Back from the World: On Activism and Social Utility

Just back from three day sojourn through central and western New York—specifically Albany, Buffalo and Fredonia, all places that critical to my intellectual development at various points of my career. I earned a BA and MA in English from SUNY-Fredonia, my doctorate from the University of Buffalo and taught for six years at SUNY-Albany. The Book House at Stuyvesant hosted a joint signing with myself and Janell Hobson and the English Department at SUNY-Fredonia hosted a lecture and signing for me as part of the college’s homecoming activities.

The highlight of my trip though was conversation between myself and Masani Alexis DeVeaux that was hosted by Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo. Talking Leaves is one of my favorite book spots in the world. Founded in the midst of the heady political times of the early 1970s, it remains a bastion of sophisticated left sensibilities as well as a shining example of a business committed to social justice and community involvement. Still remember picking up my copy of Tricia Rose’s Black Noise at Talking Leaves—literally grabbing my copy as they opened the shipment (my colleague and friend Greg Dimitriadis picked up the other copy that day back in 1994).

Of course, Alexis and I have a history—much of it lovingly recalled throughout the pages of New Black Man. Though we could have “performed” as Mama Soul and Soul Baby (the metaphor for our intellectual relationship) Alexis (who attended the Saturday march in DC) thought it would be better to use our conversation to discuss political realities in the post 9/11, post-Katrina world. What occurred was a great conversation about pedagogical strategies, the generational divide among The Left and the need for a new language of social justice—a language more in sync with “generation ipod” and finally wrested from the grips of the Old Left.

One particularly interesting moment during our conversation about language was a discussion of the word “activism”. In her former role as Chair of Women’s Studies at the University of Buffalo, Alexis mention that she often had to defend to administration the department’s desire to maintain small class sizes. Her simple response to them was that the classes needed to be small because the students were, in part, being trained to become activists. Activists? And as you would expect from any university administrator, in their minds, activism was equated with “Take Back the Night” events, locking administrators in their offices or students taking over the President’s office. Fair enough—and don’t think that their aren’t a large amount of students on our campuses who think of activists and activism in the same light, hence their desire to distance themselves from any thing that even hints at an act of activism.

But Alexis made the point the activism should begin with equipping our students (and the folk) with the skills to critically access their relationship to power and to that which actively disempowers and marginalizes them. I’ve been thinking about this definition as I introduce the students in my “Introduction to African-American Studies” class to the activist example that was Ella Jo Baker (Courtesy of Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement : A Radical Democratic Vision ). Many of my students see activism as something that belonged to the “1960s” and thus out of place with their contemporary lives. Like so many others—Joy James, Manning Marable and Charles Payne quickly come to mind—I’ve always seen “Black Studies” as a site of praxis—theory and practice imagined in the name of social justice. And in 2005 there is perhaps no better example of praxis than Ella Jo Baker, particularly because as a “middle aged” women in the late 1950 and early 1960s she understood the importance of embracing “youth culture” as a means of helping black youth realize their own political goals.

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The original impetus for my trip to Western New York was the 35th anniversary celebration of the Educational Development Program (EDP) at SUNY-Fredonia. EDP is an offshoot of the Educational Opportunity Program, a program that exist on all 66 of the State University of New York’s campuses. Created by legislation pushed through the New York State assembly in the late 1960s by Buffalo’s Arthur O. Eve. 35 years after the program’s founding, more than 40,000 folk have earned undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees from SUNY campuses because of the program. I am one of those 40,000 graduates. As a “SUNY-baby” (I earned three degrees from SUNY institutions) who benefited greatly from the Educational Opportunity Program and the Underrepresented Minority Fellowship (also the brainchild of Eve), I derived great satisfaction from the six years that I spent as a professor at SUNY-Albany. Arthur Eve understood that the hallmark of a productive society was an educated and skilled professional workforce. He also understood that blacks, Latino/as and poor whites were underrepresented within the SUNY system. Out of realities of “need” and “social utility” came a vision that ultimately was in the best interest of the State of New York and society at large.

Back on the Radio

On Monday September 25, 2005 at 5:15, Cultural Critic and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal discusses his new book New Black Man with Mark Thompson, the host of “Make It Plain”, on XM-Radio’s The Power (XM 169)—A 24-hour African-American talk radio program.

