No Chocolate City

This is from a Sci-Fi newsletter I subscribe to. The author is a resident of New Orleans and describes Race there as more complicated than its portrayed in the OLd Media. It usually is:

There are no "black" or "white" neighborhoods in New Orleans in the way that the media mean it. Here, a "black neighborhood" often refers to a single block, or just a part of a block. I'm white, and my neighbors to either side are black, and there's a white couple behind my house, and then Section 8 housing (primarily black, but not all) down the street. And then there are a couple of wonderfully restored houses, but I don't know the racial make-up of the owners, and I don't care. Black and white people live together in New Orleans.

Are some neighborhoods "blacker" or "whiter" than others? Sure, but New Orleans has a rich and complicated racial history which cannot be summed up with "whites live uptown" and "blacks live downtown." New Orleans began as a French colony, not a British one. The French did participate in slavery, but their rules and regulations (the Code Noire) were different from the British's, which led to New Orleans having the largest population of "free people of color" in the country.