“We Get Shit Done to Us:” Economic and State Sponsored Violence in Treme

The house Albert and Lorenzo visit is marked with a spray-painted X. The markings in the four quadrants designate (on top) the search squad that visited the site, (left side) the date of the visit, (right side) notations for hazards such as gas and water leaks, downed wires or dead animals. The bottom quadrant, in this case inaccurately marked with a 0, denotes bodies found at the site. The markings were made on all homes in the flood zone, and are still visible on many homes today.

As Colorlines has discussed before, there are massive race and class issues with the New Orleans citizens who want to return home. Tram Nguyen has been covering the situation, and explained in 2009:

Four years after Katrina, the city of New Orleans can still break your heart. Not with the raw suffering of the hurricane and its aftermath, but with the stark exposure of an economic apartheid that keeps poor people of color locked out of the city’s political process, as well as its prospects for restored housing and renewed economic growth.

By some accounts, New Orleans’s recovery has made progress. The city’s population level reached 73.7 percent of its pre-Katrina number by the end of 2008, according to the January 2009 New Orleans Index released by the Brookings Institution and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. (Updated figures will be available in August.) Because the region had already been literally “under water,” New Orleans pretty much bypassed the foreclosure crisis that is engulfing many parts of the country. And compared to the national unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent in March, New Orleans unemployment has hovered at about 5 percent since November 2008.

But this more prosperous picture may be the result of cropping out many of the city’s poor former residents—most of whom are Black—who have been blocked from returning.

And in Nguyen’s follow up article from this month, things are no better:

The city’s housing crisis also reflects the disastrous impact of public housing demolitions and redevelopment policies. In New Orleans, many former public housing residents say that on top of losing their homes, they were shut out of participating in the redevelopment process. For many, it was clear that there was just too much money at stake to let the residents get in the way. In the wake of Katrina, Louisiana became a bonanza of federal subsidies for firms ready to take advantage of the opportunity to rebuild. The developers, as a former staffer for one private company put it, stood to “make money hand over fist” through a number of unusually generous bond deals.

That all the homes in the Big Four are gone is a stark reality in New Orleans. So now, after decades of government policies that put housing needs into the hands of private developers, local activists are looking beyond simply fighting for better and more affordable housing. They are joining with housing advocates throughout the nation to emerge from the national crisis with nothing less than the assertion of housing as a human right.

Alongside the commentary on destruction and displacement, episode three provides a glimpse at the tensions surrounding gentrification and displacement. An altercation begins between Davis and his two gay neighbors, with Davis asserting that they were soulless gentrifiers taking over the city.

However, the conversation doesn’t play to type – while Davis’ neighbors talks about what they are doing as historical preservation and not gentrification, the scene illuminates some of the more complicated dynamics at play in some of NOLA. Davis’ neighbor is well aware of the history and legacy of Treme, saying defiantly: “I’m from Uptown, Mr. Mackery is from mid-City – we’re as New Orleans as you.”

And, playing into the earlier theme of state sanctioned violence, the neighbors react with horror when Davis accuses them of calling the police on the second line celebrations “We have never once called the cops!” he replies indignantly, again showing an insider, us-against-them outlook that Davis actively tries to deny.

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