“Make it Plain” can also be heard live on WOL (1450 am Washington) and WOLB (1010 am Baltimore).

New Black Man on the Radio

Mark Anthony Neal discusses his new book New Black Man on NPR's News and Notes with Ed Gordon

New Black Man on the Road

Wednesday September 21, 2005
7:00 PM
The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza
1475 Western Avenue,
Albany, NY 12203

Book-Signing and Discussion

Join Janell Hobson (SUNY-Albany) and Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) at a Book-Signing Event in celebration of their new books

Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (Routledge)

and

New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (Routledge)


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Thursday September 22 2005
7:00 PM
Talking Leaves Books
3158 Main Street in Buffalo, NY, 14214
(716) 837-8554

Book-Signing and Discussion

Join Masani Alexis DeVeaux and Mark Anthony Neal as they discuss their most recent books Warrior Poet: The Life of Audre Lorde and New Black Man and comment on recent events surrounding Hurricane Katrina


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Friday September 23, 2005
3:00 PM
State University of New York College at Fredonia
Fenton Hall 105

Book-Signing and Lecture

Mark Anthony Neal, '87, '93, faculty member in the African and African American Studies Program at Duke University and National Public Radio commentator, will speak on campus Friday, Sept. 23 at 3 p.m. in 105 Fenton Hall as a guest of the English Department.

His talk, sponsored by the department's Mary Louise White Fund endowed through the Fredonia College Foundation, is entitled "What the Hell Is a Male Feminist? Rethinking Masculinity in a Post-Feminist World." Relating closely to his most recent book, New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005), the talk will be followed by a brief question-and-answer session, book-signing and reception.

For more information regarding this event, contact Natalie Gerber (English) at (716) 673-3851.

Blackademe Weighs in on Katrina, 9/11 and Kanye West

It Is About Race
by William Jelani Cobb

William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of History at Spelman College.

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Commentary: A Perspective on Looters and Race
by Lester Spence

Lester Kenyatta Spence is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University

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Left Behind: Backdrop to a National Crisis
by Peniel E. Joseph, Ph.D.

Peniel E. Joseph teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook.

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Wahneema Lubiano on Race, Class, Katrina and the Left

Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African and African American Studies at Duke University

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Commentary: New Orleans' Cities of the Dead
by Karla Holloway

Karla FC Holloway is William R. Kenan Professor of English at Duke University

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‘Our Tsunami’: Race, Religion and Mourning in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama
A Sermon by Maurice O. Wallace

Maurice Wallace is Associate Professor of English and African and African-American Studies at Duke University

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Commentary”: On the Fourth Anniversary of Sept. 11
by Farah Jasmine Griffin

Farah Jasmine Griffin is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

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Thank You, Kanye!
by Fanon Che Wilkins

Fanon Che Wilkins is an Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Race-ing Katrina
by Mark Anthony Neal

Mark Anthony Neal is Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University

Wahneema Lubiano on Race, Class and Katrina

'Killing Them Softly': Race, Class and Hurricane Katrina
by Wahneema Lubiano
September 6, 2005

“Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, “This is working very well for them. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know were underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”

The politics of life and death are articulated in public and private conversations, in allusions to past and present history, in unacknowledged desires and fears, as well as in the movements and undertakings of the powerful. In these private and public conversations, allusions, desires and fears, movements, and undertakings, race is not only race, class is not only class. And as people talk in this moment they don’t always express or even know what they want or fear as they’re wanting something or terrified by something. And always, always, power is directing our attention to something other than itself–unless, of course, it needs to show itself as something that comforts. The disaster (both natural and unnatural), the responses to this disaster, and the huge public conversation about the disaster is revealing and heightening the contradictions already present in our social order. And the history of those contradictions.

Many things have gone on in the response to Katrina:

Things including war on the poor, which is business as usual for this social order. Those who were already poor (employed or not) when Katrina hit are certainly poorer in the wake of the disaster.

Things including both the dynamics of racism in movements and undertakings and the expressions of racism in the large conversation.

Things including the fierce and generally unacknowledged messiness of the dynamics of racism and classism and the entangling of race and class concepts that live both in those confusions and in material life. Racism treats all racialized others (regardless of class position) as if they are the lower class, the dangerous class, made visible. And if race is the uneasily but still recognizable (to the general public understanding) social determination, class, of course, is the social ordering and determination that is most often treated as simply a limitor of consumer choices.

