I take back everything I said about Southwest Louisiana

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let’s be honest, Lake Charles, which suffered the brunt of the storm, isn’t easy to love.

It’s a petrochemical town on a “working coast,” and like the wetlands it sits on, it gets the job done but isn’t much to look at. Sprawling big-box stores, strip malls and parking lots, car dealerships, mobile home parks, pipe yards, fast food franchises. All those chemical plants, too, turning petroleum into ingredients for your shampoo, disinfectants, milk cartons, pharmaceuticals, adhesives, toys, shoes, furniture, electronics. And the poison those plants belch into the air and lakes and bayous — in which we swim, from which we eat.

In some ways, Southwest Louisiana is exactly what you think it is. Lake Charles is the kind of place where a committee of mostly white officials can vote to keep a Confederate monument on the courthouse lawn (until Hurricane Laura blew it down) despite the fact that more than half of the city’s population is Black or brown. Its schools and neighborhoods are deeply segregated. When my friend Ellen’s family — who are Chinese-American — bought a house in a white neighborhood in 1980, their housewarming gift was a dead cat on the doorstep. Almost a quarter of the city’s population of 78,000 lives below the poverty line. In 2016, the metro area voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and almost certainly will again.

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