Seven Months After Katrina: Is the “Twenty-Point Plan” Fact or Fiction?
by Robert D. Bullard

March 31, 2006 -- It has now been seven months after Katrina struck and three months since I wrote Katrina and the Second Disaster: A Twenty-Point Plan to Destroy Black New Orleans. At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, things don’t look good on the ground in New Orleans for the home team. As each month passes, it appears that the “Twenty-Point Plan” is gradually being implemented. Whether this is by design or by default, the end results are the same. Katrina floodwaters may have swept New Orleaneans from their city but the politics of race is keeping most African American evacuees from returning.

This brutal fact is made clear by a steady stream of empirical studies— ranging from repopulation projections of a smaller New Orleans footprint, racial barriers to government loans and grants, insurance “tug of war,” racial redlining and “greenlining,” inadequate clean-up standards, no safe neighborhood re-entry plan, risky debris disposal and waste facility siting schemes, expulsive zoning, discriminatory land use and rebuilding plans, restrictions on temporary housing (mobile trailers) siting, old-fashioned housing discrimination, shuttered government-subsidized public housing projects, new “super-authorities” that usurp the power of locally elected officials, and a city electoral process (city elections are scheduled for April 22, 2006) that is less democratic than the elections held in war-torn Iraq.

These are strong words. However, you be the judge. This is not rocket science—but more political science. For every point in the “Twenty-Point Plan,” it is not difficult to find empirical support. Read the points and look around at what’s happening. Now that we know what is happening, what are we Americans going to do about it? Will Americans stand by and watch a “second disaster” unfold? It will take much work on the ground and a national effort to reverse this present course. It is not too late. A wide range of grassroots activists, academics, civil rights, and faith-based organizations are already working to turn back many of the harmful policies and practices that disenfranchise African American Katrina survivors—the few that have returned to New Orleans and those that are still scattered but want to go home.