What it is possible to see and hear in the vicious, or stumbling, or confused, or simply inarticulate expressions from various people [archive: newspaper reportages, opinion, and letters to the editor, media, online discussion fora, conversations] about what was and is happening along the Gulf Coast is the imagination run wild and fearful. Many members of the U.S. public were unable to “see” Latinos/Latinas, Asian-Americans and Asians–members, for example, of a Vietnamese congregation trapped in their church, poor white people, abandoned foreign tourists – the vision of complexity is wiped out by the “darkness” so thoroughly on display, so thoroughly and simplistically discussed.

Racism side-swipes the usually non-raced (poor white people), or the lightly-raced (Latinos/Latinas, Asians and Asian Americans, etc.), or the accidentally and transiently raced (foreign tourists trapped by the disaster). The heterogeneity of the trapped is matched by the multiplicity of the forms of entrappment., by what was already in place, or, more to the point, by what wasn’t already in place–but the complexities are covered by the shadow cast by the people so multiply black.

Among those things that were devastatingly in place were plans and responsibility for a New Orleans evacuation that were privatized--controlled by a private contractor, IEM, that is a consultant to FEMA. But what was most devastatingly already in place was the softest of soft targets–the already poor. One discussant on the Left Business Observer list-serv referred to the criminal negligence of the U.S. government’s response as “killing them softly.” What wasn’t in place: an economic safety net for the poor to begin with, and regard for what that lack means in the midst of a disaster.

But the middle classes and much of the upper classes –in short, anyone whose assets stop short of helicopter or private jet ownership or access to same and who might someday need to get out of town or might need to have help in a disaster or crisis ought to be a little anxious right now. (I’m talking about all of us right now.) What many see as the criminal negligence of FEMA’s [archive: FEMA guideslines, FEMA regulations, various newspaper articles, government documents, letter from Louisiana governor to the President via Homeland Security, etc.] operations is also, I think, a form of disciplining aimed at the not-poor and/or the not-black as well who are not part of this disaster but are consuming it and its lessons from afar. Black poor people, and other poor or event just temporarily poor people, are the canaries in the coal mine. This government is in the process of abandoning us all to varying degrees. And it is that variance that is malleable and mitigated by the specifics of class and/or race.

Whether you are hitchhiking out of a disaster, driving out in a Honda or a Porsche, the structural horrors (material, economic, political) of the devastation of the Gulf Coast now will stretch out its tendrils to all of us. While the thickness and shape of the tendrils of a disaster will be affected by mitigating factors, what we will increasingly have in common is our rotting infrastructures and the abandonment of a sense of common good materially manifested by our government. (And the material consequences of the destruction of that region will hit us all even if unequally so.)

That abandonment of some notion of a common good has shown up for decades in the public acceptance of U.S. disregard for the outside world. Disregard isn’t containable–it travels out to the world and comes back home too. What we’ve been willing to support in the spread of this and past governments’ brutalizing of other countries, other people, has brutalized our own imaginations of what we are as a social order.

The present hyper-visibilities – the plight of specific kinds of people in this moment as well as the specifics of expressions of racism directed at black Americans, in addition to what I call the flickering visibilities – the plight of poor white people, of temporarily poor people (displaced tourists; medical professionals, other helpers), could be a goad to constituting an alternative to the idea of everyone for him or her individual self.

But there’s noise that interferes with that signal. When George Bush was talking about rebuilding the house of Trent Lott and sitting on the porch with Lott, this language acted as a shout-out to the racist part of this administration’s base because, whatever the complexities of the actually existing Trent Lott, he resonates across the white supremacist U.S. as a defender of segregation [archive: newspapers, magazines, online fora (eg. The Free Republic.com), everyday discussions, etc.]. The resounding noise of that shout-out helps provide cover for the privatization of reconstruction (Hello Halliburton) [archive: government documents, newspaper accounts, official correspondence, etc.] and disaster management (Hello IEM) [IEM Press Release, New Orleans Times-Picayune article], and a reward to the refiners via the lifting of environmental protections [various newspaper articles, White House Press Release] – an enrichment that is a shoutout to the richest part of Bush’s base.

