Architectures of Pain: Racism and Monuments Removal Activism in the “New” New Orleans

Abstract

In 2017, the City of New Orleans removed four segregation-era monuments celebrating the Southern Confederacy and valorizing white supremacist ideology. As in other cities, efforts to remove such monuments are not new, and historically have been connected to collective challenges to racialized inequality, and more recently to transnational postcolonial struggles. Given the longstanding activism in favor of removing such monuments I ask, Why now? In exploring this question, I examine the circulation of images, talk, and text about the monuments in relation to the city's post-2005 political economy and find that people's expressed sentiments regarding the statues illuminate the ongoing challenges faced by New Orleans' multiracial working-class and poor residents. I argue that the city administration's framing of the monuments as emblems of an unequal past decouples the monuments' removal from the urgent need to meaningfully address present inequalities. While clearing the cityscape of these four monuments makes neighborhoods more palatable to residents who oppose overt symbols of white supremacy, it may also paradoxically contribute to gentrified redevelopment that displaces predominantly non-white poor and working-class residents.

Black Freedom, Black Markets: Notes on New Orleans Black Masking Indian Tradition

“…From state abandonment amid the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, to systemic efforts to deny the right of return to those displaced by the storm, to the wholesale destruction and subsequent conversion of public housing to market-friendly mixed-income schemes (Arena 2012), and to the closing of the city's only public hospital to make way for a $1.1 billion medical complex (Lovell 2011;Robillard 2009), poor and working-class Black communities have been the primary casualties of a rapidly reordered New Orleans, one increasingly wealthier and significantly whiter. Compounding this, post-Katrina gentrification fed by waves of "white return" migration to this majority Black city has facilitated the widespread displacement of African Americans to the urban peripheries (Barrios 2010;Campanella 2013;Croegaert 2020). Coupled with Louisiana boasting the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, poor and working-class African Americans who comprise roughly eighty percent of those locally incarcerated are largely deemed undesirable and, thus, expendable within this "new" New Orleans (Armstrong 2018).…”