'Left of Black': Episode #27 featuring NOLA Artist Bruce Davenport, Jr.

Left of Black #27
w/ Bruce Davenport, Jr.
March 21, 2011

In a special episode of Left of Black, featuring a live audience, host Mark Anthony Neal talks with New Orleans artist Bruce Davenport, Jr. about surviving Hurricane Katrina, the cultural significance of New Orleans’ high school marching bands, and using his sketches to keep New Orleans’ culture vibrant.

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→Born and raised in New Orleans’ Lafitte housing projects, artist Bruce Davenport, Jr. lives and works in the now-infamous Lower Ninth Ward, devoting his time to meticulous graphic reenactments of the local musical culture of junior high and high school marching bands, those that were decimated by the levees breech and those that survive. His current exhibition “All I Need is 1 Pen” at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University was curated by Diego Cortez.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Tales from New Orleans

Tales from New Orleans
by Emily Stokes

In an airy, white-walled classroom in the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (Nocca), Anne Gisleson, its director of creative writing, is leafing through an anthology produced by her high-school class. It was a scramble getting it together, she tells me cheerfully.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit Louisiana on August 29 2005, Gisleson’s students – many of whose homes had been destroyed – were relocated to other schools across the country. Meanwhile, the old cotton factories and train depots that house Nocca were taken over by Task Force Raven, a division of the National Guard, who used it as army barracks. For a year, Gisleson says, an officer slept under her desk.

A selective state high school that trains students in literature, music, dance, theatre or visual arts, Nocca is one of the cultural hubs of New Orleans. Its teachers are working artists, and its alumni include the actor Wendell Pierce (from The Wire and the New Orleans-set Treme), musicians Wynton and Branford Marsalis and composer Terence Blanchard. Like many teachers in New Orleans, Gisleson – an energetic 41-year-old Nocca alumna who still looks like a student – responded to the storm with a fresh syllabus. She asked her class to explore the literature about New Orleans and to write about their own experiences of the city. “It’s something that everybody was feeling at the time,” she says, perching on a desk, “a near desperation to get across the worth of the city and to validate it. Faced with its loss, we felt a need to examine the culture that we had.”

Katrina, which left more than 1m in the Gulf region displaced and 70 per cent of homes in New Orleans damaged, required an unprecedented urban recovery project in the US. For this reason, historians have compared it to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which left 85 per cent of the Portuguese capital in ruins. The aftermath of Katrina is reminiscent of the 18th-century earthquake in other ways. After 1755, contemporary philosophers and writers sought to respond to and make sense of the disaster. Rousseau called for mankind to return to a more natural way of living – for people to take care of the small patch of earth over which they had control; as did Voltaire, if more satirically, in Candide.

Similarly, in the past five years, Hurricane Katrina has spawned an array of artistic responses – from home-grown community storytelling programmes to blockbuster films. Meanwhile, so-called “Katrina Literature” has become its own genre – so popular that the “Katrina memoir” has become almost a cliché.

There is a long history of writing about New Orleans, both by residents of the city and outsiders. Generally, says Gisleson, writers have tended to mythologise New Orleans, reinforcing a “gaudy image of the city as quaint, exotic, slowed down, somewhere where people do nothing but drink beer and talk”. And since Katrina, writing about New Orleans has become not merely a literary but a moral issue.

Read the Full Essay @ The Financial Times

Trouble the Water: Film Screening and Discussion

Rights! Camera! Action! Human Rights Film Screening Series

Trouble the Water (2008, 90 minutes)

July 13, 2010 7:00 pm
Duke Gardens

Winner, 2008 Anne Dellinger Grand Jury Award

Nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary, TROUBLE THE WATER takes you inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen. It’s a redemptive tale of two self-described street hustlers who become heroes-two unforgettable people who survive the storm and then seize a chance for a new beginning.

The film opens the day before the storm makes landfall-twenty-four year old aspiring rap artist Kimberly Rivers Roberts is turning her new video camera on herself and her 9th Ward neighbors trapped in the city. “It’s going to be a day to remember,” Kim declares. With no means to leave the city and equipped with just a few supplies and her hi 8 camera, she and her husband Scott tape their harrowing ordeal as the storm rages, the nearby levee breaches, and floodwaters fill their home and their community. Shortly after the levees fail, their battery dies.

