Whites Take a Majority on New Orleans’s Council

NYT

November 20, 2007
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 19 — In one of the clearest signs yet of Hurricane Katrina’s lasting demographic impact, the City Council is about to have a white majority for the first time in over two decades, pointing up again the storm’s displacement of thousands of residents, mostly black.

In local elections on Saturday, a veteran white politician, Jacquelyn B. Clarkson, defeated an African-American candidate, Cynthia Willard-Lewis, by 53 percent to 47 percent, in a contest for an at-large Council seat decided largely along racial lines. In addition, substantially more whites than blacks appear to have voted. Ms. Clarkson will become the fourth white member on the seven-member Council.

The total number of votes cast in the election — 52,614 — was sharply down from 113,000 in the election for mayor in May 2006. The low number called into question recent optimistic estimates that the city’s population had attained as much as two-thirds of its prestorm level, which was about 450,000.

In the 2006 election, many of those displaced by the hurricane voted absentee or drove into New Orleans to cast ballots. That vote from elsewhere appears to have been largely absent on Saturday, over two years after the storm.

“I think many people have moved on,” said Gregory C. Rigamer, a local demographic analyst whose work has been widely cited here. “When you look at this, you have to think the lower voter turnout would indicate that some people who previously cast votes from afar have lost interest.”

Since the mid-1980s, black politicians have held virtually all of the reins of power in a city where interest groups are sharply factionalized along racial lines and blacks were once two-thirds of the population. Saturday’s vote indicated a transition is in the making, perhaps similar to the one that occurred at the end of the segregation era here.

White candidates made other gains on Saturday, taking two New Orleans seats in the Louisiana Legislature long held by blacks, and a state court judgeship that had also been occupied by a black judge.

Voting was largely along racial lines. The apparently greater number of votes cast by whites — 29,700, compared with 22,900 black votes, according to an analysis by Mr. Rigamer — makes uncertain widely quoted estimates that blacks, despite a disproportionate population loss, are still substantially in the majority here.

The weekend election appeared to confirm what many had predicted immediately after the storm in 2005: New Orleans became almost overnight a smaller, whiter city with a much reduced black majority. And the results suggested that the election for mayor last year, where voting percentages were closer to pre-Katrina norms, might have been something of a fluke.

“Either blacks have really decided not to come back, in numbers, or they just voted by not voting,” said Cheron Brylski, a veteran political consultant here. “I’m really amazed at the number who just didn’t show up, knowing what was at stake.”

“I think this is the new normal,” she added. “We have to accept the fact that this is who is here, and this is who is back.”

The results on Saturday were greeted with gloom in black political circles.

“It is somewhat disheartening,” said Bill Rouselle, a veteran African-American consultant here. “It’s an indication that a lot of people have given up hope. A lot of people feel abandoned.”

Though not as highly publicized as the mayor’s race last year, the race for one of two at-large seats on the seven-member Council was nonetheless closely watched in New Orleans. The event that prompted the contest — the resignation of a popular black councilman who pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge — shocked the city as few events in public life here have, appearing as confirmation that a miasma of corruption still held sway in New Orleans.

Virtually none of the post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction projects planned by the city have gotten off the ground. Racial divisions on the Council have been sharp, and confrontations with Mayor C. Ray Nagin are frequent, though usually fruitless.

Ms. Brylski, the consultant, suggested that this might change under the newly constituted Council. “I do think the power shifts to the City Council,” she said, “and it’s incumbent on them to do something.

This is, after all, "the old South," home of the good old boys. What did you expect? Oh, and into whose pockets did all the money allocated to relief and rebuilding go?

I had a friend who was a subcontractor on a lucrative recovery project. He just walked away when the contractor "explained the game" to him. Glad there are still some people of principle left.

Had another friend who is a member of the Rainbow Family. They descended on NOLA en mass from all parts of the country to set up soup kitchens. My friend, an experienced kitchen person, ran a kitchen that fed 5000 people a day for free. According to what I've heard they were about the most effective relief group, and they hitchhiked there, worked for free, and scammed the food. But they are no account DFH's ("dirty farkin' hippies").

Labratory indeed.

This isn't racism. It's domestic neoliberalism. Local Floridian governments have been declaring poor areas devastated by hurricanes blighted areas to redevelop small towns into shore front real estate and encourage investment and revenue for taxes for a few years now.

No living room for the poor class. They're a drain on government resources and most never stop being a drain. What good are they from a cost-benefit analysis? Better to force them to relocate and let some other town/city pick up the tab.

It has been obvious for a long time that God in America hates poor people. That's how he shows it...by making them poor. I think since the Calvinist Puritan beginnings.
If you are poor in America you are flawed almost beyond redemption. And you will only be redeemed thru violence, that great American redemptive force.
Forget all that Jesus crap in the New Testament about the poor. It has been effectively edited out.