Did Closing the Large Housing Projects in New Orleans Create a Spike in Crime and Violence? By Dr. Lance Hill

One of the post-Katrina policies touted as a way of reducing poverty and crime was to demolish most of the large housing projects and disperse the poor throughout the city (and the nation). Apparently the planners were not paying attention to what happened in Memphis when this policy was implemented.

In New Orleans, dispersing the poor also meant dispersing some of those who deal drugs, which would inevitably lead to a new war over drug markets. Combine that with a generation of untreated Katrina-traumatized poor youth, expelling them or driving them out of the new profit-driven charter schools, and skyrocketing Black unemployment and poverty rates because Blacks have been locked out of the billions in recovery money, and one can see the futility of proposals to “arrest and imprison” our way out of this problem or blame fragmented and dispersed families and local communities for problems that were imposed on them by social planners who wanted a whiter and more affluent New Orleans.

Now there are cries to bring out the National Guard to meet the problem of traumatized youth who could care less about the criminal justice consequences of their actions because they expect to be quickly executed in retaliatory actions for their crimes. The National Guard tactic was tried in Puerto Rico several years ago but only showed some success because crime and violence was concentrated in a few public housing neighborhoods, which we no longer have for the most part. The National Guard assisted local police in New Orleans after Katrina, but that was in a city largely depopulated. Now that we have forcibly dispersed the poor internally in a 180 square mile area, the chance of anticipating and preventing violence through policing seems very unlikely.

But we do have proven solutions that overcome geography and trauma. They begin with remedying the injustices of the Katrina recovery. Opening tens of thousands of jobs to local residents would reduce, not increase violence. It would not end it, but it would improve on the 37% Black poverty rate we have now—a rate higher than before Katrina. We had $20 billion to spend on hiring local workers and we did not; we now have another $20 billion in recovery dollars and there is no plan to change the policy of relying on cheap, itinerant, outside labor. People who self-medicate their emotional pain with street drugs can be removed from the deadly drug market by providing comprehensive mental health programs and prescription drugs for the indigent. And we can ban the practice of expelling special needs students and low-performing students from our schools and also stop driving them into dead-end “prison prep” dumping schools just so that privatized charter schools can inflate their test scores and make a profit.

What does the future hold? We now have 65% of Black children under the age of five living in poverty in New Orleans, facing a bleak future. The Census Bureau says that as of 2010, there is not a single white male between the ages of 13 to 15 living in poverty in the city of New Orleans. Is there a correlation to the relative low crime and violence rate among young white males and the fact that, although they too experienced the trauma of Katrina, they came back to private mental health care, free anti-depressants and counseling, and their parents' homes were not demolished nor were their jobs stolen? They face a bright, secure, future.

The model for solving the problem of New Orleans Black youth crime and violence is right in front of us: it’s just across St. Charles Avenue.

Dr. Lance Hill is the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, a tolerance education and race relations research center based at Tulane University in New Orleans. He is the author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and The Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Poverty Skyrockets in New Orleans: 65% of Black Children Under Age of Five Living in Poverty, By Lance Hill

On September 22 the Census Bureau released information from their 2010 annual American Community Survey based on a poll of 2,500 people in New Orleans. Not surprisingly, the report was ignored by the local mainstream media since it speaks volumes about the inequality of the Katrina recovery. Despite the billions in post-Katrina federal dollars for building schools, streets and bridges, and homes, the New Orleans poverty rate has actually increased back to the highest level since 1999. The survey revealed that 27% of New Orleans adults now live in poverty and 42% of children.

This recent development reverses the temporary decline in poverty rates reported in 2007 and 2008 surveys when the poverty rate was nearly cut in half compared to pre-Katrina numbers. Those early declines in poverty were probably the result of large numbers of low-income African Americans who could not afford to return or lacked housing and employment. The new spike in poverty, despite the increase in overall education levels in the city, may signal that blacks are not sharing equally in the employment benefits of recovery dollars. Indeed, the city may be creating a new generation of chronically unemployed poor who were previously part of the low-wage working poor.

When President George Bush waived the prevailing wage provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act following Katrina, he provided employers with a financial incentive to hire low-wage outside temporary workers. State contracts to rebuild storm-damaged schools have provided little employment for black storm victims. The new rise in poverty can be attributed in part to the exclusion of local blacks from recovery jobs, including rebuilding school facilities and school operations. It is self-defeating to attempt to solve the long-term public education problems while children and their parents are pushed deeper into poverty by education agency employment and contracting policies.