Seamlessly weaving 15 minutes of this home movie footage shot the day before and the morning of the storm with archival news segments and verite footage shot over the next two years, directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal tell a story of remarkable people surviving not only failed levees, bungling bureaucrats and armed soldiers, but also their own past.

Directed and produced by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal and Executive Produced by Joslyn Barnes and Danny Glover of Louverture Films, edited and co-produced by T. Woody Richman, with addiitonal editing by Mary Lampson, Trouble the Water features an original musical score by Neil Davidge and Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack, and the music of Dr. John, Mary Mary, Citizen Cope, TK Soul, John Lee Hooker, and the Free Agents Brass Band and introduces the music of Black Kold Madina.

The film will be preceded by a panel discussion featuring Wahneema Lubiano, an associate professor in Duke’s Department of African and African American Studies, and Mark Anthony Neal, a professor in Duke’s Department of African and African American Studies.


Rights! Camera! Action! Human Rights Film Series Screening

This new film series features documentaries about human rights themes that were award winners at the annual FullFrame Documentary Film Festival. Exploring issues as diverse as voting rights, the right to die, the death penalty and access to education, these exceptional works of art move us even as they pose tough questions about whose rights are protected and why. The films are archived at the Duke Library and are part of a rich and expanding collection of human rights materials. The film series is sponsored by the Archives for Human Rights, the Duke Human Rights Center, the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Program in Arts of the Moving Image (AMI).

A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and Political Will in the Post-Katrina Era

Lower 9th Ward (October 2008)



Originally Delivered as the W.E.B. DuBois Lecture @ George Mason University in February of 2009

Haunting the (Political) Waters:

A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and Political Will in the Post-Katrina Era

by Mark Anthony



"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



Can “niggas” be cosmopolitan? The answer was emphatically no, four years ago, as we all witnessed the drama(s) of misery and suffering unfold in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast region. To be cosmopolitan suggests access to certain economic resources and the leisure time to travel the world unfettered by the demands faced by everyday folk. But those black bodies that that made themselves visible in the days after Hurricane Katrina’s landing were not “everyday folk”—they were “niggas” and “niggas” is perhaps apropos for a nation that struggled to name the landlocked and waterlogged black bodies that encroached upon the casual comforts and carefree expectations of our tiny little worlds. We called them “looters,” “refugees,” “unfortunate,” “sinners,” “animals,” “hapless” and “helpless”—anything but citizens. Such terms, ironically did little to provide media commentators pundits any more insight into the complexities of the moment or the literal landscape in which the moment evolved. As Darwin Bond Graham writes in his essay, “The New Orleans that Race Built,” despite efforts to shorthand New Orleans, the city “remains an assemblage of terrains imbued with so much meaning, nesting so much struggle and power, history and community.” (Graham)



And it is in this context that I’d like to offer yet another linguistic reference: “Katrina-Politans,” a term that obviously references notions of cosmopolitanism, but more so draws from Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s decidedly classed concept of Afro-Politians—those Africans who live in the world. (Tuakli-Wosornu) What is to be said about the humanity, desires and survivalisms of those black bodies that bore witness to Katrina’s fiercest moments, even as they are deemed expendable, and dare continue to think themselves citizens of the world? What I am suggesting here is a form of cosmopolitanism, that speaks to the relationship between those black bodies so many observed four years ago—bodies that were rendered visible, yet invisible at the same time—and the State. This is a type of cosmopolitanism marked, in part, by a symbolic homelessness from notions of mainstream American morality, political relevancy and cultural gravitas; a cosmopolitanism that finds resonance in the “Katrina Generation”—those black bodies that were deemed as little more than “refugees” by mainstream corporate media. In this regard the evoking of the term, “refugee” duly reinforced the inhumanity and foreignness of this population. In the early moments of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the evoking of “refugees” also cast illegitimacy on those so called “refugees” who might view themselves as national subjects—citizens—deserving of relief in a moment of national crisis. The term “refugee” also cast aspirations on the desires of the “Katrina Generation” to seek citizenship in whatever locale they chose—or likely were forced—to relocate.



