NEW ORLEANS–U.S. capitalism and colonialism expelled African people from New Orleans [NOLA], not hurricane Katrina.
Ten years after the storm passed by the city on August 29th, 2005, the white business class has recovered. Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, patrons of the New Orleans Saints NFL football team and tourists over flow the streets in the French Quarter a few years after Katrina.
The Lafitte Housing Complex was one of the oldest projects in NOLA’s 6th Ward. These beautiful 2- story town houses were untouched by flood water but African people who returned to them were kept out by metal panels put up by the U.S. government.
For those who could get back into their homes they were removed by New Orleans police.
The now burgeoning downtown business district is just a short distance from where the original Lafitte Housing Complex stood. By the department of housing and urban development (HUD) decree, the projects were demolished for “mixed- income housing”.
New Orleans has been rebuilt to serve the ruling class. Arne Duncan, U.S. secretary of education said in 2010, “Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans schools”.
African people have been disenfranchised. The education system in NOLA is in the hands of the State.
In December, 2014, Louisiana was awarded a $32 million federal grant for preschool education.
In April 2013, a inspector general's report found that around $700 million awarded to help Hurricane Katrina victims was unaccounted for.
All of these resources were in the hands of the State and not African people.
The devastation of U.S. colonialism
August 28, 2015, neo- colonial U.S. president Barack Obama said Hurricane Katrina "started out as a natural disaster" but "became a man-made one — a failure of government to look out for its own citizens".
An admission had to be made because the facts of the devastation of U.S. colonialism on its colonial subject African people are glaring 10 years after hurricane Katrina.
One year before hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a company called IEM [Innovative Emergency Management] was given $500,000 by the U.S. government to produce an evacuation plan for the city. No evacuation plan was ever produced.
The U.S. army corps of engineers built a levee one and a half foot shorter than it needed to be to protect the city from a flood.
The government knew that the levees had been breached the day before NOLA became engulfed with water. Emergency services were never notified.
As African people attempted to flee the rising waters they were met with U.S. military and white vigilantes who drowned them in violence.
From Algiers Point accounts of State sponsored terrorism to the Danziger Bridge police shootings, crimes against African people go unpunished.
The U.S. government has not made any attempt to provide a way back home for African people whom they expelled from New Orleans.
The time is overdue for African people to take matters into our own hands. The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement [InPDUM] is championing a petition titled “ #AfricanChargeGenocide”. Sign the petition today at: www.Africanschargegenocide.com.
