers is provided by New Orleans Nation in the post City Hall Riot.
“This is a YouTube riot,” I tell the woman next to me, and we both keep asking why the cops don’t get those “media” people out of the aisles, as they’re obviously the ones keeping this thing hot.
Here, I think, is how history gets played out today, how the record is made of anger–through the shouts of the dispossessed as captured by the ambivalent handheld camera. I remember in the 2000 RNC riots in Philadelphia, there was a protest crew that called itself “Camcorder Jihad.” This afternoon’s digital crew is more limp, but perhaps more malignant.
I was speaking with Eli Ackerman, who was concerned about how so many in New Orleans have been critical of the public housing activists. Eli assures me that the national media coverage is sympathetic to New Orleans public housing residents.
I’ve been bagging on these interlopers myself.
The local line is to call them outside agitators. An insult that traces it’s linage back to carpetbagger, perhaps. An accusation that is not going to ruffle feathers outside of New Orleans, where when people think of Northern interlopers in the South, they think of the Freedom Riders. (I think of AmericaSpeaks and ICF International.)
There Is Indeed Such a Thing as Bad Press
With two stunning own goals. The public housing interlopers must be taking classes in public relations from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
First, there was the horrible public housing flier that threatened to burn down condos and dominated talk radio while the Housing Conservation District Review Committee (HCDRC) voted to permit the demolition of B.W. Cooper and C.J. Peete housing developments.
Then there is the lovely piece on Sharon Jasper, former public housing resident now living in voucher backed housing with a wide-screen TV, who I hope has now fired her publicist.
Mark Mosley writes about Sharon Jasper in Playing Into Your Opponent’s Hands, where a long conversation about the possibility of Cadillac driving welfare queens.
Frankly, your whole line of reasoning reminds me all to much of Reagan’s use of a single welfare mother who had a Cadillac — and the result was slashed programs for the poor and the biggest incidence of homelessness I’ve seen in my lifetime.
I don’t think your argument has any merit at all. I am absolutely not in favor of humiliating human beings on public assistance by making them account for every detail of their lives. We ALL benefit from tax dollars — from roads to schools to hospitals. I also have no doubt many of these folks do work and they all pay taxes. So unless you’re willing to also undergo the humiliation of being asked why you buy and wear and do by some public official, I don’t see why folks on public assistance should undergo that humiliation.
Comments from Nightprowlkitty and wintermute are also of interest.
The counter argument can be found in the coursing river of racist bile in the comments section beneath the article at NOLA.com. It has been stated with some moderation in the comments of Your Right Hand Theif.
I know that there are people who REALLY need help. But, people like this don’t and should be evicted. The 60 inch TV proves the mentality over the reality.
I don’t like to live poor, either. It is either expensive Christmas gifts or a cold winter. I just put $1500.00 in oil in the tank, so it’s DVD’s, CD’s and cheap dollies and cheap toys at the dollar store for my children.
A public relations disaster this, but I’m sure to the public housing interlopers feel that the reaction this bit of press is only a showing of true colors.
Speak for Yourself
In all the back and forth about Sharon Jasper’s television and the indignities of means testing, the discussion of Sharon Jasper is dishearteningly paternal. Sharon Jasper said incredibly foolish things to the Times-Picayune. She comes off as ungrateful for a lovely home, perhaps because she is an ingrate.
She was presented as a spokesperson at City Hall by activists according to Housing Officials Claim Surplus.
Sharon Jasper, a former St. Bernard complex resident presented by activists Tuesday as a victim of changing public housing policies, took a moment before the start of the City Hall protest to complain about her subsidized private apartment, which she called a “slum.”
The Times-Picayune held her up gladly. The Times-Picayune follows up on the day of the City Council hearing by quoting her making hateful statements that are racial if not racist, to other people in City Council chambers who’d merely attended a public hearing. Was not admittance all that protesters asked for at the gate?