When Walter Mosley makes the point, as he did in The Nation, that “not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age,” he captures the tragic irony of Katrina’s aftermath: many Americans and dare I say the State, have never deemed those black bodies as legitimate citizens. (Mosley) And why would they? The everyday realities of New Orleans citizens prior to Hurricane Katrina stood in stark contrast to America’s view of itself, particualry before the recent finacial crisis. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, nearly 20% of the city’s 450,000 residents live below the so-called poverty line. Within the black community in the city, about 30% of that popular was below the poverty threshold, though the national average for Black Americans was abouy 25%. (Durant) The national poverty levels for all Americans was 12.7% in the year before Hurricane Katrina. (Leonhardt) In otherwords, the black poor in New Orleans–based on a statistical map that captures little of the challegnes faced by those just above the poverty line—represented nearly three times the rate experienced by the average poor American.



For those in which there was a regular, if not fully livable wage, 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. As Lynell Thomas writes, the city’s tourist industry “invites white visitors to participate in a glorified Southern past. Black residents, if they appear at all in this narrative, appear as secondary characters who are either servile or exotic—always inferior to whites and never possessing agency over their own lives.” (Thomas) Thus perceptions of of the black poor on display at the the New Orleans Convention Center or in the Louisana Superdome were framed by a national imagination that had historically viewed them as service workers or at best, entertainers. In many ways, the coverage of Hurricane Katrina survivors functioned as little more than a national travelogue.



The role of New Orleans’s black citizens in the tourism economy of the city prior to Hurricane Katrina, helps better frame the emotional distance and lack of empathy that seemed palpable in much of the early media coverage of storm. Political scientist Melissa Harris-Lacewell observes that the regular coverage of Hurricane Katrina was only matched by the real time coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks in allowing a shared national experience of trauma. As Harris-Lacewell writes, “Rather than a single, terrible moment replayed for the media, the horror of New Orleans increased daily, produced new images of agony and death, and generated increasingly awful narratives of suffering.” Yet as Harris-Lacewell argues, there was a discernable distance between how white and black citizens viewed the effects of the tragedy and the extent that white citizens were willing to empathize with their black counterparts (Harris-Lacewell) I’d like to argue that this disconnect, while fueled by the realities racially biased structures, including the national media, was also the product of the inability for many audiences, including African-Americans, to fully invest in the idea that the black poor in New Orleans were truly citizens. This dynamic became critically clear, as Katrina survivors were dispersed throughout the country, desiring sanctuary to often disparate locales.



What the Black Katrina poor represented was a segment of the national population that had been largely isolated—politically, and otherwise. Stephanie Houston Grey suggest that the that very infrastructure in cities like New Orleans was “designed to isolate both ethnic and economic from one another by creating a protective membrane around the privileged to shield them from those less desirable. Thus the federal response was not simply an aberration of administrative policy, but a logical extension of existing urban rationality.” Issues of containment became palapable in national media coverage as black hurricane Katrina survivors became the embodiment,according to Houston Grey, of a “moral panic…leading to media hyperbole that feeds fear and hysteria, provoking a police response that is out of proportion to the actual threat that may or may not be posed.” (Houston Grey) Thus the human misery that crusted and festered over in the Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center was not viewed in the popular realm as a failure on the part of the State (at least at the time), but the failure of the infrastructure to keep such black bodies contained.



In her book Black Cosmopolitanism, literary scholar Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo suggests that efforts to deny black bodies access to the resources of the State—via active political isolation—are historically related to fears among whites that blacks might view themselves as cosmopolitan subjects. Writing about the Haitian Revolution, Nwankwo argues that “the denial of access for people of African descent to cosmopolitan subjectivity coexisted with a denial of access for that same population to both national subjectivity and human subjectivity…effectively determining the possible parameters of identity for people of African descent.” (Nwankwo) Thus the naming and misnaming of black Katrina survivors was as much an effort to deny them relief—as relevant in a natural disaster as it has been historically in relation to pursuing of legal recourse for racial and gender discrimination—as it was an attempt to dictate from above how those particular black bodies and all the black bodies who were forced to account for the images those black bodies projected, would be interpreted as political subjects.



