Project 2005 by Geoff Carter « The Pen in Hand Blog

Attribution: Win Henderson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By Geoff Carter

Recently, my wife and I have taken to going over to my mom’s place and watching TV with her. We watched—and she loved—the harrowing Zone of Interest, the fascinating Queen’s Gambit, and even some episodes of The Sopranos. She didn’t care much for Janet Planet or Ted Lasso, but that’s okay. It’s a generational thing. She is ninety-four years old.

Our latest watch has been the 2010 HBO series Treme, which focuses on the trials and tribulations of post-Katrina New Orleans. It’s a great series created by the same people who brought us The Wire, and which features many of those same actors, including Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters. But really interests my mother, and always has, are the depictions of real-life social injustices. To Kill a Mockingbird was an institution at my house when we were growing up. Whenever it came on the late show or network television, it was required viewing.

Treme is a fictionalized version of the post-Katrina trauma, and this treatment of that crisis lends a more personal feel to the prevailing sense of loss felt by the people of one of America’s greatest cities. I’ve also seen When the Levees Broke and If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, both Spike Lee documentaries. The first is about the immediate aftermath of the storm; the second examines New Orleans five years after the disaster. Both are simply brilliant portraits of the exile—the deportation—of an entire population.

The inherent—and occasionally explicit—racism exposed in the actions and policies of both the federal and local governments in post-Katrina New Orleans is appalling. But the truly appalling fact was the more I watched what was being done in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the more I was reminded of what is currently happening with Project 2025. In fact, in some ways it seems to me as if the post-Katrina horror show was a dress rehearsal for Project 2025.

I don’t want to start sounding like a conspiracy theorist—no, space lasers did not cause the storm. Neither did Jeffrey Epstein, but there are still an interesting number of correlations between the events of New Orleans in 2005 and Project 2025. These are (probably) not evidence of a nefarious and far-reaching plot, but the product of a cruel and enduring racism and class discrimination of which this country cannot seem to cure itself.

After the forced evacuation of mostly African American New Orleans neighborhoods, residents were sent to locations as far away as Houston and Florida. Many insurance claims on their flooded homes were denied, so a lot of residents could not afford to come back to their homes. They were, in a sense, deliberately displaced from New Orleans, much as many new immigrants are being illegally arrested by masked ICE agents and deported out of the country.

Post Katrina Project 2005), and Project 2025 policies have both removed people deemed undesirables, both because of emergencies (one real and one manufactured). When residents of New Orleans housing projects like Calliope tried to return after being evacuated, they found their buildings shuttered even though they had not been seriously damaged during the storm. It seemed that the city didn’t want them back and refused to let them go home. They were not welcome in their own city. Today, thousands of immigrants and U.S. citizens are being arrested by masked ICE agents, detained without due process, and summarily deported to foreign countries. Like poor African American Orleanians, they are also being exiled.

After the storm, every school in the New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward was closed with no foreseeable plans to reopen in the aftermath of the storm. Families couldn’t return because there was nowhere for their children to go to schools. Eventually, charter schools stepped in and took over, erasing public schools there. By that time, New Orleanians stranded in cities like Houston had already enrolled their kids in schools there.

Project 2025 has called for the abolishment of public schools and the establishment of more Christian-based schools. President Trump has obliged them by terminating the Department of Education. Proponents of Project 2025 have been bombarding and browbeating local school boards across the country to ban books and curriculum they deem unfit for children—books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Speak, and The Bluest Eye.

After Katrina, local government officials closed down Charity Hospital, New Orleans’s biggest and most popular hospital, and—even though it was perfectly fine after being refitted after flood damage—refused to reopen it, instead opting for a new for-profit facility. Project 2025 has been instrumental in dismantling the Social Security Administration and defunding Medicaid—all for the benefit of the one percent.

Project 2025 is heavily informed by the Christian Nationalist Movement which is in turn influenced by fundamentalism, racism, and the Seven Mountain Mandate, which posits that seven segments of society: family, media, entertainment, religion, education, business, and government must be transformed into institutions friendlier to Christian ideals—like racism and oppression. It’s not difficult to see how the Trump administration is working to subvert these institutions to Project 2025 tenets.

Exiling a large portion of the New Orleans African American community to distant cities has compromised the local culture. The Mardi Gras Indians, or Black Masking Indians (an African American subculture that rose up in defiance of the practice of not allowing slaves to practice their religion), known for dressing in incredibly elaborate costumes and parading on Mardi Gras or festival days, have been woefully decimated by the new diaspora. Hundreds of native musicians, artists, and writers never returned.

According to Shearon Roberts, in Treme, the oldest Black neighborhood in the city, over one thousand African American homes were wiped and have since been replaced by one hundred and twenty white households. The gentrification, the reverse white flight, is well underway. And so, “Black New Orleanians experience cultural intrusion and appropriation from outsiders that affects the meaning and history of their traditions. (Roberts).”

Part of Project 2025’s mission has been the elimination of all federalized DEI programs and office. In fact, on the first day of his second term, Donald Trump issued an Executive Orders 14151 and 14173 targeting those policies. As a result, the Department of Defense has marked material that these orders have deemed unsuitable, like photos of the Navajo Wind Talkers, or the Enola Gay, the bomber which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Apparently, any photo with the word “gay” in its caption is unAmerican.

I don’t really believe that Project 2005 was a dry run for Project 2025, but I do believe the exile of New Orleans African American residents and the ultimate destruction of their projects was a deliberate and conscious (but unconscionable) decision based mostly on economics. I also believe Project 2025 is bent on destroying American institutions to enhance its vision of a white Christian American.

New Orleans is not the city it was and will never be the same again. The same forces that forced the native African Americans into exile, took their property, commandeered their schools, and co-opted their culture are the same forces behind the warped philosophy of Project 2025. Both—explicitly and implicitly—believe in white supremacy. Both are deeply invested in class warfare. And both have been—and will be—responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.