The casual throwaway racist language of “savages running wild”, of “people who should be grateful that the disaster will provide them with a better life” in the Astrodome; the cliches about black welfare dependency and the bad behavior of “those people” showing that they can’t really be saved [archive: huge volume of newspaper letters to the editor, online fora, everyday conversations], and the willingness of those in charge of recovery simply throwing food and water [archive: newspapers, television footage; online fora] at victims of this storm–all of these things and more provide cover for other forms of class warfare on the part of the powerful and cover for the work of dismantling, one disaster or crisis at a time if necessary, the idea that our social order can expect its government [archive: conservative position papers; conservative magazines (eg. The American Spectator), online fora] to do more for its citizenry than to usher public money to what it sees as that money’s “rightful” owners, the corporations that paid for the heads of that government’s election.

The response to this disaster does not have to be actually racist; racism is so much a part of our culture that it is always available as a simple tool of convenience. It can be called onto duty and then dismissed. One of the jobs that it does terrifically well, again and again, is to divert attention from what else is happening. The public imagination was focused on the scary blackness of people massed at the Superdome or the Convention Center, standing on the highway, standing on roofs. That vivid visibility also pushes the other people (in their heterogeneity) also there out of the picture frame until they are pulled into the picture as representations of the not-black and scary “properly” behaving fictions. I am describing a relay of framing movement as these “proper” victims are contrasted to those people spectacularly on display as visible contrasts to the “lawless” and the “looters” of New Orleans.

Late last night I was taking a break from obsessing on the internet and saw Tucker Carlson on CNN doing up a follow-up interview with Andre Broussard (president of Jefferson Parish ) who, on Sunday, had broken down crying after criticizing the federal government on “Meet the Press.” Carlson asked Broussard to comment on the awfulness of the looting in New Orleans (cue pictures of burning buildings in NO), and Broussard said, “well, some of that is going on here too. Our shopping center burned on Wednesday.” Broussard went on to describe what the police and national guard were having to contend with in his area.

It was a moment when the possibility of bad non-black actors was at least alluded to. It was also a moment that passed really quickly.

The comfortably well-off U.S. (and/or those who simply want comfort and aren’t too particular about what it costs in other people) – can have that desire for comfort fed by the disciplining of the visible poor – the dangerous classes.

I want to be clear, so I’m going to say this as directly as I can. I’m bringing together four areas of concern: (1) the presence of racism does not mean the absence of class warfare against the poor and working class; (2) a war on the poor does not mean that people of considerable color aren’talso the easier targets; (3) the analytic insufficiency of a U.S. black/white binary around racial thinking does not mean that other “others” can’t be thought about; and (4) the attention being paid to particular subsets of objects of governmental criminal negligence does not mean we shouldn’t all be terrified of the closing down of idea of a common good.

* * * * *

I’m going to finish here with some attention to “looting” – both the idea and the activity. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." -- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials.

The September 2nd - 5th weekend edition of USA Today (online) ran as one of its sub- headline (in the online edition, it was to the right of the main headline): “Lawlessness Fosters Fear.” A word here about lawlessness and its class belonging. If we are not a lawless nation from the very top of our government’s hierarchy, I don’t know what we are. (Actually existing criminals ought to be indignant at the expressions of hypocrisy.) We are up to our noses in a lawless war gerry-rigged by lies; we are led by an administration for whom laws and regulations that get in the way of the good of corporations are routinely ground under its wheels; the engine of help that took its time getting to the disaster region is a product of that lawlessness and disregard for its people. Our attention is being directed to the lawlessness of individuals, and we respond with fear: “that could happen here, that could happen to me.” And we are gratified when “order” is talked about and seems to have been restored. Sometimes all that is required for the achievement of that satisfaction is to see a black male lying on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back [archive: newspapers, television, online fora, conversation].

In the meantime, we are at the mercy of a lawless over-class that is looting the state and a state that is looting itself for its friends (yet another Hello to Halliburton) and that is invisible to us. The reek of sanctimoniousness and self-righteousness that is drifting outward from the haves of the Bush administration and condemning not only looters, people who “didn’t have the sense to leave,” the local governments, and the poor–the poor , who Barbara Bush tells us are better off now that they’re in the Astrodome than they’ve ever been in their lives–well, the stench of that self-righteousness rivals for noxiousness the smell of shit from the NO Superdome and Convention Center that people there had to breathe for almost a week.

