When Good Trouble Becomes Bad News
By Dr. Kyshun Webster
Some words cannot be disinfected by calling them satire.
According to Verite News, court filings reveal that New Orleans City Councilmember Freddie King wrote, after opposing a proposed 278-unit apartment development near English Turn, “I don’t want dread heads and bonnet wear fools next to me.” About half the apartments reportedly would have been affordable to lower-income residents. King later testified that he was mocking what housing advocates believed motivated his vote—not expressing his own views. That explanation deserves acknowledgment. It does not erase the words or the worldview they invoke.
“Dread heads.” “Bonnet wear fools.”
This is the vocabulary of contempt. It summons America’s oldest racial caricatures: Black people as disorderly, irresponsible and unfit for respectable company. Reduce people to their hair and clothing. Turn culture into pathology. Then use the stereotype to explain why they should live somewhere else.
Different messenger. Same poison.
This is internalized racism after it acquires status, property and political power—the belief that proximity to certain Black people threatens one’s respectability. It is the impulse to prove you have “made it” by separating yourself from those still struggling. White flight becomes class flight, and the new gatekeepers call it progress.
Black elitism is still elitism. Class prejudice does not become virtuous because its messenger is Black. And NIMBYism—“not in my backyard”—does not become principled leadership simply because it hides behind “neighborhood character.”
Character for whom? Protection from whom?
Those are the questions King must answer.
New Orleans has always been two cities sharing the same streets. Walk two blocks behind the mansions of St. Charles Avenue and wealth gives way to struggle. Luxury rises beside neglect. Tourists celebrate Black culture while the people who created it are priced out, pushed farther from their jobs and treated as threats when they seek homes near prosperity.
Here, inequality does not live across town. It lives across the street.
That geography was built through redlining, exclusionary zoning, disinvestment and political choices about who belongs where. Every time affordable housing is treated as an invasion, segregation receives another coat of paint.
We cannot close the racial wealth gap while guarding concentrated privilege. Housing determines access to appreciating property, stronger schools, reliable transportation and economic mobility. When those who have gained power recycle the same stereotypes historically used to exclude Black families, they do more than betray the struggle for equality. They become custodians of the very machinery that created the gap.
That contradiction is not merely hypocritical. It is diabolical.
Councilmember King did not create New Orleans’ housing crisis, and the city’s history of segregation cannot be placed at the feet of one Black official. The full council supported the zoning restriction. Every member should answer for that decision. But collective responsibility cannot become camouflage for individual accountability.
King owes this city an unequivocal apology—not a political non-apology or another argument about intent. He should acknowledge the injury, clarify his values and explain how his housing decisions will advance inclusion rather than exclusion. Then he must prove those values through measurable commitments to affordable housing and genuine engagement with the people demeaned by his words.
In an election year, Black working-class residents should never wonder whether Black leaders see them as constituents—or contaminants.
Representation is not simply placing a Black face in office. Racial equity requires fidelity to Black humanity in all its forms: poor and prosperous, polished and imperfect, dreadlocked and bonnet-wearing. It requires leaders to use power not merely to protect those who have arrived, but to expand opportunity for those still trying to find their way in.
The test of leadership is simple: Once you gain power and inherit the key, do you dismantle the gate—or lock it behind you?