Separating out the numbers by race shows a profound and growing racial inequality. While the overall adult poverty rate is 27%, black poverty is nearly double the white poverty rate: 34% compared to 14%. The child poverty rate of black children under five years old is an appalling 65% compared to less than 1% for whites. The Census Bureau data indicate that there are 9,649 black children under the age of five living in poverty in New Orleans in contrast to only 203 white children.

But what is truly stunningly is that the survey indicates that that while there are several thousand African American males ages 12 to 15 years old living in poverty, the survey could not find a single white male in the same age bracket in poverty.

With all the triumphal rhetoric of New Orleans as a city rising from the dead, the Census Bureau data offers the harsh truth that that some have risen while others have fallen. We act at our own peril if we ignore these troubling developments; the problems of education and youth crime and violence cannot be solved as long as local blacks are unfairly deprived the economic benefits of the recovery and the recovery jobs for rebuilding the city.

Sources: Racial breakout data from U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2010 1-year Estimates (Fact Finder files); for general non-racial 1999 and 2007 data, Greater New Orleans Community Data Center which used Census Bureau reports, Numbers Talk Newsletter September 26, 2011. For spread-sheets of poverty by race in 2010, see this link for Black percentages and this link for white percentages. For GNODC report see this link.

Dr. Lance Hill is the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, a tolerance education and race relations research center based at Tulane University in New Orleans. He is the author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and The Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

More History Denial on Katrina Recovery, By Lance Hill

In the days before the fifth anniversary of Katrina, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published their first full story on the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC) "greenspace" plan. Predictably, it revises the history of the plan that they editorially endorsed and that Brown University researcher John Logan said would eliminate 80% of the black population.

One popular misconception reiterated in the article is that the only areas slated for demolition were those under the "green dots" on the planning map. In truth, the BNOBC plan, first proposed by the Urban Land Institute in November 2005, was designed to demolish all homes that flooded--and using that flood criteria, the result would have been the demolition of virtually all Black neighborhoods. Race was a key factor in given that the white Lakefront area was explicitly exempted from demolition (see attached map). The homes under the green dots were simply reserved for conversion to parks and retention ponds--"greenspace." In the end, under the BNOBC plan, most of New Orleans residential neighborhoods would have reverted to woodlands and swamps.

Granted, the BNOBC plan did contain a 120 day "planning period" in which neighborhoods had to prove they could recover or face demolition, but given that the residents of these neighborhoods were scattered to 5,500 cities in 48 states and most had no jobs, no means of returning, and it was illegal for residents to stay overnight even in their gutted homes in New Orleans East, the BNOBC planners knew that no neighborhood could re-convene and meet the criteria or deadline.

The best evidence of that the "neighborhood planning process" was a charade is found in the plan budget on page 57 of the BNOBC report below (http://bit.ly/BNOBCGreenspacePlan) which allocates $12.7 billion for "heavily flooded/damaged home acquisition" and "demolition and site remediation." The budget was sufficient to ensure that virtually all homes in the flooded residential areas would be demolished. In addition, although over 40% of blacks rented pre-Katrina, not one penny was budgeted to rebuild rentals.

More than simply a "green dot" problem, the fear that blacks had was of a vastly greater removal policy. As the Brown University report found: "The city of New Orleans could lose up to 80 percent of its black population if people displaced by Hurricane Katrina are not able to return to damaged neighborhoods, according to an analysis by a Brown University sociologist. Professor John R. Logan, in findings released Thursday, determined that if the city's returning population was limited to neighborhoods undamaged by Katrina, half of the white population would not return and 80 percent of the black population would not return."

Finally, the current level of blight is not, as the Times-Picayune suggests, the result of the failure to demolish homes and relocate residents. Since the plan was never to rebuild the city in its entirety, the city never requested funding to rebuild the damaged roads, water lines, and sewerage system for the entire city. Entergy, the local electric company, asked for and received $400 million in a federal bailout funds to rebuild the electrical grid for the entire city. New Orleans would have adequate infrastructure today if the elite planners had not been preoccupied with keeping most of the population out of the city. Most of the current blighted homes are a result of the failure of the planners to request any funds to restore rentals and then subsequently the state's policy of allocating home-owner rebuilding funds in a racially discriminatory way, according to a recent federal court ruling.