In the U.S. state we seem to be really particular about our tolerance of looters. In fact, we have a tiered system for even thinking about them. Within this community of thought, the absolute bottom is occupied by people who steal TVs. The lowest of that low are those who might barter the TVs for drugs; slightly above them (but still lower than a snake’s belt buckle) are those who steal TVs and might barter them for water, money, clothing, etc.; rising above them are those who are looting food, water, shoes, clothing for their own use or that of others’ close to them (who nonetheless, President Bush told us, should be included in the most dire penalty for looting).

By contrast, occupying the very top tier of looters would be the big state actors, like the Bush administration, looting the national budget for its illegal war and accompanied by the war and disaster profiteers who are engorging themselves and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future but who, I admit, aren’t often photographed carrying away their billions in plastic garbage bags while running down the street.

When people start talking about a shoot-to-kill policy for looters, aren’t they in danger of committing the crime of threatening the life of the President of the U.S.?

We might want to think about why it is the petty thief who gets shot while these other looters simply get richer (Hello Dick Cheney–I wanted a break from saying Halliburton).

Finally, to those who have said and continue to say that this isn’t about race or class, you simply aren’t paying attention. What is happening is, of course, about more than those social facts, but the existence of those social realities within a nation that allows itself to accommodate those realities will be rewarded with all the horrors brought on by the public’s inability to see what has been and continues to be made within the terms of that accommodation. We accept living within a world of unequal division of resources. We accept living in a state that is intent upon re-making the world to its accommodation. We accept the tearing down of a material fabric of governmental responsibility for which we pay with our taxes. And we accept this in some significant part because class inequality and racial inequality are as American as apple pie. The politics of death are articulated in the life we deny the most vulnerable of our people. And the life that is increasingly going to be denied to more and more of us.

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Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African and African American Studies at Duke University

‘Our Tsunami’: Race, Religion and Mourning in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama

The Guest Sermon today is from my colleague and friend, Rev. Dr. Maurice O. Wallace

'Our Tsunami’: Race, Religion and Mourning in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama

And when he was come night, even now at the descent of the mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the might works that they had seen; Saying Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord: peace in heaven and glory in the highest. And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, Master rebuke thy disciples. And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. And when he was come near, he beheld the city and wept over it. (Luke 19:37-41)

Some African-Americans have described the devastation wrought
by Hurricane Katrina as ‘our tsunami’… (David Gonzales, “The Victims, Largely Poor and Black” The New York Times)

I. I am sick today, with grief. A grief, significantly exacerbated by a deepening consternation I have for the general health and, from my point of view, the dubious well-being of the church in America today. I am gravely worried, about what I perceive, as a conflict, a contradiction, if you may, between our increasing religiosity, on the one hand, and our decreasing relevance and vitality to change the world’s conditions, on the other hand. I am troubled, this morning, grievously troubled, by the popularity of a commercial Christianity that romanticizes our faith for the sake of capital campaigns, political favor and box office receipts, and misrepresents the journey as fast and furious, when the way is oft-times arduous and long-winded. It is disturbing, beloved, that the measure of our faith today is so often in the spectacle-charm of charismatic display that charisma now trumps compassion as the essential element, the sine qua non, of Christian identity in the most popular churches in America today. Worship is so singularly worshipped, and bells-and-whistle praise so fashionable now, that the experience of church today is all celebration, and no sympathy at all. Which is not to say that celebration is incompatible with worship but any man who only ever celebrates, who treats life as an interminable party, has no time or inclination to contemplate the extreme weight of black urban life and loss incomprehensibly endured in Louisiana and Mississippi last week. His humanity, and the human prospect for godliness within him, is thus diminished by his indifference. The very thing that would realize his divine potential, the praise craze of this current age helps him, tragically, to avert. It is a reflex of the religious I believe I comprehend, but can’t quite understand.

