Wet Bank Guide

Well someone stepped from the crowd he was nineteen miles high
He shouts we're tired and disgusted so we paint red through the sky
I said the truth is straight ahead so don't burn yourself instead
Try to learn instead of burn, hear what I say, yeah, yeah.
-- Jimi Hendix, House Burning Down

How could any educated person not approve of tearing down the city's four largest public housing complexes, a fellow blogger on the New Orleans blogger mailing list asks? In that question lives every ugly and sharp edge that glitters about this question like a field of broken glass.

My education was tutoring fourth graders at St. Alphonsos, a Catholic school at the edge of the now demolished St. Thomas, to escape high school catechism class. It was continued in college one semester mentoring the middle school newspaper at the Carver Complex in Desire. Complex was an apt name: it was a place that looked more like the prisons my father once built, surrounded by a tall, razor-wire topped fence and patrolled by armed guards.

These were not bad kids. Given the circumstances I knew they all lived in, I think they were in fact superb. Based on the kids I met, I knew their parents were not bad people. Perhaps I was just lucky to encounter children whose parents gave enough of a damn to insist they go to St. Alphonsos, children who grew up in homes in or around Desire where reading was not an alien concept, who could conceive of being on a school newspaper.

Perhaps they were the exception. I have a good friend who spent the last year coaching the most hopeless kids in the St. Tammany Parish Schools for the state's LEAP exam. These little golums were the future headlines and the future shooters and victims, and they scared the shit out of him. The kids I know were not those zombies, the walking dead. They were just like ourselves at that age, full of life and curiosity. These kids were an eduction for someone who who grew up on the privileged lake front, my exposure to people of color limited to Sylvia the maid or my father's handyman. They taught me that the people in these neighborhoods were not some Dark Other, but people just like everyone else.

Why tear down the projects? Why not tear down the projects? The arguments fly back and forth, but I have to ask this: We don't have projects now, not really. There's just Iberville and a few score units off Earhart. Has that reduced the crime and murder rate? Has that turned around the schools? Has it brought an economic miracle? How will tearing down these buildings do what the flood could not to clear out generations worth of mistakes?

Perhaps I am foolish to think, to hope that the largely working population (I include among the working the retirees and disabled who provided the free child care that freed up mom to work making beds downtown); to believe that these people might have some opportunity to return. Without them, the city will not grow back into something recognizably New Orleans. If we let the working class be replaced by hordes of undocumented Latin Americans, people who's fear of La Migra makes them more like the docile black working class of two or more generations some people seem to yearn for, it will profoundly transform the city. I welcome the new comers, without whom we would not be as far along as we are. But I want to add them to the mix, not replace the people who were here before.

Let me be clear, as I have been in the past. I have no use for stoop sitters and corner idlers. If you're not coming home to work and be a part of the massive task that still lies ahead, then don't come. I don't want you to come. We don't want you to come. You don't deserve to be here. To generalize and tell everyone who ever lived in public housing that they are all stoop-sitting, soap-watching losers is wrong. It's a lie, and that fact so many don't know that is perhaps the biggest problems of all: we really don't know each other.

Perhaps the people I care about, the ones who really helped make New Orleans with city we love, the ones who lived in what were arguably hell holes at times and yet got up and somehow got the kids to school and themselves to work, perhaps they have already begun have come home. I work at 1111 Tulane on the back end of the CBD, where people who ride the bus to-and-from work wait, the people who work the downtown hotels and clean the streets. I eat at the McDonalds on Canal every now and then and the Real Pie Man stops at my corner. The people of color who made up the core of the New Orleans working class are home in ever increasing numbers. Perhaps all the truly hard working folks, whether they lived in HANO housing or in the rundown rows of doubles that fill stretches of the city, perhaps they have already made it back. At the very at least as many of them are back as a percentage as anyone else in the city. The downtown where I work looks a lot like the downtown of the past, just with fewer people.

But that's not what this is about. The battle over the projects is just another skirmish in the centuries long struggle of race in the South, and in New Orleans. To the white community the projects represent every stereotype and social dysfunction and fear--fears real and ignorant--that result from every mistake we have made since Reconstruction, perhaps since the first slave ship landed on the river.

The projects became a hellhole because we all chose to let that happen. Building Bantustan on the Bayou did not solve the problems of slavery, or reconstruction or desegregation. It just attempted to push "the problem" into manageable blocks that were easy to avoid. Now we hope to push the problem even further away, onto another city, by tearing down the largest block of affordable housing with no plan for its replacement. That's not a solution. That's another attempt to escape the responsibility for the last several hundred years.

We're not going to escape that much karma that easily. People have told me that the association of the projects with all of the ills that might be found there is called a "spatial fetish" in social science. The brick buildings under discussion are truly a fetish, something meant to represent the unseen and powerful. Burning the fetish will not kill the spirit it represents, or the responsibilities that spirit places on us. That spirit has been fed on tears and blood for too long, has become too powerful. The projects are just a thing, not The Thing.

By insisting that the projects be demolished without confronting all of the real problems that animate the boogieman the folks I grew up with call "The Projects", we almost guarantee another generation of the same old racial shit. We will simply have found another way to dodge the real problems and leave in place all of the anger, dependency and despair, the suspicion and dishonesty and fear. It will breed more bulgy-eyed "civil rights" activists who will necklace anyone white or black who doesn't follow their line. It will push to the front people in the white community to answer them, people who are the other side of the same cheap brass coin, people whose white robes are plush like those of the best hotels, people who share Jimmy Reiss' vision of an ethnically cleansed city.

Is that where we want to live, in Rhodesia-turned-Zimbabwe? In the Balkans?

I don't want to save the projects. I want to save New Orleans. Tear down the projects in the current atmosphere, without confronting what those buildings truly represent to both sides and we might as well tear down the levees because I'm not sure what there will be left to save.

Edited at 12:45 to fix the "bad" words the child protection software stripped out. If it happens again, find the missing instances of shit, death, dead, murder and fetish and win a prize TBD.

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