All of these injustices can be remedied and all neighborhoods restored if the political leadership, locally and nationally has the will to make people whole again.

Above Map: Revised Times-Picayune Map published August 23, 2010 (leaves out "flood-damaged" neighborhoods targeted for demolition. See map originally published).

Happy New Orleans? Kaiser Report Reveals Two Cities Five Years After The Storm

By Lance Hill, Ph.D., Executive Director, Southern Institute for Education and Research

Today the Times-Picayune published an editorial “New Orleans Is A Happy Place to Be,” drawing on the recent Kaiser Foundation survey. The Kaiser survey did reflect increased optimism but it is a frank overview of the problems and racial disparities that bedevil the recover. Moreover, the survey did not interview any of the 100,000 people that the Census Bureau estimates remain displaced from the city. A 2008 Louisiana Family Recovery Corps survey indicated that 75% of displaced African Americans want to return but could not afford moving costs, housing, and had no employment prospects.

Kaiser plans to release the total datasets which would allow us to see the racial breakouts of all the responses, but they have released some additional data that pertains to the need for affordable housing: for example, 42 percent of African American respondents said they were renting their residence, nearly double the 24 percent of whites who rent.

Here is the link to the new Kaiser Foundation report: New Orleans Five Years After The Storm. Much of the local media has spun this as a feel-good report in which New Orleanians are more concerned with the Horizon Oil Spill than with the lingering effects of Katrina. In fact, a slight majority of respondents simply said they thought the oil spill “will cause more damage” than Katrina, which could be taken as an assessment of the larger Gulf-Coast impact of the spill. Indeed, seventy percent of the respondents think that America has forgotten the challenges facing New Orleans.

Some of the responses were broken out by race and they provide some useful insights into the difference of opinions between black and white storm victims and the different ways they continue to experience the impact of the storm.

From the report:

Compared to whites, African Americans in Orleans Parish…

--are more likely to say that both their own lives (42% vs. 16%) and the city in general (66% vs. 49%) have not yet recovered from Hurricane Katrina;

--are more than twice as likely to be living in a low-income household (61% compared to 24%);

--are more likely to report having had trouble paying for food or housing over the past year (both 31% vs. 8%);

--are more likely to report being uninsured (25% vs. 10%) and to have had problems paying medical bills (29% vs. 13%);

--are substantially more likely to report worries, such as the 64% who say they are very worried their children won’t be able to get a good education, compared to 18% of whites, and 59% who say they are worried health care services might not be available when needed (vs. 21% for whites);

--are more likely to see the city as a bad place to raise children (51% vs. 35%).

Katrina Pain Index 2010 New Orleans - Five Years Later

By Bill Quigley, Davida Finger and Lance Hill
It will be five years since Katrina on August 29. The impact of Katrina is quite painful for regular people in the area. This article looks at what has happened since Katrina not from the perspective of the higher ups looking down from their offices but from the street level view of the people – a view which looks at the impact on the elderly, the renter, people of color, the disabled, the working and non-working poor. So, while one commentator may happily say that the median income in New Orleans has risen since Katrina, a street level perspective recognizes that is because large numbers of the poorest people have not been able to return.

Five years after Katrina, tens of thousands of homes in New Orleans remain vacant or blighted. Tens of thousands of African American children who were in the public schools have not made it back, nor have their parents. New Orleans has lost at least 100,000 people. Thousands of elderly and disabled people have not made it back. Affordable housing is not readily available so tens of thousands pay rents that are out of proportion to their wages. Race and gender remain excellent indicators of who is underpaid, who is a renter, who is in public school and who is low income.

In short, the challenges facing New Orleans after Katrina are the same ones facing millions of people of color, women, the elderly and disabled and their children across the US. Katrina just made these challenges clearer in New Orleans than in many other places. Here is where we are five years later.

Overall population

Five years after Katrina, the most liberal estimates are that 141,000 fewer people live in the metro New Orleans area. The actual population changes will not be clear until official Census Bureau findings are released in November, but it is safe to say that over 100,000 fewer live in the City of New Orleans.

The New Orleans metro area is made up of several parishes, primarily Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and St. Tammany. Orleans had 455,000 people before Katrina, now they have 354,000. Jefferson had 451,000 before Katrina, now they have 443,000. Plaquemines had 28,000 before Katrina, now they have 20,000. St. Bernard had 64,000 before Katrina, now they have 40,000. Source: Census Bureau.