Only one month ago, on the very same day that an estimated ten to fifteen thousand marched along Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Drive to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and to mobilize support for its extension, the Atlanta Georgia Dome, World Congress Center, Philips Arena and International Plaza were nearly filled to the rafters with more than 100,000 predominantly black churchgoers gathered for MegaFest 2005, the star-studded super conference and Christian entertainment event brilliantly conceived by Rev. T. D. Jakes, the most popular, most charismatic, most sermonically adept television evangelist in the last twenty-five years. Now I was not there, but I am given to understand anecdotally that a spirited time was had by all. It was a monumental celebration of Jesus as Lord, like none Atlanta had seen since the first Jakes conference there in 1999. Surely, Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem more than 2,000 years ago could not have held a candle to 100,000 brothers and sisters, “saved, sanctified, blood-bought and Holy Ghost-filled,” churchin’ together in the black cultural holy city, Hotlanta, in 2005. But for all the celebration there one month ago, I am bothered that I don’t hear the lamentations, the fervor, the loud din of mourning by those who got bought whole new wardrobes and even got their “h’ir did”--shout out to Missy Elliot--just for Megafest (I’m sorry, that wasn’t nice, was it?).

Was that celebration so intoxicating that it numbed all 100,000 celebrants to the horror of Hurricane Katrina, the outrage of official race- and class-based abandonment of thousands to spiritual despair and the cruelest indignities of death? Where is the mega-aid from Mega-fest and its corporate sponsors? Where were the mega-buses to evacuate the stranded and struggling? Worse still, why has there been no exercise of the mega-influence of so many black religious persons, a goodly number of whom cast their vote for the present Administration last November, to demand something from this President, a man who spends more time in Texas, it seems, than in Washington (though it hardly matters where he is anymore since, from a certain point of view, he’s been on vacation his whole presidency). I do not mean to pick on Rev. Jakes exclusively. He is but a symbol for a new black evangelicalism that seems far more preoccupied by gay marriage and “judicial activism” than by human and civil rights. To be fair to Rev. Jakes, it is true that he has not been indifferent to this disaster and has coordinated a relief effort led by his own 30,000 member church, The Potter’s House, in partnership with a dozen other largely black mega-ministries. It is reported they have given $250,000 in food, water, clothing and first aid and Jakes’s church has opened its elementary school to the children of the displaced who end up, intentionally or aimlessly, in Dallas. As generous as this aid may seem, however (or ungenerous, depending on your perspective of things), the new black church in America has left altogether untouched its greatest resource to relieve the suffering of so many who weekly support them. One thing, Jesus admonished the rich young ruler, thou yet lacketh. With more than $400 billion wasted on an unjust war in Iraq, how could the church let our Gulf Coast neighbors be so egregiously insulted by a congressional appropriation of one-fortieth of that sum? What will it take for the black church, its evangelicals especially, to expend its newfound political influence in order to save souls?

Who but the black church has the moral and political capital to agitate on behalf of the Gulf coast’s disinherited, the likes of whom Jesus was so unambiguously clear about defending? And not only defending, but feeding. He did not, after all, only fly by Jerusalem, and think his duty done. No, as Brother Kanye West recently reminded us, Jesus walked. He doesn’t do fly-bys. Jesus walks, is West’s refrain. He doesn’t make political speeches full of promises come too little too late. Jesus walks. With the shoeless and the shirtless. Jesus walks. With the stranded and the starving. Jesus walks. On the ground. He walks. Through hell and high water. He walks. With neighborly compassion, not executive conceit. He walks. But more than that. He feeds. Four thousand here. Five thousand there. He feeds them who hunger. No signs of looting, no bottleless babies, no outbreaks of violent frustration, though the potential is there. Because he feeds his friends. With only twelve volunteers and the most restricted of resources, he did what FEMA and Homeland Security obviously cannot.

I don’t’ understand it. If the Savior can feed thousands with a team of only twelve and the most meager means, then somebody tell me why the leadership of the mightiest nation on the globe cannot coordinate its unsearchable resources with at least the equal efficiency of an un-degreed Hebrew carpenter? Wait. Don’t answer that. I already know the sad, un-American answer. We all do.

II. It is the Lukan picture of Jesus that I have called your attention to this morning, because it is the picture of the most essential response any of us, conventioneer or president, could have to the Gulf coast apocalypse some have called “our tsunami” in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead. For Hurricane Katrina is indeed “our tsunami” as much as it is that of the unmoored masses of Biloxi, New Orleans and—lest we forget—Sri Lanka.

Witness Jesus atop Mount Olive. From that mountain platform, he commanded the full panoramic view of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount from the East across the Kidron Valley. Behind him set Jericho. And closer still, Bethany. At his feet fall the praises of them who proclaim him Lord and King, fulfillment of the prophecy. And it would be a thrilling scene, except for the curious disconnect between him and them. They celebrate, but he mourns. Looking down from Olivet , he mourns. Mourns over Jerusalem. He sees a bigger picture, commands a wider perspective and mourns for Jerusalem. Thousands and thousands of churches will conduct worship this morning with shouting and celebration, clapping and dancing, and miss the point made by the example of Jesus: Its mourning time. Jerusalem’s in jeopardy. Its mourning time.

Somehow, we’ve lost sight of the importance of mourning. Of the redemptive value of sackcloth and ashes. Somehow, we’ve been mis-educated, theologically misinformed, led away from of our tradition, and have come to regard mourning only as a sign of hopeless resignation and sinking sadness But I want to suggest that mourning is more than resignation; in mourning is the potential for redress and resistance. It is not the white flag of surrender it appears to be to uninitiated eyes. But it is a passionate protest against the tyranny of death. Mourning is a sit-in against loss, a public petition that will not keep silent. Mourning is the spectacle refusal of indifference, apathy, chauvinism, and injustice. Today is a day of mourning. A day for un-silenceable sorrow and unappeasable complaint against environmental racism, corporate looting by big oil, against presidential arrogance and insensitivity, third-world poverty in affluent America, against the wretched light in which black life in America and Africa is seen, against a political unconscious which perceives New Orleans as Baghdad, and Mississippi as Afghanistan. This is our tsunami.

So let us mourn with those who mourn. Weep with those who weep. Cry aloud with anguish at what has befallen us at the gulf coast. For it is only by God’s inscrutable grace that what has happened miles from here, did not happen precisely here. In any event, this is our tsunami. And it is mourning time. Let us raise our voices in bitter lament, conceding that while our praise may get us goodies from a giving God, it is our mourning that provokes a mothering God to radical action on behalf of oppressed and suffering people. This is our tsunami. And so I mourn with Louisiana. I mourn with Mississippi. I mourn with Alabama. And I have only this confidence for my food and comfort:

God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed
And though the mountains be carried in the midst of the sea;
Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled,
Though the mountains shake with swelling thereof.
There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God.
The holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.
God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God shall help her, and that right early.
The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved
He uttered his voice, the earth melted.
The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our refuge.
God bless you. Amen.

***

Maurice Wallace is Associate Professor of English and African and African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideology in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995

Race-ing Katrina

Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more”—Bessie Smith, “Backwater Blues

To understand the carnage currently taking place in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast region, one has to understand what life was for many folks who lived in the city of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans was a city in which nearly 70% of its inhabitants were of African-descent. Of the city’s nearly 450,000 residents, over 23% live below the federal poverty level and nearly 40% of children under the age of 18 also live below the poverty line, to say nothing of those folks whose incomes are above the poverty level, but still exist in a tenuous economic state. Tourism was the city’s primary industry, much of it related to the activities of The French Quarter and seasonal events like Mardi Gras, the Sugar Bowl, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the occasional Super Bowl. The livelihoods of many of the city’s working class and working poor communities were inextricably tied to their roles as service workers in the tourism industry. In other words, for much of the year, some sections of New Orleans were little more than underdeveloped outpost—not of some so-called “third world” nation, but right in the United States. In its aftermath, Hurricane Katrina has and will still expose many shortcomings in human nature, the federal government and political leadership—those elected and anointed—but for this moment, she has powerfully exposed the reality of race, class and poverty in the United States. Many of those who have died and will still die will have done so simply because they were poor and/or they were black.

