Democracy Now! | Three Displaced New Orleans Residents Discuss Race and Hurricane Katrina

Democracy Now! | Three Displaced New Orleans Residents Discuss Race and Hurricane Katrina: "AMY GOODMAN: What about this discussion of: ‘Will New Orleans be rebuilt?’ I thought about after 2001, the attacks, if anyone said, ‘Will New York be rebuilt?’ That was not the question. It was how it will be rebuilt, but there is this question: Will it even be? Almost a sense of ‘Is it worth rebuilding?’ Your response?

BEVERLY WRIGHT: Yes. I believe that New Orleans will be rebuilt, because New Orleans is a world class city. I believe, however, that these questions are posed because of the way that New Orleans is being perceived at the present moment. And that is that it is a city that had a majority African American population, and that that population is acting in a way that's – that we shouldn't – less civilized than what we should be acting under these times of duress, so people are saying, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn't build it.’

On the other hand, I really believe that developers, some of them, are doing a break dance at this moment as they watch so many African Americans being removed from the city, of course, because of these circumstances, because now they will have a chance to rebuild it the way that they would like to build it, and that is without us. You hear people say that the city of New Orleans will be bigger, it will be better, it will be stronger. And we also know that the plan is for it to be whiter. And that is one of the reasons that those of us who are scattered all over do plan to return. We are in the process of trying to organize in some way that we will be at the table for the rebuilding of our particular community, but what is happening in New Orleans and the way some of it is being reported is no different from the way we were being reported before the hurricane. And so, you basically have all of the prejudice and racist kinds of feelings that people have about us being played out in the media now."