Kawana and Sharon Jasper make Michelle Malkin happy, and therefore they both make me very unhappy. We do not want the attention of Michelle Malkin. We do not want to have the nation’s understanding of New Orleans devolve into an issue for the fringes.
Sharon Jasper is an unpleasant person. She is a deplorable spokesperson.
White Anti-Racist, Anti-Imperialist
While the protesters and police clashed at City Hall, a protest took place in Oakland, California. Oakland Demo against NOLA home Demolitions according to East Bay IndyMedia, the work of an organization called the Heads Up Collective.
The LiveJournal page of the Heads Up Collective explains who they are:
The Heads Up Collective is a white anti-racist, anti-imperialist project. We are rooted in the global justice and anti-war movements. We developed through the mass actions that rocked the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and through opposition to the right-wing military advances of the U.S. government launched at home and abroad after the devastating attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001.
I don’t see how outside agitators plan to effect change when it is guided by a vision that is as poorly refined as the one above.
The issue of public housing is racially charged. It makes sense that “white anti-racist” groups would be drawn to New Orleans, looking for a charge to ignite the cultural pyrotechnics of the WTO in Seattle in 1999. It does not serve the the residents of public housing to have their cause sent in the direction of “anti-imperialism” and rockin’ mass actions.
They make the issue of race is paramount, the issue of housing is ancillary, when in reality we all understand the housing to be paramount and race to be ancillary.
Racism exists. It has existed. It will exist. To make public housing primarily an issue of race is folly. We can’t eliminate racism as a precondition to the repopulation of the city. To make race the focal issue is to make everyone’s efforts to provide housing for former residents of public housing quixotic.
Digital Communication
A San Franciscan I know in passing, a young woman who I find laughably serious, shot me the bird from the protester side of the iron gate mentioned in all the press. I’d made eye contact, she gave me the finger. This was before the clash with police, so there was still time to smile at the gesture.
It amused me. This is the extent of outreach on the part of these public housing interlopers. To find a time and place to accuse and insult.
When the local bloggers bemoan the outside agitators, they are thinking of Jay Arena, (hi, Jay). They recall confrontations in UNOP meetings, where people had surrendered yet another evening for yet another planning meeting. They were in no mood to hear about how they were the oppressors.
Yet, if ever there was an opportunity to find common cause between public housing residents and their fellow citizens, it was in the summer of planning, the year of our lord, 2006.
A Sufficient Number of Public Housing Units to Accommodate All
From a passage of the UNOP District 4, Appendex A: 20 Recovery Projects:
Project Name: Redevelop and Improve B.W. Cooper Housing and
Adjacent Area
Type of Project: High Recovery ValueThis project will establish a mixed-income neighborhood that combines phased renovation of existing buildings of value and the addition of new buildings. Existing units will be combined to make larger units, while decreasing total unit density. New infill housing will be located in adjacent neighborhoods on adjudicated and vacant properties. The design will reflect a variety of compatible types that integrate the look of the surrounding neighborhoods. The project will use public infrastructure funding to re-establish the street grid, sidewalks, landscaping and utilities. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has declared its intention to rehabilitate and rebuild public housing in the City of New Orleans. This project is part of ensuring that HUD provides a sufficient number of public housing units to accommodate all displaced former public housing tenants in their own neighborhoods in a short- and long-term strategy. Public housing should be rehabilitated and/or built to the highest sustainable standards and be of a significantly higher density than current HOPE 6 policies to establish a critical mass that will support and sustain retail, social services and community programs.
Who’s idea was it to ensure that “HUD provides a sufficient number of public housing units to accommodate all displaced former public housing tenants in their own neighborhoods in a short- and long-term strategy?”
This is an idea of our own, cobbled together by the collaboration of the residents of Planning District 4, Gert Town, Mid-City, Hollygrove, et al. It does not mention mixed-income housing, and explicitly states a desire for a higher density of public housing.
