We Are All Victims of the Katrina Housing Debacle
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
"African Americans are
treated as waste products of society."
If you can't live somewhere, to call it home with all
the rights of social place and citizenship - then you are a non-person.
Democracy means nothing in a society that does not acknowledge a person's, a
family's, a people's right to exist in the place of their historical
connection. It negates their social and geographical existence, and marginalizes
them - totally. They are no one.
This is in some ways worse than the condition of the slaves,
who were forced to wear his or her master's place name - the "Smith" place or
the "Jones" place or the "Jefferson" or "Washington" place - as their last
names. But at least these place names connected the slave to the physical space
of their birth, or work, and to their fellow slaves who shared the same
circumstances of soil and oppression, of joy and love. Of being a person from a
place shared by other people.
The American brand of capitalism tolerates no such notions
of place or presence - of personhood - except in the most theoretical
terms, with no force of law.. This rich man's regime decrees that the fate -
and even identity - of human beings must be subjected to the shifting winds of
profit: you are no one, unless I say so; you live nowhere, unless it suits me.
And then, once you have outlived your usefulness, you must move on, like a
nomad from no place in particular.
"Once you have outlived
your usefulness, you must move on, like a nomad."
Such has been the official policy of the United States for
Black people, since Emancipation. For generations, we were shut out of the
great national make-over that created suburbia, only to see our own city
neighborhoods bulldozed into even tighter zones of sickness, deprivation, and
social disorganization, under the guise of urban renewal. Now even these
enclaves are deemed too valuable for Black habitation. In every city across the
country, Black neighborhoods are under siege - designated for gentrification -
only this time, there is no alternative site for settlement. African Americans
are treated as waste products of society, but have not even been assigned a
landfill in which to rebuild our lives.
The masters of capital enjoyed a windfall, literally, when
Hurricane Katrina and its official enablers swept out half of Black New Orleans
- now ripe for gentrification. Black political leadership has collectively
failed to respond to the New Orleans catastrophe, just as they have been
impotent in the face of the general tide of gentrification. But we have a few
heroes and heroines. Maxine Waters, the Black congresswoman from Los Angeles,
successfully pushed through the U.S. House of Representatives a bill that would
at least conserve from demolition the city's stock
of public housing, and replace some of the affordable housing that has been
lost, as an anchor for African American return to their ancestral place. Color
of Change, the progressive Black organization that is using the Internet to
connect the cyber-world with the real world of Black struggle, is pushing for
Senate passage of Maxine Water's bill. Go to ColorofChange.com,
and lend your signature. But remember: the bell that tolls for New Orleans,
tolls for all of us.
We must have a new social contract. We will not be nomads,
non-persons from nowhere.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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