Displaced People

Louisiana residents are located in more than 5,500 cities across the nation, the largest concentrations in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and San Antonio. A majority of displaced residents are women – 59% compared to 41% men. A third earn less than $20,000 a year. Source: Dana Alfred, Louisiana Disaster Recovery Corps (2007).

Lost housing

More than 1 in 4 residential addresses in New Orleans is vacant or blighted – by far the highest rate in the US. Though the numbers have been reduced somewhat in the last three years, 50,100 residential properties in New Orleans remain blighted or have no structure on them. Source: Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (hereafter GNOCDC), Benchmarks for Blight (May 7, 2010). See also, Michelle Krupa, Blighted Houses in New Orleans Dropping Steadily, Times Picayune.

About 58 percent of city renters and 45 percent of suburban renters pays more than 35 percent of their pre-tax household income for housing. Households should spend less than 30 percent of income on housing. Anything over 30 percent means that housing is not really affordable for that family and they are likely to cut back on other necessities. Source: GNOCDC, Housing in the New Orleans Metro, October 13, 2009.

Over 5000 families are on the waiting list for traditional public housing and another 28,960 families are on the waiting list for housing vouchers – more than double what it was before Katrina and the government destruction of thousands of public housing apartments. Since the post-Katrina bulldozing of several major public housing developments, there has been more than a 75% reduction in the number of public housing apartments available. Source: Housing Authority of New Orleans.

Rebuilding

Under Louisiana’s “Road Home” program to rebuild storm-damaged housing, rebuilding grants for homeowners on average fell about $35,000 short of the money needed to rebuild. The shortfall hit highly flooded, historically African-American communities particularly hard. The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center filed suit in 2008 against state and federal agencies charging that the grant policy was racially discriminatory and that black homeowners received far smaller grants than white homeowners. The judge in that case has opined that “on average, African-American homeowners received awards that fell farther short of the cost of repairing their homes than did white recipients” and while noting the parties’ commitment to rebuilding New Orleans, found it “regrettable that this effort to do so appears to have proceeded in a manner that disadvantaged African-American homeowners who wish to repair their homes.” Source: PolicyLink, A Long Way Home (2008) & Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center.

At least 19,746 applications for rebuilding homes that are eligible for funding have not received any money from the Road Home Program grant program. Source: The Road Home Program.

Economic Health

The metro area has 95,000 fewer jobs than before Katrina, down about 16 percent. Source: GNOCDC & Brookings, The New Orleans Index at 5, August 2010. Black and Latino households earn incomes that are $26,000 (44 percent) and $15,000 (25 percent) lower than whites. White household income is $56,000, Latino household income is $41,000 and African American household income is $35,000 in the metro New Orleans area. Source: Jesuit Social Research Institute, JustSouth Quarterly, Summer 2010.

New Orleans has a poverty rate of 23 percent more than double the national average of 11%. But because of the loss of people in New Orleans there are now more poor people living in the surrounding suburban parishes than in the city. Source: 2008 US Census Bureau, ACS; GNOCDC, Who Lives in New Orleans Now? October, 2009.

Within New Orleans the majority of households are lower-income.

Public and Private Education

The number of students in public schools in New Orleans, which are over 90 percent African American, has declined by 43% since Katrina. Source: Southern Education Foundation. New Orleans Schools Four Years After Katrina. (hereafter SEF).

But an average increase of 5% a year in enrollment for the last two years (35,976 to 38,051 from 2008-2009 alone) indicates that people whose children attend public schools continue to return as housing and employment opportunities allow. Source: Louisiana Recovery School District.

In 2008, 85% of white students in New Orleans attended private schools, one of the highest percentages in a major city in the US. Source: SEF.

New Orleans now has more charter schools than any other public school system in the country. Of the 89 public schools in New Orleans, 48, more than half, are charter schools. Sixty percent of students now attend privately managed but publicly funded schools. Source: Louisiana Recovery School District.

Metro area has recovered 79 percent of public and private school enrollment. Source: GNOCDC & Brookings , The New Orleans Index at 5, August 2010.

People Receiving Public Assistance

Over one-third of Social Security recipients who lived in New Orleans have not returned. There were 74,535 in 2004 and 47,000 in December 2009. Source: Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.

Medicaid recipients have declined by 31%: pre-Katrina enrollment in Medicaid in New Orleans was 134,249. December 2009 enrollment was 93,310. Source: Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

Supplemental Security Income recipients are down from pre-Katrina 26,654 to 16,514 – a 38% decline. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.