In the year after the flood, when so few of us had a home, when so many of us depended on the city, on society and on each other, the challenges faced by public housing residents where not inconceivable.
Ghetto Clearance as Conventional Wisdom
The Freedom Riders were outside agitators, attempting to ride a bus with integrated passengers through the South to New Orleans in 1961. They were attempting to force the hand of the federal government, since the Supreme Court had ruled in 1947 that interstate buses could not be segregated. They been beaten, arrested and tortured in Alabama. They never arrived in New Orleans.
This time however, the outside agitators do have not the support of city, state or federal government. They do not have a strategy to achieve a political goal. They simply cannot chain themselves to every public housing structure every day in the coming year. It is not mass action, it is street theater. Their actions are self-defeating. They provide political cover for officials to dismiss the plight of public housing residents.
It is the federal government, HUD and the crooked outside agitator Alphonso Jackson, that wishes to raze public housing with the support of HANO, and now the City Council. The City of New Orleans is not alone in it’s efforts to eradicate poverty by eradicating the homes in which the poor live. This is now the conventional wisdom at the federal level. It is the Right Thing(tm) to do.
Approaching this issue from the fringes only makes the weak arguments for demolition look rational.
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us
For the rest of the nation, the City of New Orleans has become a truly tasteless racist joke, where the wind up is school buses full of the impoverished rolling across the border into Texas and the razing of 4,500 public housing units is the punch line.
If you wonder why we’ve attracted outside agitators, it is because the injustice is so apparent and the hypocrisies are so bald. The same sort of decent folk who have felt compassion for the City of New Orleans are going to wonder why we can’t extend that compassion to the most impoverished residents of New Orleans.
In writing about New Orleans, I often want to quote Walt Kelly’s paraphrase, “We have met the enemy and he is us”, of Oliver Hazard Perry’s dispatch after the Battle of Lake Erie: “We have met the enemy and they are ours — two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.” (This begs the question who is Walt Kelly? He was the Berke Breathed of the ’50’s. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry is figure from Great Lakes history.)
While searching for the exact Kelly quote, I found the forward to The Pogo Papers which reads.
Specializations and markings of individuals everywhere abound in such profusion that major idiosyncracies can be properly ascribed to the mass. Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.
There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.
If there is one thing that the outside agitators have demonstrated that they can achieve, it is to alienate the people who care. This is something that we as a city cannot afford.
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Ray, you are misunderstanding my interest in this story.
I am not trying to change public policy about public housing.
Both of us can only show anecdotal evidence as to what folks from out of state are thinking. I am saying as an individual who has tried to follow what is going on in New Orleans that I used the story as an opportunity alert folks in NYC about what the federal government is doing. And it was effective.
I’m certainly not saying someone in New York is going to help solve the problems of how to provide public housing or assistance to folks with housing in New Orleans. I have never made that claim.
What I AM saying is that folks not only from NY but from all over the country have an opportunity to speak out about what our federal government is doing with federal tax dollars. What is happening now in New Orleans is happening all over the country.
I hope I have made it more clear what I’m speaking of here. This is a national issue and we all are affected by what the feds are doing to our country. If we can bring national attention to what HUD is doing it won’t be so easy for them to get away with bilking the taxpayer by giving out crony contracts and doing shady deals.
Sunlight can be a powerful disinfectant that way. So I still maintain the protesters did bring national attention to this issue and there is an opportunity because of that to keep the story going.
Thank you all for commenting, Ray, Kitty, Karen, Maitri, Eli, Tom, and then especially Tom, Ray, Karen and Kitty for helping me understand matters better.
Kitty, I’m glad that it gives you a place to to take the discussion in New York. It is interesting. I often say that the politics of New Orleans are not about red and blue, or black and white, they are about wet and dry. In the realm of nonprofiteering, there is a thing called outreach. I do my outreach with a simple question, “You on the Road Home?” or “Where you with Allstate?” or simply, “How much water did you get?” There is a common experience that binds us.
