“At the same time that the Mayor and City Council acted courageously and progressively in ridding the city of those monuments to a loathsome past, the new regime that removal celebrates, as some skeptics note, rests on commitments to policies that intensify economic inequality on a scale that makes New Orleans one of the most unequal cities in the United States. ... Local government contributes to this deepening inequality through such means as cuts to the public sector, privatization of public goods and services, and support of upward redistribution through shifting public resources from service provision to subsidy for private, rent-intensifying redevelopment (commonly but too ambiguously called "gentrification"). These processes, often summarized as neoliberalization, do not target blacks as blacks, and, as in other cities, coincided with the emergence of black public officialdom in and after the elder Landrieu's mayoralty and continued unabated through thirty-two years of black-led local government between two Landrieus and into the black-led administration that succeeded Mitch. Both the processes of neoliberalization and racial integration of the city's governing elite accelerated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It may seem ironic because of how the visual imagery of dispossession and displacement after Katrina came universally to signify the persistence of racial injustice, but a generally unrecognized feature of the post-Katrina political landscape is that the city's governing class is now more seamlessly interracial than ever. That is, or should be, an unsurprising outcome four decades after racial transition in local government and the emergence and consolidation of a strong black political and business class, increasingly well incorporated into the structures of governing. It has been encouraged as well by the city's commitment to cultural and heritage tourism, which, as comes through in Mayor Landrieu's remarks on the monuments, is anchored to a discourse of multiculturalism and diversity. And generational succession has brought to prominence cohorts among black and white elites who increasingly have attended the same schools; lived in the same neighborhoods; participated in the same voluntary associations; and share cultural and consumer tastes, worldviews, and political and economic priorities.” DiversityRacismInequalityIntegrationMulticulturalismNew OrleansNeoliberalismEconomic InequalityHurricane KatrinaGentrification Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives Source: The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives