Chocolate City?

According to an article in the New York Times this morning,

Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans was greeted with yowls of protest last week when he declared that it was God’s will for New Orleans to be a “chocolate” city.

Not “howls,” but “yowls.”

The problem, writer James Dao explains, is that New Orleans,

nearly 70 percent African-American before Hurricane Katrina, had lost some of its largest black neighborhoods to the deluge, and many fear it will never be a predominantly black city again, as it has been since the 1970’s.

Indeed, race has become a subtext for just about every contentious decision the city faces: where to put FEMA trailers; which neighborhoods to rebuild; how the troubled school system should be reorganized; when elections should be held.

Many blacks see threats to their political domination in reconstruction plans that do not give them what they once had. But many whites see an opportunity to restore a broken city they fled decades ago.

In the struggle to rebuild New Orleans, could blacks find that their place in it is that much smaller?

And this problem is not merely that the “political domination” of the city by blacks will be reduced or eliminated; it is that the power of the Democrats in Louisiana will be reduced or eliminated.

The city has long been the backbone of Louisiana’s Democratic Party, dominated by the Morial and Landrieu families. Black voter turnout there was crucial to United States Senator Mary L. Landrieu, the daughter of a former mayor of New Orleans, Moon Landrieu, in her narrow victories of 1996 and 2002.

For those reasons, some blacks see a political conspiracy in the proposals for a smaller New Orleans, analysts said. Fears about New Orleans becoming majority white have also made some black politicians wary of proposals to revamp New Orleans’ schools and city government, which are widely viewed as corrupt, bloated and inefficient.

The argument is being made, in short, that reducing or eliminating black “political domination” of New Orleans is racist both in itself and also as part of an effort to

diminish the power of Louisiana Democrats. (Leave aside for now the fact that the proposal that has engendered this response came from a commission created by Democratic mayor Ray Nagin.)

Would it be illegal racial discrimination to refuse to rebuild a part of the city (“The Bowl”) that is prone to flooding because the residents of that area were predominantly black? For guidance on this question there is no better place to look than the Supreme Court’s most recent holding approving what looks to the naked eye to be the racial gerrymandering of North Carolina’s infamous 12th Congressiional district in Hunt v. Cromartie, 532 U.S. 234 (2001). I have discussed this case and its implications a number of times, such as here, here, and here, in most of which I quoted or referred to this passage from the majority opinion by Justice Breyer (which, by the way, the recently sainted Justice O’Connor joined):

The issue in this case is evidentiary. We must determine whether there is adequate support for the District Court’s key findings, particularly the ultimate finding that the legislature’s motive was predominantly racial, not political…. The Court has specified that those who claim that a legislature has improperly used race as a criterion, in order, for example, to create a majority-minority district, must show at a minimum that the “legislature subordinated traditional race-neutral districting principles . . . to racial considerations.” Race must not simply have been “a motivation for the drawing of a majority minority district,” but “the ‘predominant factor’ motivating the legislature’s districting decision.” Plaintiffs must show that a facially neutral law “is ‘unexplainable on grounds other than race.'”

Refusing to rebuild housing in flood zones would seem to be a reasonable, non-racial explanation for not rebuilding “The Bowl.” But according to Justice Breyer and four other Supreme Court Justices, including Saint Sandra, even a desire to diminish Democratic electoral prospects would be legitimate.