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Black Racism or Opportunism in New Orleans?

Lewis Loflin

The New York Times (October 4, 2009) has again brought race to the forefront in its far-left reporting. They present the issue as white racism, when in fact it's anti-white racism and black/liberal political corruption. The incident concerns government subsidized housing for blacks in St. Bernard Parish versus New Orleans where poor whites are denied any public help. Let's look first at the two communities and how they differ, then how the whole corrupt process works.

Let's look at St. Bernard Parish. On August 29, 2005, St. Bernard Parish was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The storm damaged virtually every structure in the parish. The eye of Katrina passed over the eastern portion of the parish, pushing a 25-foot storm surge into the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Almost the entire parish was flooded, with most areas left with between 5 and 12 feet of standing water.

The water rose suddenly and violently, during a period which witnesses reported as no more than fifteen minutes. In many areas, houses were smashed or washed off their foundations by a storm surge higher than the roofs.

All of the parish's homes were unlivable. The per capita income for the parish was $16,718, even lower than Bristol, Virginia among the poorest city in Virginia, a much wealthier state than Louisiana. The racial makeup of the parish was 88% White. (Wiki) The vast majority of St. Bernard Parish is low-income and white, not "middle-class" as the New York Times claims.

Contrast this with New Orleans. New Orleans is home to one of the largest and busiest ports in the world, and metropolitan New Orleans is a center of maritime industry. The New Orleans region also accounts for a significant portion of the nation's oil refining and petrochemical production, and serves as a white collar corporate base for onshore and offshore petroleum and natural gas production.

The racial makeup of the city was 67% black, 28% white. Per-capita income $17,258. 80% of New Orleans was flooded. (Wiki) New Orleans is in fact wealthier than St. Bernard Parish, which suffered far more devastation. Even now crime is rare.

Yet it was blacks in New Orleans that rioted in the streets, murdered people, etc. while no such behavior occurred in far more devastated St. Bernard Parish. New Orleans is one of the most crime-ridden cities in America even before Katrina.

According to www.nola.com (June 1, 2009), "Though the city experienced a 17 percent drop in the number of violent crimes last year, New Orleans remains the nation's most murderous city by a wide margin, according to the FBI's annual report..."

John Penny, a criminologist at Southern University of New Orleans, said the city has variables that make its crime situation different from those of other cities. "Since Katrina, many people can't find housing, jobs, employment, and even though the school system has said it has improved, we still have too many people that are uneducated."

Yet the poor whites of the area and there are a lot of them don't behave like animals. The facts suggest that crime and lawlessness are directly related to race, not income. But if it was income, why is that not addressed? What is the problem according to the New York Times?

To quote, "in part because the houses that were destroyed were disproportionately for low-income renters, market rents in the city are 35 percent higher than they were before the storm, out of the reach of much of the city's work force." What about the homeless whites in St. Bernard Parish? The real problem is partly the New Orleans economy.

According to Wiki: "Tourism is another staple of the city's economy. Perhaps more visible than any other sector, New Orleans' tourist and convention industry is a $5.5 billion juggernaut that accounts for 40 percent of New Orleans' tax revenues. In 2004, the hospitality industry employed 85,000 people, making it New Orleans' top economic sector as measured by employment totals."

Tourism like that in the Smokies or that being are developed in Southwest Virginia with millions of tax dollars are low-wage, low-skilled industries.

Because so many blacks elect to drop out of school, etc. these industries are the only jobs most of them can get. And instead of dealing with their failure to get an education or the low-wages paid by employers, the taxpayers merely subsidize the problem.

Oddly since Katrina illegal alien Hispanics have flooded the depressed New Orleans job market driving wages down even lower. According to the New York Times (February 15, 2009) confirms just what I've been writing:

"NEW ORLEANS - They are the men still rebuilding New Orleans more than three years after Hurricane Katrina, the head-down laborers from Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala...Their pockets stuffed with bills, the laborers are vulnerable because of language problems and their status as illegal immigrants.

And as Hispanics have become the prey of choice in crumbling (black) neighborhoods here in one of America's most crime-ridden cities, racial friction between the newcomers and longtime black residents has moved close to the surface."

The NYT shows again why blacks are often racists: "Many (Hispanics) bluntly assigned a racial component...The blacks are waiting for us. They'll beat you up. They'll take your money." The rest of this story is more incredible coming from NYT as it illustrates a facet of black culture many liberals considered normal:

The accusation of racism does not ring true to some city leaders. The Hispanic workers tacitly acknowledge some unfamiliarity with the dangerous ways of inner-city life, and in the eyes of some in New Orleans, they have mistaken simple opportunism for racism.

It is not exactly racial prejudice that makes the Hispanic laborers the target of choice, said the Rev. John C. Raphael Jr., a black former New Orleans police officer and now a minister who has led anticrime rallies here. "I think it's not directly racial," Mr. Raphael said, but rather "the fact that they were vulnerable, they were taken advantage of."

OK so the massive amount of black-on-white crime is simply "opportunism" and never racism while the rare white-on-black crime is racism? Because the thugs are "people of color" they can't be racists. Their real solution for black criminals? Again to quote the NYT:

Janssen Valencia, a police officer who acts as an interpreter and occasionally as a radio counselor for Hispanic laborers here, urges them to hide their money and vary their walking patterns. "It's very sad that they're here helping us rebuild, yet you have an element that's targeting them," Officer Valencia said. "They work all week. Then comes the weekend, they get robbed."

So why are blacks not working these jobs? Are they all lazy and criminal or is it criminal employers (ignored by a black/liberal controlled City government) refusing to hire them? But this is why all the poor whites moved out to lower income areas such as Bernard Parish to escape this problem of back "opportunism."

