Katrina Turns Eight, Yet a Hurricane of Black Violence Still Rocks the Big Easy: It's Time for the Bob Barker Plan

Eight years ago, the world was supposed to feel sorry for the black people in New Orleans they watched on their television sets. Hurricane Katrina had exposed, for the world to see, unpleasant racial realities that don't go away with the passage of time or the changing of the channel.

It's time we get serious about the "Bob Barker Plan"

They only get more intense.

How can you expect to clean up the streets of inner city America, when those on the front-lines of black violence blame anyone and everything except black people for littering the streets with violence?
[I Was Shot in New Orleans, But I’m Not Angry at My Shooter, NextCity.org, 8-27-13]:

Mother’s Day 2013 brought one tragedy and two miracles out of New Orleans. Here is the tragic: Young men with guns shot me and 18 other people at a parade. The miracles: Among the 19 shot, no one died from their wounds, not even me. The bullet landed in my stomach, shredding through internal organs before lodging in a delicate patch of tissue surgeons have nicknamed the “soul hole” because getting hit there can easily take a life. My surgeons told me the fact that I survived is a feat of nature.

No one ever expects to get shot, but I especially never expected it the way that it happened. Sunday, May 12 was just like every other Sunday I spend in New Orleans, filming the city’s weekly second line parades. For the uninitiated, second line parades are an only-in-New-Orleans phenomena. The tradition spans back more than a century to a time when blacks were not allowed, by virtue of their race, to purchase life and health insurance policies.

Instead, black communities around the city banded together to form neighborhood-based “social aide and pleasure clubs” that would use dues money and other fundraised cash to offset funeral and major health care costs for their members.

To promote the club, members would each year put on daylong parades for their neighborhoods, complete with brass bands, costumes, royalty and fanfare reminiscent of Mardi Gras, albeit on a smaller scale. The “second line” of neighborhood people would follow the band and club members’ lead as they danced across the city. (Blacks at the time were not permitted to join Mardi Gras Krewes, so this also presented a rare opportunity for blacks to march in the streets.) The parades remain today a predominately black affair, although more and more people from outside the community have begun to participate in the ritual and, certainly, to document it.

The parade, with its sharply dressed band and dancers followed by a “second line” of revelers, had been going for about 30 minutes when two young men began firing indiscriminately into the crowd. A man selling icy beers from a picnic cooler on the back of a red wagon ducked. Everyone began to run in panic. The men were shooting to hit a single target, regardless of everyone else who was in the way. I fell in the street, hit in the side but feeling the burn of the bullet deep in my stomach. The appearance of the ambulance was both immediate and interminable.

Six weeks and 11 surgeries later, I was released from the hospital. Every day is a struggle. I am in constant pain. I’ve lost a significant amount of weight. The things I used to love I can no longer enjoy. One thing, however, is not a battle: I feel no anger or vindictiveness toward those who shot me. Instead, I feel sad. As I move on with my life, the young men who perpetrated this crime are facing the rest of their lives behind bars. They are in early 20s and have already lost their chance at a full, free adulthood.

This is a worn-out theme in my tattered city. People are tired of hearing about it, but seemingly have no answers. Yet as a black woman, I don’t believe there are no answers. I believe there can be resolution to the deadly phenomenon if enough people were truly committed to ending it. 

I guess it wasn’t altogether true when I said that I was not angry. I am outraged — not at the young men who shot me, but at the system that fostered their violence. Most of the young men who commit violence in our city are born in circumstances that never give them a chance to be anything other than desperate. And people are liable to do anything during desperate circumstances, up to and including lashing out with gunfire at a parade of people just to hit a perceived threat. We are no more human to them than they are to us. And until we see that they are a product of our indifference and begin to hold elected leaders accountable for their circumstances, we will continue to see their indifference directed toward us.

New Orleans is a relatively small city, with a population of about 361,000. It’s totally feasible to drill down to the number of young black men that are either at risk of falling into a life of crime or are already there. City records count 17,925 black men between 15 and 25. Of this group, about one third are at risk, with criminal records, teetering on the line toward the criminal life. That’s a little more than 6,000. That’s a manageable number to plot out an assessment and case management program for them.

