Trust in New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina was colorblind...The storm packed a terrible punch for communities in majority white suburbs, from St. Bernard Parish to Slidell, and also pummeled largely African-American New Orleans...But not everyone is faring the same as they try to put their lives back together...African-Americans have been three times less likely than whites to tap into a Department of Insurance program designed to help homeowners settle insurance disputes, according to an Associated Press analysis...The analysis illustrates a common problem. Minorities are often so disconnected from public agencies, or distrustful of them, that they fail to use available resources. State officials, however, can still help many people by making an extra effort to publicize the mediation program, just as they have done with the Road Home rebuilding plan....An Unequal Battle, Editorial, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 11/3/2006

In this fascinating editorial, what is unspoken is why black folks in New Orleans, more than half of which have yet to return to the city, are so distrustful of public agencies. Does it have anything to do with the police abandoning the city during Hurricane Katrina? Does it have anything to do with Mayor Nagin's inability to make a phone call to get city school buses, available in the hundreds, to evacuate the 9th Ward? Does it have anything to do with Govenror Blanco's failure to call out the National Guard in a timely fashion? When the writer was in New Orleans on honeymoon in the 1980s, he and his new spouse were delighted by the Quarter, but if you walked beyond the tourist boundaries, we both saw poverty of a kind that we'd only seen in Walker Evans photographs taken during the Great Depression. This most-heavily-welfarized city of the South was doing less for its poor than any other American city we'd been in, yet had been under the control of the liberal Democrats for decades. Katrina and its aftermath, despite "reform" Mayor Nagin, does not suggest that much has changed.

Luther