Abstract
In 2017, the City of New Orleans removed four segregation‐era monuments celebrating the Southern Confederacy and valorizing white supremacist ideology. As in other cities, efforts to remove such monuments are not new, and historically have been connected to collective challenges to racialized inequality, and more recently to transnational postcolonial struggles. Given the longstanding activism in favor of removing such monuments I ask, Why now? In exploring this question, I examine the circulation of images, talk, and text about the monuments in relation to the city’s post‐2005 political economy and find that people’s expressed sentiments regarding the statues illuminate the ongoing challenges faced by New Orleans’ multiracial working‐class and poor residents. I argue that the city administration’s framing of the monuments as emblems of an unequal past decouples the monuments’ removal from the urgent need to meaningfully address present inequalities. While clearing the cityscape of these four monuments makes neighborhoods more palatable to residents who oppose overt symbols of white supremacy, it may also paradoxically contribute to gentrified redevelopment that displaces predominantly non‐white poor and working‐class residents.