Public Transportation

Total ridership declined down 65.7%. From over 33 million in 2004 to about 13 million projected for 2010. Source: Regional Transit Authority

Crime

“Violent crimes and property crimes have risen in New Orleans since Katrina and remain well above national rates.” Source: GNOCDC & Brookings, The New Orleans Index at Five, August 2010.

Oil Damage

Speaking of crime, there have been at least 348 intentional fires set in the Gulf of Mexico, controlled burns they call them, since spill. Source: Deepwater Horizon Response, July 14, 2010.

About 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersant have been dumped into the Gulf, over a million on the surface and about 750,000 gallons sub-sea. Source: Marianna Nash, CNN, Scientists Dispersant Concerns Remain.

About 210 million gallons of oil (5 million barrels) were released by the BP spill. About 800,000 barrels were captured by BP – making it by far the largest oil spill into marine waters in world history. Source: Campbell Robertson, U.S. Puts Oil Spill at Nearly 5 million Barrels.

Wetland destruction

“Since 1956, when measurements began, 23 percent of the coastal wetlands have converted to open water.” Source: GNOCDC & Brookings, The New Orleans Index at Five, August 2010.

The challenges of post-Katrina New Orleans reflect the problems of many urban and suburban areas of the US – insufficient affordable rents, racially segregated schools with falling populations, great disparities in income by color of households, serious pollution from remote uncaring corporations, and reductions in the public services like transportation. Katrina made these more visible five years ago and continues to make a great illustration of the US failures to treat all citizens with dignity and our failure to achieve our promise of liberty and justice for all.

Bill is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Bill and Davida are law professors at Loyola University New Orleans. Lance is Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. You can reach Bill at quigley77@gmail.com, Davida at dfinger@loyno.edu, and Lance at lhill@tulane.edu.

Special thanks to Allison Plyer of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center and Amy Liu of Brookings for their great August 2010 report, The New Orleans Index at Five.

Why Are Children Killing Children in New Orleans? By Lance Hill, Ph.D

The shooting of eight people this weekend in one incident has once again set off a debate about youth violence in New Orleans. What I find troubling is that in today’s newspaper which reports this incident and several other killings, the paper also reports another police officer under investigation into the alleged police killing of a black man in the aftermath of Katrina; and it reports the awarding of a Pulitzer prize for a story on the alleged killing of nine patients, most of whom were African American, at Memorial Hospital four days after Katrina. For the past two weeks, the local news has been full of allegations of police and racist vigilantes killing innocent citizens in the wake of Katrina.

The young teenagers engaged in violence today were mere children when Katrina struck. This “Katrina Generation” lived through the some of the most degrading and inhuman treatment ever inflicted on a community in the last century. Children returned to a city with no public medical care, no systematic trauma stress care; a city where authorities closed hospitals and mental health care units; where children lived in gutted houses and attended schools where they were forced to sit on floors because they had not chairs or desks. Yet we wonder what is wrong with our children?

Isn’t the question: “What is wrong with us?”

If we dehumanize children, can we not expect that they lose a part of their humanity? When children numb themselves to their own pain, can we not expect them to numb themselves to other people’s pain? The most dangerous form of violence is the silent violence of indifference to the suffering of others.

How can we ask children to heal themselves when we cannot heal ourselves of our own inhumanity? Nearly five years after Katrina, there is still no trauma screening program in New Orleans schools.

Why are children killing children in New Orleans? Because we make killing less painful than living.

Lance Hill, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, Tulane University.

New Orleans Charter Schools and Privatization, by Dr. Lance Hill

The Congressional Research Service has prepared an excellent publication on privatization and government. Its definition of privatization places charters and vouchers clearly in the privatization category. I think that it is crucial in the debate on school reform to not allow charter advocates to obscure their free market theory theoretical foundation with the use of the word "charters" (Fannie Mae was not a "charter" mortgage company--it is a privatized public service).

The author defines privatization as the use of the private sector in the provision of a good or service. Private sector is defined as any non-government entity, including non-profits, religious organizations, and volunteer groups. The heart of the definition is that with the transfer of services from the government to the private sector comes, to some degree, a transfer of power, i.e. the public loses some measure of control over the service.

