3-18-08, 9:35 am

It is no secret that Louisiana is a state of stark inequalities. With astonishing rates of poverty, poor health care, a failing educational system and a pervasive culture of racism, Louisiana does not live up to the American dream. In many respects it seems to be that dream’s negation. So the anomaly must be explained away. In the national discourse, the message is clear: Louisiana’s pauperism is someone else’s dirty laundry, solely the business of those “backward Southerners,” the result of corrupt state politics, certainly not a structural implication of US capitalism as such. We are told that it is a bizarre exception to capital’s rule rather than a weak link in the chain that calls into question the prevailing ideology. With such logic the state is pushed to the periphery as far as national politics are concerned.

Following the devastation caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, however, Louisiana was suddenly propelled into the consciousness of the nation and of much of the world. The suffering of the poor and working classes who live in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast became a living indictment of the economic and political system of this country, a world hegemon that can carry out simultaneous wars in other continents but cannot respond when its citizens are most in need. The ironic situation highlighted, and continues to highlight, the deepest contradictions of capitalism in the era of globalized production and the ongoing crisis of democracy in the United States.

Homelessness is an index which reveals Louisiana’s savage class and racial structure without equivocation. The results of the 2007 Homeless Demographic & Needs Survey have recently been released in a startling report called A Single Night Counts: Homelessness in Louisiana. The survey is popularly known as the “Point-in-Time” survey because it is conducted over a designated twenty-four hour period and therefore provides a cross section—like a snap shot—of homelessness across the state on that particular day. The Point-in-Time survey is conducted biennially (since 1998) by homeless service providers, Continua of Care leaders, social science researchers and others for the purpose of “assessing the numbers and needs of the perilously sheltered and unsheltered on the local level” (p. 5).

The Point-in-Time survey provides much-needed empirical data concerning structured inequality in this state, but it does have limitations. For instance, there are obvious difficulties in surveying homeless persons who are not in shelters at the time the survey is conducted, especially if they are located in one of the state’s many rural regions. The report states that “by a conservative estimate, on any given day, there may be as many as twice the reported count of homeless adults and children living in Louisiana” (p. 5). Nevertheless, between noon, January 30th and noon, January 31st, 2007, 5,815 surveys were completed, representing 9,755 adults and children in thirty-nine parishes. Of this total, 3,781 people were identified as precariously housed (i.e. seriously at risk of homelessness) and 5,994 were found to be literally homeless, meaning that they stay in emergency shelters or transitional housing for some period, sleep in places not meant for human habitation or use shelters intermittently. The data reveal many startling things, including the profound impact that hurricanes Katrina and Rita have had on the face of homelessness in Louisiana, as well as the racial makeup of the homeless population.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita

Of the 2,826 single adults and unaccompanied youth who identified whether they had been displaced by hurricanes Katrina and/or Rita in 2005, 1,112 (39.35%) indicated that they were, with 1,714 (60.65%) indicating that they were not. Of the 1,084 homeless families who reported whether they were displaced by one or both of the hurricanes, 578 (53.32%) indicated that they had been, with 506 (46.68%) indicating that they had not. When the single persons and family counts are totaled, displaced persons make up 43.22% of all those who reported their displacement status, with non-displaced persons making up 56.78%. Those people who were displaced by one or both of the hurricanes in 2005 make up a substantial proportion of those who reported their displacement status. They are only seven percentage points short of comprising half the total.

Race

1,549 (57%) of the 2,719 single adults and unaccompanied youth who reported race identified themselves as African-American/Black, whilst only 1,094 (40%) identified as Caucasian/White. Of the 1,059 homeless families who reported race, 793 (75%) identified themselves as African-American/Black, compared with only 241 (23%) who identified as Caucasian/White. When the single persons and family counts are totaled, African-American/Blacks represent 61.99% of all those who reported race, with Caucasian/Whites making up only 35.34%. To put these figures in perspective, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that “Black persons” make up a mere 31.7% of the Louisiana population and that “White persons” make up 65.4%, as of 2006, the year of their most recent estimate. The percentage of Black persons living in Louisiana is higher than the national average (12.8%), of course, but this does not change the fact that they are represented disproportionately in the Point-in-Time homeless data—to an unsettling degree.

These statistics did not fall out of the sky. The large number of displaced persons who were homeless over a year following hurricanes Katrina and Rita suggests deep problems that extend to the core of our society. The federal government’s failure to respond to the crisis, the disproportionate distribution of storm-related hardships on the poor and working classes, and bourgeois attacks on public housing are all manifestations of the class struggle in the present conjuncture. Without doubt, Louisiana has become the epicenter of the class struggle in this country, because it is a weak link in the political-economic chain.

And it is clear that in the United States as a whole—not just in Louisiana—the principle contradiction between capital and labor is overdetermined (to use Althusser's terminology) by systemic racism, which modifies the distribution of economic inequality and other types of social exclusion. The 2007 Point-in-Time homeless data support such a proposition. Nevertheless, although these two contradictions are inextricably bound together in the present social formation, they are also relatively autonomous. We cannot expect one to disappear just because the other disappears. Part of our historic challenge as socialists, then, is the overcoming of both class and “racial” forms of oppression in addition to popular-democratic forms of struggle.