In a sane society, city records tracking those 17,925 black males would have as the first directive the implementation of the "Bob Barker Plan." 

Depo-Provera is a sane, reasonable alternative to the streets of New Orleans running red with the blood of innocent black children, murdered by black males firing guns 'randomly' into the direction of some Nubian adversary.

Take Central City, the most dangerous part of New Orleans (boasting a murder rate of 317 per 100,000 in 2007); Disingenuous White Liberal writes for the New Orleans Times Picayune would have you believe that prison (daring to punish black criminals for violating the white man's laws!) is actually what rips up 'families' and tears apart "communities" [Prison rips up families, tears apart entire communities, NOLA.com, May 18, 2012]:

This is "the belt" of Central City, home to an invisible, grating force -- the cycling of its residents in and out of prison -- that can fray family and community at their roots.

Around here, young men leave home for prison, not college. No one can afford to buy Jaymalis trendy sneakers, MP3 players, the things kids covet. So before his house arrest, he took to hanging out with friends and taking what was there.

Neighborhoods like this one have been particularly hard-hit as Louisiana's prison population has increased exponentially in the past few decades. Nobody here is a stranger to the ripples emanating from the state's stiff sentences, swollen prison rolls and vacuum of resources for convicts who return home. 

While the state spends millions of dollars each year locking up Central City residents, it has invested comparatively little in schools, recreation programs, job centers and health clinics. Boys grow up believing that dealing drugs -- a daily trade in the few blocks around Jaymalis -- is the surest way to cash. Doing time is an expected price, if not a rite of passage. 

 Or, those black boys grow up to blow away tiny black children. [Central City violence takes tiny victims, NOLA.com, 9-1-13]:

These were the final and carefree moments of children whose blood has spilled on the streets of New Orleans' Central City neighborhood.

In the last three years, four young children - Jeremy Galmon, Keira Holmes, Briana Allen and now Londyn Samuels - have been caught in crossfire. They died in a section of the city where fear and anger reverberate each time another baby is shot dead. 

"God, please send your mercy down to New Orleans, Louisiana," a preacher thundered during a vigil for Kiera a few days after she died. "We got babies killing babies."

Some lifelong residents of Central City said at times they feel like they are living under siege.
"I'm scared, I'm really scared," said Cynthia Battle, 54, one of the parents who gathered Saturday at a school-supply giveaway at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. "I'm thinking a bullet might pass us, and I don't let them out anymore. When I was coming up, you would walk around. Now, it's terrible. You have to worry about everything."

For Al Mims Jr., an anti-violence activist whose father was killed 26 years ago, the solution is not to rely only on police and prosecutors. As another young child is mourned in Central City, he said the community must get on the same page.

"I've buried thousands of children since my daddy was killed. We have to stop making excuses when our children are killed in a residential neighborhood," Mims said Saturday. "We've got to teach our children. And it takes a village, but the village has to be on the same page."

 These black people, living in third world conditions within the United States of America, are nothing more than 'pets' of liberal whites and white conservatives like Leigh Anne Tuohy (of The Blind Side fame): the existence of these downtrodden blacks make white liberals feel good, knowing they have a go-to population whose pathetic nature can only be blamed on white racism.

White conservatives feel that if only they could be removed from the ghetto (black community), they would instantly enjoy a life as meaningful as Michael Oher.

It's hard to believe, but New Orleans doesn't have to be a city where four young black children have been killed in three years (all by black males), or where black activists, shot by blacks at a Second Line parade, hold all of their venom at an insidious "system" that actually incubates black criminality through EBT/Food Stamps, Section 8 Voucher, and Welfare.

The "Bob Barker Plan" must be instituted to ensure that the "pet" population of white liberals and white conservatives doesn't get too large; after all, Hurricane Katrina showed us what happens when you don't spay and neuter your "pets".