This dissertation examines the class-, race-, and gender-based conflicts surrounding the 1990s privatization of an African American Public Housing development in New Orleans, Louisiana. The case illuminates how race, class and gender inequality is resisted and reproduced within the context of a post-segregation era, majority Black City. Drawing on Adolph Reed's Black Urban Regime theory, I conceptualize the struggle over privatization of Public Housing as a key expression of the racialized and gendered class relationship that makes up New Orleans' Black Urban Regime. The Black Urban Regime encompasses, on one side, Black officials that control the local State, along with their middle class allies, and the City's White corporate elite. On the other side is the City's Black working class majority, who often times are the electoral base of the Black Mayoral administration. To manage this contradictory relationship the Black political elite must appear to meet the redistributive, progressive agenda of its base, while simultaneously meeting the real neoliberal development needs of White corporate interests. Research for this single case study includes over forty in-depth interviews, a review of news articles, organizational and government documents, and observation of several public meetings dealing with various aspects of the St. Thomas privatization process The study's central finding is that non-profits, an understudied area of Urban Regime-informed works, were central to winning the formerly combative African American Public Housing residents to cooperate, rather than resist, privatization and removal. By engaging residents in a series of planning meetings and insider negotiations, the non-profits removed the female-led Black Public Housing residents from their key terrain and source of power, that of protests and disruption. In the past, disruptive actions won resident's power by undermining the racial, class, and gender legitimacy of the local and national levels of the State. In contrast, non-profits drew residents away from their historic source of power, and thus helped manage, rather than exploit, the Regime's contradictions. Finally, consistent with the extended case study method, the findings of this study are used to contribute and extend theories of urban politics, racism, and the practice of public sociology / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_23202 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Contributors | Arena, John D (Author), Gotham, Kevin Fox (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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