4/24/06
FADE FROM BLACK
The New New Orleans
This past weekend, New Orleans turned out for its first mayoral election since Hurricane
Katrina. The results reveal much about where the future of this once -- and perhaps again -- special city may lie.
While at this point it's hard to tell who is and isn't back in the city for good, before
Katrina the population of New Orleans was about two-thirds African-American. The evacuation has wrecked havoc on record-keeping,
but it seems fair to assume that the overwhelming majority of those scattered semi-randomly to the four winds (essentially
the people we saw gathered at the Superdome and the convention center) were African-American.
Given that, there has been considerable concern among black activists nationwide that Katrina
will be used as an excuse to remake New Orleans in a newer -- specifically less black -- image. Last weekend's election suggest
that those concerns may be well-founded.
According to consulting firm GCR & Associates, incumbent Mayor Ray Nagin, who is black,
won 38% of the votes, while Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu, who is white, won 29%. Since no one collected a majority of the votes,
there will be a runoff in a month.
Nagin won two-thirds of the black vote, but relatively little of the white vote. Landrieu
managed 23% of the black vote.
Nagin probably came off, particularly to non-black voters, as ineffectual in managing
both the evacuation and the rebuilding effort. He likely also suffered from the phenomenon of white voters' relative reluctance
to vote for black candidates whenever a white alternative is available (Nagin faced another black candidate his first time around in 2002). And he clearly hurt himself with his famous "chocolate
city" gaffe, which, while unwise politically, was not without reasonable foundation:
According to GCR, blacks cast just 52% of the 108,000 ballots this election, compared to 62% of the 135,000 in the last election. Now
do the math: that's 56,000 ballots this time, vs. 83,000 last time. This loss of 27,000 black voters appears to account for
100% of the total lost voters due to Katrina (135,000-108,000).
To repeat, essentially all of the voters lost to Katrina were black.
You can see why groups like the NAACP had urged (unsuccessfully) Louisiana to open satellite voting stations around the country
for displaced citizens. And you can see why, although it was impolitic to put it that way, and may not have even been sincere
coming from the mouth of Nagin (who was always viewed somewhat suspiciously by blacks in N.O. as a corporate executive plant),
blacks were right to be concerned about whether New Orleans will remain a "chocolate" city.
If Nagin is unable to a) find some of those lost black voters, and b) convince non-blacks
that he'll be able to manage the recovery better than a guy who's been hanging out in Baton Rouge all this time, his goose
may be cooked. We're not in a position to say whether that would be a good or bad thing for the people of New Orleans,
but we do know that the city has not had a mayor who wasn't black since the 1970's. It would truly would be a new New Orleans.