As many were enthralled by the human and natural dramas taking place in the Gulf Coast region, the news that there was an increase of the number of people living in poverty in this country went virtually unnoticed. The more discerning viewer of national media coverage of Katrina could have guessed as much without the aid of a national report. The reality is that some of New Orleans’ residents were already dying a slow death, brought on by a concentration of poverty, inferior housing, dilapidated educational structures, violence, environmental decay and systematic state neglect. Ironically we can thank the national media, who quite unintentionally, exposed the world to the reality of poverty in the region, even as it took many outlets 3 or 4 days to wrap their head around the fact that the majority of city’s residents were black. While the national media might have been oblivious or at least unwilling to openly address the racial component of the disaster—including the absolute failure to contextualize the slow pace of federal assistance with the reality of who they were charged to assist and the subsequent “looting” that occurred—let’s not believe that the powers to be were not. New Orleans, like far too many of America’s urban centers, needed a Marshall Plan (like the one going down in Iraq), long before Katrina came ashore. The failure of the federal government to fully address the city’s near state of crisis before Katrina—including the failure to deal with an aging and inadequate levee system—had a great deal to do with the kinds of people who lived there.

The title of Thomas Shapiro’s recent book The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality is perhaps a fitting metaphor for what it meant to be black and poor in a city like New Orleans. Although Shapiro’s concern was over the wealth gap that exist between middle class blacks and whites and the extra costs associated with being black and middle class—higher mortgage rates, less equity, and less financial flexibility, among others—there are clearly also added costs associated with being black and poor. For so many poor people in this country, there is an understanding that poverty has added costs—not only are you poor, but you are forced to live in environments that often lack vital resources or at least the kinds of resources that those with significantly healthier economic profiles have come to take for granted. And the black poor have long understood this—this is exactly what Bessie Smith sang about in “Backwater Blues” (1927), her mediation on what it meant to be black and poor and forced to live in a place where whenever the waters of the Mississippi rose, there was a good chance you would lose all your earthly possessions. In the context of Hurricane Katrina, that added cost may have been your life or at the very least the scorn of a nation that couldn’t quite understand why you were “so black” and “so poor”. Thousands of American citizens became “refugees” in the eyes of the American public and while we understand that a refugee is one who seeks “refuge”, let’s also be clear that for most Americans that term has been largely applied to “boat people” fleeing the tyranny of their native lands. And in that regard maybe “refugee” is the fitting term.

Kanye West—brave as he is in his attempt the fill the leadership void amongst hip-hop artists since the murder of Tupac Shakur—was right when he said “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black people”, but we need to complicate that sentiment. It is perhaps too easy to suggest that the federal government’s response to Katrina would have been more emphatic if it occurred in largely white communities. The initially tepid and lazy response to Katrina in New Orleans wasn’t just a product of racist neglect, it was also the product of the devaluation of whole communities because they didn’t posses political capital. In other words the black poor of New Orleans were politically irrelevant thus it didn’t matter what happened to them because they were incapable of holding anybody accountable for their tenuous state. Yes, President Bush would have responded more quickly in Florida, but not simply because his brother is the governor of the state, or that the state is more visibly “non-black”, but because the Florida possesses a white and Spanish-speaking electorate that votes and thus can hold any damn body accountable for their failure to respond in a timely matter. On some level the sudden (and legitimate) indignation of black political leadership—The Congressional Black Caucus, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., Rev. Al Sharpton, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, etc—was insulting. There has long been cause for such indignation: the erosion of Civil Rights legislation, the prison industrial complex, the dysfunctionality of the electoral process, the tragedy of urban schooling, homophobic and misogynist violence, and the criminal justice system among them. As the images of the black poor in New Orleans began to circulate, it not only exposed social crevices caused by race and class, but perhaps, the irrelevancy of current black political leadership. The indignation of black political leadership was as much a last stab at validation as it was a legitimate attempt to find recourse for those suffering in New Orleans and other regions of the Gulf Coast.

***

Literally as the heritage of New Orleans washes away in defiled and diseased waters, there’s little doubt that there was a new blues that was birthed on rooftops, in the Superdome and outside the New Orleans Convention Center. The stories of those children and young people who were forced to suffer have yet to be told and they will be told in the music, visual art, literature and body movements that have yet to come—except in the nightmares these folk have confronted them nearly every night since Katrina’s land-fall became a reality. Katrina was an incredible disaster, but let’s hope that her most lasting effect will be to rattle the foundations of a democracy that has failed to live up to its own promises.


NP: Wynton Marsalis--In This House, On This Morning