Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Who is killing New Orleans?

Nicole Gelinas:

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...New Orleans’s immutable civic shame, before and after Katrina, is not racism, poverty, or inequality, but murder—a culture of murder so vicious and so pervasive that it terrorizes and numbs the whole city.

In 2003, New Orleans’s murder rate was nearly eight times the national average—and since then, murder has increased. In 2002 and 2003, New Orleans had the highest per capita city homicide rate in the United States, with 59 people killed per year per 100,000 citizens—compared to New York City’s seven. New Orleans is a New York with nearly 5,000 murders a year—an unlivable place. The city’s economy has sputtered over the past generation partly because local and state officials have failed to do the most elementary job of government: to secure the personal safety of citizens.

The president wasn’t alone in his misperception of what ails New Orleans. In the aftermath of the storm, hand-wringers wondered why they hadn’t noticed before that so many American blacks live in Third World conditions—supposedly only because they’re black. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer voiced white America’s knee-jerk best: “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals. . . . So many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor, and they are so black,” he mused on the air.

But Americans didn’t notice this before because it’s not true. Despite the president’s rhetoric, and despite those indelible images from the Superdome and the Convention Center, New Orleans is just as much a black success story as a black failure story.

Yes, New Orleans has a 28 percent poverty rate, and yes, New Orleans is 67 percent black. But nearly two-thirds of New Orleans’s blacks aren’t poor.

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Despite the images of collective helplessness broadcast after Katrina, New Orleans does not have a stratospherically high government-dependency rate. In 2002, it had 6,696 families on cash welfare, or 3.6 percent, compared with New York City’s 98,000 families, or 3.2 percent. In 2000, 7.8 percent of New Orleans households received Supplemental Security Income, compared with 7.5 percent in New York.

Anyone familiar with New Orleans knows that the city is filled with hard-working people—most of them black. Welfare reform, in New Orleans as in the rest of the country, worked; between 1996 and 2002, Louisiana cut its welfare rolls by 66 percent. The only virtue of New Orleans’s tourism-dependent economy is that those with few skills who want to work can work; the city’s unemployment rate was 5.2 percent during 2004, lower than New York’s 7.1 percent.

But not all black New Orleanians are consigned to working as busboys or hotel maids. The city long has had a substantial black middle class, and indeed a black affluent class.

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During slavery, New Orleans had the largest urban population of free blacks after Baltimore. As Haas relates, the children who were the product of “mixed sexual unions” were often sent to Europe for education by their white fathers—and often returned better educated than many of their white local counterparts. With the help of substantial inheritances, they formed a black elite that persists in New Orleans to this day.

Likewise, less wealthy New Orleans blacks, “with their commitment to education, industry and self-reliance, defied all stereotypes of black inferiority” and formed New Orleans’s vibrant black middle class, Deberry wrote in his Times-Picayune piece. “[O]ther southern cities would develop black middle classes that would dwarf New Orleans’s. But that doesn’t mean the one in New Orleans ever went away.” The city’s historically black colleges—Dillard University, Southern University at New Orleans, and Xavier University—have never stopped churning out educated, middle-class black graduates.

There is much more.