Will Blacks Have a Role in Rebuilding New Orleans?

Summary

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"Katrina"-shorthand for the tortures it inflicted on the helpless by nature and man, and the potential ethnic cleansing of a great city-can ignite a movement much wider and deeper than the campaigns to boycott South Africa and Free Nelson Mandela, solidarity actions that breathed life into broadly-based politics in the Eighties. [Katrina] touches home and history, friends and family; it revealed the Black condition in the raw. The exodus of multitudes speaks to the Old Testament cultural framework that is wired into the consciousness of even the most secular African American. Katrina-related activities have proliferated beyond the countable, to become an obligatory action item on every authentic every Black organization's agenda.

There is much reason for optimism. Movements often need monsters and [George W. Bush] and his minions are a horror show. The Katrina debacle plunged Bush's Black approval rating to 12 percent, as measured by the Pew Research Center. Few doubt that the administration's callous and ineffectual handling of the Katrina crisis ("negligent homicide") caused the near-evaporation of Bush's thin Black support.

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Will Blacks Have a Role in Rebuilding New Orleans?

First of two parts

New York Times, January 27, 2006: Brown University study concludes that New Orleans may become mostly white because residents are too poor to rebuild. The city could lose as much as 80 percent of its Black population if i...

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