(Of course, I need to be careful here because I didn’t loose anything to the storm. My possessions where safely stored on in a second floor storage locker when I spent the summer in Ann Arbor, but the point is that…)
This is common experience. Everyone has a story of this experience. The common experience extends to the trauma and stress not only of the flood, but of the recovery. Road Home, Imminent Health Threat, the murder rate and home invasions, FEMA trailers, broken pumps, and broken schools.
So, Kitty, I’m amazed at how many people have soured on the current administration. Bhutto’s assassination had people talking and people are beginning to see how overextended we are.
There is a common thread, which is the failure of the federal government, the cronyism, the loyalty to the administration and the politicization of the federal bureaucracy, and the contracts. Oh, the contracts.
Ray, we should take it from here. If we don’t like Jay Arena tactics we should form our own think tanks. This is why I’m developing the unconference series, so we have a place to meet and set a neighborhood driven agenda for the redevelopment of the city.
Tom, I’m reading through the UNOP documents. I’m going to post on each of the public housing developments and the UNOP redevelopment plans for each. For all the effort that we poured into the UNOP, I see no indication that we are following it.
Nightprowlkitty: If you want to change what HUD is doing then, yes, you want to change public policy–maybe not dramatically or force an overhaul or force things to go back to the way they were before (which was a disaster), but any change would represent policy change. Speaking of NYC, the Village Voice had HUD listed as the worst landlord in the city a few years back in a Top 10 list of such. It’s had problems for years, and it shouldn’t have taken anything happening in NOLA for people to see that. (Look up info about the Miami debacle if you want to read more.) Seeking reform of HUD is an attempt to seek policy change, and there is no shame in that. What the federal government does with its take dollars *is* public policy.
Ray
I would like to read about the Miami debacle. Can you provide some links? Also, you say, “I heard little in the way of nuance or rational discussion during this whole debacle, but instead emotional talk and assumptions about how, oh, that public housing was meant to be temporary.” I’m interested in reading about the history of the intent of public housing. I know that it has swung back and forth from temporary housing to low-income housing.
Ray - you say:
“It’s [HUD] had problems for years, and it shouldn’t have taken anything happening in NOLA for people to see that.”
Sure, HUD has had problems for years. For the past seven years in particular, the entire structure of our federal government has had more than just “problems” but has been practically dismantled and sold off to the highest bidder.
Yes, you’re right, to demand accountability is talking about public policy.
I don’t know how to explain it to you from the position of someone not from the area but who loves the City of New Orleans for many reasons (most of them very personal). Don’t know how to explain that although I lived only a mile away from Ground Zero on 9/11 I have not blogged about New York City, except in poetry.
I was educated by NOLA posters at Daily Kos about the true story of what had happened — felt personally cheated that I was not being given the truth by our traditional media, not even an approximation of the truth. I went from there to the local NOLA blogs to learn more, as well as speaking with friends I have who live there. It took more than a year of this before I even began to blog about New Orleans.
It’s not just about public housing to me. There are also the demolitions going on of middle class housing, as Karen Gadbois has detailed so thoroughly (along with Matt McBride’s recent writing about this).
It’s about city planning generally. I have no expertise in this area, nor do I claim any. As a blogger, all I wish to do is inform other folks like me, from outside the area, of the real story, to the best of my ability.
My only desire (and I will tell you that desire is shared by many folks who live out of state) is that the people of New Orleans, not federal agencies, get to make the decisions of how the city will be restored and rebuilt. It’s not a big role I play, nor do I claim it is. But spreading the word and debunking the false stories is something any blogger can do if they pay attention — and I do think it makes a difference. Every person who gets educated is one less person that can be duped by the mendacity driving the politicians and the traditional media.
Whether it is public housing, demolition of private homes, the levees, the Saints, insurance companies, the real story deserves to be heard by everyone in this country.
Alan, thank you for your response — I particularly like the “wet-dry” characterization and will no doubt steal that when I write about this subject again.