Pitzer in the News 2005-2006 Academic Year

Professor Hal Fairchild Quoted in Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul)

Abandoned, yet again
David Peterson, Star Tribune
September 4, 2005

The first thing to grasp about this past week in New Orleans, Elliott Stonecipher says, is that the poor blacks whose suffering and looting filled our television screens felt abandoned long before the hurricane arrived. The basic systems that sustain society, he says, didn't suddenly fall apart during these past few days.

The abandonment, according to one of Louisiana's leading political commentators, has stretched out over decades. And so has the social breakdown.

"The public schools virtually had failed. Not only whites but affluent blacks were leaving. We were looking, quite frankly, at the impending demise of New Orleans as a major city. Many, many systems were failing, including public safety. Long before now, the tourists who were kept safe in tourist areas would have been dumbfounded to see what went on [in] the rest of town. That is the backdrop, in essence, to what people are seeing today."

The images of suffering and lawlessness in New Orleans jolting the living rooms of America are also igniting a national conversation, much of it in cautious whispers, about the racial and class dimensions to what is taking place.

"People with money were not seeking refuge in the Superdome," says Halford Fairchild, professor of psychology and black studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. "Of the 23,000 refugees in the Superdome, one reporter counted only four whites."

All discussion of what caused water to pour through downtown New Orleans took place amid uneasy questions about what might have been different had the city been a place like San Francisco, full of affluent, educated whites.

For Jeff Johnson, a former Minnesotan now teaching at the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health and Social Justice at the University of Maryland-Baltimore, the poor blacks living in the most vulnerable parts of New Orleans, the deepest points in the now submerged bowl below the Mississippi River, are in positions similar to their counterparts in Minneapolis who live close to freeways and breathe the most polluted air.

"One of the most dramatic things I've seen is a study in the American Journal of Public Health last year asking, if blacks and whites were given the same kind of medical care, what would happen? It turns out, if you equalized treatment from 1990 to 2000, about 900,000 African-American lives would have been saved. Blacks are not treated the same as whites, and they are exposed to more adverse environmental stresses," Johnson says.

The raw demographics suggest that New Orleans was extraordinarily vulnerable not only because it sat below sea level, awaiting a big storm, but also because it housed so many poor people, old people, disabled people, people without cars to get them anywhere in an emergency.

On all those scores and others, New Orleans fares far worse than cities like Minneapolis.

"The worst images we're seeing are images of the vulnerability of the part of the population who, when we say 'Everyone get out,' we then provide absolutely no way to get out, and no effective means of sustenance when they're left there," says Robin Lovin, the Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Others say they wonder why more people couldn't simply have walked to safety. But Lovin isn't totally buying that.

"New Orleans is approached on expressways elevated above swamp marsh. I don't know if you can talk about 'walking' out of New Orleans. There are a limited number of poisonous reptiles surrounding Minneapolis."

The abandonment of New Orleans by the wealthy has been going on for a long time, says Stonecipher, a demographer and pollster based in Shreveport, in the northern part of the state.

"New Orleans is at about 480,000 or thereabouts and dropping like a rock," he says. "It was at 557,500 in 1980. And to be blunt, the people getting out are those with the wherewithal to get out."

But Stonecipher says he does not see the situation strictly in racial terms. Having lived in the state all his life, he sees too many other factors at work.

In ways that transcend race and reach deep into the political culture, he says, there simply hasn't been "the brainpower, the willpower, to do what takes to fix it."

The conversation about the influence of race and class is not only about past and present, it's also about the future: Who will be helped from here on out?

On a website called the Black Commentator, editor-in-chief Glen Ford asks:

"Will the new New Orleans remain the two-thirds black city it was before the levees crumbled?"

He adds: "There will be massive displacement of the black and poor. Poor people cannot afford to hang around on the fringes of a city until the powers-that-be come up with a plan to accommodate them back to the jurisdiction. And we all know that the prevailing model for urban development is to get rid of poor people. The disaster provides an opportunity to deploy this model in New Orleans on a citywide scale, under the guise of rebuilding the city and its infrastructure."

Ethicist Lovin cautions, however, against reassembling New Orleans as a new version of the old one.

"Everyone's saying, put it back the way it was. That's not the right response for this kind of community. The way it was is part of the problem. It's a ridiculous way to approach where to go next."

The opportunity, he adds, is to reimagine a different sort of American city.