I find it very useful that the author, Kevin Korsar, lists the preconditions of free market benefits to prevail, such as that the consumer has to have full knowledge of the quality of the service or good in order to make rational choices. Rational consumer behavior is what brings about efficiency in the market; consumers use services that deliver the most for the least cost. Thus, when we transfer a government service to a private entity (and non-profits are private entities by his definition) we have to have complete transparency. For example, school operators can't hide special funding that gives them a temporary advantage in the market; which drives out better operators and results in inferior products.

Even food consumers have that kind of transparency necessary for free markets to produce the best product for the least cost: every can of beans has to list it's nutritional qualities on the label so that consumers can make rational, informed decisions on which brand is the best buy. In contrast, charter schools are not bound by that kind of transparency; they don't have to advertise test scores, low school evaluations, accurate teacher-student ratios, etc.

Competition breeds marketing and, as the author points out, while government does only what the law permits and proscribes, private entities may do whatever the law does not forbid. While we are in the midst of a revolution in cognitive science and neuroscience that is making tremendous advances in our understanding of how humans learn, little of this has made its way into the charter reform movement. Free market forces favor marketing over science.
I also like his notion that only government has the common weal at interest (ideally). Private entities, be they profit or non-profit, are driven by narrower goals such as profits, organizational mission, and bureaucratic self-preservation (no one likes putting themselves out of a job, even if they are doing a bad job.)

The issue at stake in New Orleans is privatization, not "chartering." To properly evaluate the charter reforms, as well as the privatization of teacher recruitment (TFA), we need to know the underlying "process change theory." In this case, it is privatization. Understanding the underlying change theory will help us understand the potential benefits and dangers of the reform strategy and how best to measure it against alternative strategies. As we have seen locally, when we privatize teacher recruitment, we lose the government's mandate for equitable employment with respect to race and age.

That outcome was a predictable outcome of free market theory emphasis on lowering overhead costs. The exclusion of special education children from charter schools was also a predictable free market outcome of the tendency of private entities to reduce services to increase profits or to operate within a limited revenue stream. BESE's mandate forcing charters to enroll special education students reflects their understanding that they, as an elected body, had to compensate for the narrow goal focus of privatized groups.

Which activities are essential to the state and should remain directly accountable to the elected representatives and which may be carried out by the private sector? That's the central question of the public education debate. Children are not municipal services, like garbage collection or parking-fine collections. Bad schooling affects children for a lifetime and can consign them to a life of despair. Education is ultimately a social service that affects the equitable allocation of future resources. To what degree can we safely surrender accountability to the public in this realm?

So, I would propose that in the public debate on charter schools, the following definition is the most useful:

Charter schools are publicly funded schools operated by private businesses or non-profit organizations.

Hence the debate in New Orleans, on both school operation and teacher recruitment, is a debate on the privatization of public services. If the experiment in New Orleans succeeds in bringing about excellent and equitable education, then privatization deserves the credit and the theory can be replicated elsewhere. If it fails to achieve better and equitable outcomes for the same inputs, then privatization, as a theory of educational reform, must be reconsidered.

Dr. Lance Hill is the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, a tolerance education and race relations research center based at Tulane University in New Orleans. He is the author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and The Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

LJI Presents Guest Writer Lance Hill: "The Most Racist City in the US?"

By Lance Hill, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Southern Institute for Education and Research, Tulane University

This week's comments by Ed Blakely, the former New Orleans recovery czar, caused quite a controversy in New Orleans. His criticism that New Orleanians were "lazy" was not new, but his observation about the white community's efforts to "recapture the political apparatus" and "put their foot back on Black people's throats" was the first time a high-ranking recovery official said in public what is a widespread sentiment in the local African American community. It is likely that this perception of a "power grab" will influence voting in the February 2010 city election. The tendency in the white community to ignore or dismiss this Black sentiment is reflected in the Times-Picayune's editorial response that completely omits Blakely's comments on the "blood in the water."

Transcribed from the YouTube interview:

"Everyone's a racist. It's part of something we have in this country, but it's deeper, more viral, and more visible and more entrenched in New Orleans than any place I've ever seen...There is a sense, now, in the white community, [that] there's blood in the water, and they can recapture the political apparatus and kind of put their foot back on Black people's throats. And that will be explosive and very dangerous. And I think unless the next mayor is very clever, it's going to explode and there are going to be race riots in New Orleans."
-Ed Blakely, Former New Orleans "Recovery Czar"

Click here to see the Blakely Interview.

Click here to see the Times-Picayune Editorial on Blakely - which omits the "Blood in the water" reference.