That is about to change for the poor whites of Bernard Parish as black "opportunism" is coming to their community at taxpayer expense. For the incredible story of black on Hispanic crime see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/us/16hispanic.html.

Housing Battle Reveals Post-Katrina Tensions October 4, 2009 New York times (extract).

The parish of St. Bernard, a quiet, insular suburb just east of New Orleans, has in the end agreed to allow housing for low-income families. But even though it is only a few hundred apartment units, it had to be ordered by a federal judge. The parish has fought desperately to prevent such housing and an influx of renters...

Providing housing for low-income families has been one of the most vexing problems for the New Orleans area in the four years since the hurricane.

Tens of thousands of homes, many of them dilapidated, are still vacant. But, in part because the houses that were destroyed were disproportionately for low-income renters, market rents in the city are 35 percent higher than they were before the storm, out of the reach of much of the city's work force.

The demolition of the four big public housing complexes in New Orleans in 2007 and the approaching end to storm-related federal assistance programs have made these problems more critical, and their solutions more contentious.

That is particularly true in the case of St. Bernard, perhaps the jurisdiction hit the hardest by Hurricane Katrina. Nearly every one of the 26,000 houses there was severely damaged or destroyed. Ninety-three percent of them were owned by whites.

Four years later, over half of the parish residences are still vacant or unoccupied, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. The population, at around 37,000, is just more than half of what it was. Many former residents sold their homes to investors. Thousands of people displaced from elsewhere have moved in.

In September 2006, the Parish Council passed a law that prohibited owners of single-family residences from renting to anyone except blood relatives...advocates for low-income housing say it was a blatantly racist policy, given the overwhelmingly white ownership in the parish. St. Bernard officials dropped the ordinance after a lawsuit by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center.

...a Dallas-based firm called Realty Advisors proposed building four new apartment complexes, at $60 million, in the parish. Thirty percent of the 288 apartments would be rented at market rates. The rest would be set aside for low-income renters. Reaction among parish residents was swift.

Amid grim forecasts of crime, ghettos and blight, parish officials declared a moratorium on building any apartment complexes with five or more units...

This "Dallas-based firm" will profit nicely from the taxpayers and they won't be dealing with the mess. While the New York Times goes on about race, it's about crime and the conduct of blacks that even the New York Times admitted was an every day event. That housing will not go to low income whites and nothing has been done to repair the damage already there:

Parish officials denied that they were trying to keep out blacks, saying the parish simply needs more houses, not apartments. They said they would not object if the project involved filling up all the vacant lots already in the parish instead of building new high-density housing...

Race and class make for a complicated mix in this region. Proposed low- or mixed-income developments have met with staunch opposition all over the New Orleans area, in both predominately white suburbs and in primarily black neighborhoods in the city limits.

Yet the black neighborhoods are not called racist, but whites that resist this crime-ridden black population are racist? To further quote,

A development of 35 single-family, lease-to-own homes in the black middle-class neighborhood of New Orleans East was blocked by the (mostly black) New Orleans City Council in August. The arguments against it - that it would damage property values and quality of life - were similar to those heard in St. Bernard.

The developer, a New Orleans native living in Atlanta, is considering a discrimination lawsuit, even though almost everyone on both sides of the issue is black.

You have got to be kidding me. James Perry (who is black) the executive director of the housing center is running for mayor of New Orleans claims it's class when wealthy blacks such as himself shun black thugs, but says, "it is illegal to discriminate against minorities, however, and given that a disproportionate number of those who need affordable housing in the area are black these arguments almost inevitably involve race."

Perry's website shows his occupation as a professional race baiter. Yet St. Bernard is called racist because they are poor whites, yet upper-income blacks like Perry do the very same thing and it isn't racism? Blacks are never "racist" they just engage in "opportunism".

Go to his website at http://www.gnofairhousing.org/index.html and make a tax-deductible donation of $40 or more and receive a limited edition "Live the Dream" T-shirt FREE! To further quote NYT,

Parish officials, already angered by what they see as a failure of the federal government to help them after Hurricane Katrina, were livid that a federal judge was now a force in their rebuilding. Mr. Taffaro, in a weekly column on the parish Web site, described the lawsuit "as a means to perpetuate the breakdown of true freedom of American society."

...a quarter of St. Bernard residents could not afford market rents. But even many of the parish's poorest residents oppose the apartments. "We don't need it. It's going to cause more problems. There ain't no jobs down here." (Another at a food bank said) "You know what it's going to bring."

So the end result is the New Orleans black-controlled City government will unload its criminal population on St. Bernard Parish. Illegal alien Hispanics will likely get all the construction jobs, and poor whites will pay higher taxes for jails and schools and if they say anything, they'll be called racists.

More on Louisiana

Louisiana has one of the poorest populations in the country, with all of the problems that generally entails. It has a high percentage of uninsured adults, high rates of chronic disease and an acute shortage of doctors. In most state-by-state measurements, Louisiana regularly ranks at or near the bottom for the health of its residents. NYT 12-19-09.

Health Index (most recent) by state DEFINITION: Health Index by state. "The Healthiest State designation is awarded based on 21 factors chosen from the year 2005 edition of the annual reference book, Health Care State Rankings. (http://www.morganquitno.com/)

These factors reflect access to health care providers, affordability of health care and a generally healthy population. Again we see that Virginia state-wide far surpasses West Virginia, Kentucky, etc. while Southwest Virginia still mirrors those poorer states.

# 1    	Vermont:         22.67   	
# 2   	New Hampshire:   21.4  	
# 17    Virginia:        6.74
# 28    West Virginia:   1.23 
# 32    Kentucky:        -0.86   	
# 33   	North Carolina:  -1.03  
# 38    Tennessee:       -5  
# 49    Mississippi:     -18.43   	
# 50   	Louisiana:       -20.95
Weighted average:   2.1  

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