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.

中文翻译：

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痛苦的建筑：“新”新奥尔良的种族主义和古迹去除活动主义

2017年，新奥尔良市拆除了四座种族隔离的纪念碑，以庆祝南方联邦并重视白人至上主义者的意识形态。像在其他城市一样，拆除此类古迹的努力并不新鲜，并且历史上一直与种族不平等的集体挑战以及最近的跨国后殖民斗争联系在一起。考虑到长期以来支持拆除此类古迹的激进主义，我问，为什么现在呢？在探索这个问题时，我研究了有关与该城市2005年后政治经济有关的古迹的图像，谈话和文字的传播情况，发现人们对雕像的表达情感阐明了新奥尔良多种族工作面临的持续挑战-阶级和贫困居民。我认为，市政府将古迹构筑成不平等的过去的象征，使古迹的拆除与迫切需要有意义地解决当前的不平等现象脱钩。虽然清除这四个纪念碑的城市景观使居民对反对白人至上的明显象征的居民更加可口，但它也可能反而促进了高档化的重建，使非白人贫穷和工人阶级的居民流离失所。