Assignment #2

In a country of immigrants and race struggles, it may seem arbitrary to point to New Orleans not only as an embodiment of this American tradition but also as an antithesis of it. Devastated by disasters, of the natural and social kind, it shocked me to learn that once upon a time New Orleans was a progressive, forward thinking city that  ultimately fell victim to the retrogressive trend the rest of America was following. Still in ruins, this city's history holds as many answers as questions, especially in regards to hurricane Katrina. 

Unlike most of America, founded  by a French-Canadian in 1718, New Orleans became a multiracial and multicultural metropolis from the very start. Gaining a reputation for being wild, the city attracted visionaries and rascals alike and was populated by a wide array of people from different origins. Located in the South, New Orleans has retained influences from all the settlers that once chose it as home. Founded by the French, it was eventually taken over by the Spanish until America succeeded them. Along with influences of the Caribbean people that arrived to this main land as well, it's no wonder that the multiplicity of the New Orleans people would seemingly not fit in with the rest of the American puzzle. But the thing about America is that we need to put everything in a box, and New Orleans was no exception. To this day New Orleans' economy chiefly rests on tourism. In the hopes of making the city as tourist friendly as possible a hierarchical system of classes was bound to take place. As Brinkley explains, there are different economy oriented tiers that make New Orleans more like the typical American city; the upper class dominated by the whites, the tourism business, the shipping and oil industries, and last, and most certainly least, the poor black underclass.

Before New Orleans gave in to the rest of the county; however, an unhappy group of people, the Committee of Citizens, tried to stop the inevitable. Staging what would become a landmark case in American history, a member of the group, Homer Plessy, was arrested for attempting to board the same train car as the white folks. Along with other forms of protest like the African American newspaper L'Union (later renamed The Tribune), the case was denied and the Jim Crow system was consequentially there to stay by de jure and de facto circumstances. As Peirce F. Lewis writes in New Orleans: The Making of an urban Landscape, as recently as in 2001 the public school system in New Orleans was declared to be intellectually and monetarily bankrupt. The three main reasons cited for this crisis are the lack of funds, white abandonment, and "the scarcity of a tradition of educational aspirations in the poorest segments of the black community" (129). Unfortunately, as time passes in New Orleans, progress devolves into chaos.

The biggest chaos of all is one that still afflicts the city: Katrina. Unlike most of the United States, much of New Orleans is below sea level. It is located on a very susceptible place where floods had been a problem since the French had settled. Though Florida is also near oceanic bodies of water, its soil is dry, whereas New Orleans' is soft and muddy. Having faced multiple hurricanes before, the city had levees built to protect it from any future natural disasters but some residents knew better. People in municipalities like Plaquemines, where there is a white majority, were aware that the levees were not strong or tall enough to protect them and were warned and rather prepared for what was to come. On the other hand, people in Orleans Parish where (you guessed it) the majority of people were Black, were let down by their representatives when they realized, too late, that there was a huge lack of governmental preparedness for this kind of disaster. Mainly relying on evacuation, the city was not able to provide for the poverty-stricken citizens who did not have the means to leave the city, the majority of which were African American. Federally, the government took too long to step in and, like in the past, too little was invested to reconstruct the city.

There is still hope for New Orleans, though. For African Americans, cultural heritage and societal pressures in other parts of the Untied States is sometimes deemed a route to the streets, but in New Orleans it is their unique culture that leads them out of the streets. After turning the New Orleans' paradise into the country's parking lot, it'll take a lot of time and effort to bring back what it once was, but if the past is any indication, New Orleans has always been able to get back up and march to the beat of its own drum.