Nwankwo’s notion that the collapsing of cosmopolitan possibilities is related to efforts to limit the breadth and diversity of black identity is particularly compelling in an era where black identities are intensely wedded to racial truisms, that while often legitimized by some of the most visible (and highly compensated) “celebrities”—Michael Vick, R. Kelly, Whitney Houston, O.J. Simpson and William “Flava Flav” Drayton to name a few and indeed the images that were transmitted from New Orleans—often distort the realities of contemporary black identity. For example, like most major urban areas, New Orleans contained sizable immigrant communities made up of African nationals and Afro-Caribbeans, which were reflective of the historic ethnic diversity of the city. Most media outlets glossed over the complexity of black identity in those days and weeks after Katrina’s landing, in part because such complexities challenge corporate media’s desires to manage evolving news stories. More broadly though, the mainstream press and the mainstream public at large, has rarely been willing to grant black bodies such complexity, choosing instead to embrace “exceptional” blacks, often at the expense of the black masses. For example, President Barack Obama’s success in the Presidential election, might be viewed within the context of his own status as an “exceptional” black.



In his memoir We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World, Malian scholar film scholar Manthia Diawara tells the story of spending a recent sabbatical in Paris. Concerned about the historic treatment of Africans in the city, Diawara wore his Black American Intellectual status on his sleeve, but when stopped by a pair of law enforcement officers who rifled through his bag only to find his Malian passport, he was symbolically undressed. The passport was evidence in the minds of the officers that Diawara was just another African—another nigga—and thus not deserving of the common courtesies extended to citizens or visitors for that matter. Diawara’s exchange with the police was prefaced by a conversation with the cab driver, also an African, whose cab he was in when Diawara were stopped by the police. “Where are you originally from?” the driver queried Diawara in response to Diawara’s earlier claim that he was from the United States.” (Diawara)Seemingly an innocent question, in many ways it was meant to demean Diawara’s site of origin and to undermine any privilege associated with his cosmopolitan identity. If a major Black American Intellectual can undressed in such a fashion, what can be said of those whose cosmopolitanism isn’t clothed in class and ethnic privilege.



Indeed, I can’t imagine that there isn’t a day when the Katrina Generation, as it is dispersed throughout the country and denied access to its “homeland,” is not faced with the like-minded query: “Where are you really from?” For all of the good will offered to Katrina transplants and in light of Barbara Bush’s ridiculous claim that they had bettered their fortunes, the reality is that many municipalities viewed Katrina survivors as a further burden on already overtaxed resources. But the Katrina-Politians are citizens of the world, by the vestige of their humanity, and they have every right to make claims on that citizenship, wherever they choose or are forced to lay their heads. Clyde Woods makes a finer point here, “In the blink of an eye, African Americans, and identity fraught with ambiguity, were transformed into black people, a highly politicized identity.” (Woods)





Haunting the Waters, Troubling National Memory



There’s a certain haunting presence about Trouble the Water, the award winning and Academy Award nominated documentary about Hurricane Katrina. It’s a presence that is immediately felt by anybody who has had the chance to journey across the city of New Orleans in the past few years. While tourists travel about downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter blandly commenting on the limited hours of some of the city’s more authentic haunts, and the Lower 9th Ward continues to serve as the most lasting monument of the destruction, portions of the city remain a decidedly barren reminder of the vibrant living cultures that once existed in the city. Of course where there is no people, there is no culture and the slow pace of recovery in the city suggest that something more sinister might be in play. Nevertheless, if Hurricane Katrina offered the rationale for what might be the only most contemporary example of ethnic cleansing in the United States, then the power of Trouble the Water comes from its brazen ability to summon the voices and spirits of those—who by force or choice—have not returned. As such Trouble the Water is a striking intervention, for a city that lacks the bodies—and the political wills that such bodies possess.



Trouble the Water tells the story of Kim Roberts, a 24-year-old New Orleans resident and aspiring rapper and her husband Scott, as Roberts documents their experiences before and after the hurricane on a hand-held video camera. Produced in collaboration with Tai Leeson and Carl Deal, the very fact that the film exists speaks to the economic realities of so many Katrina Survivors. As Rivers told the Brooklyn Rail, “We’d run out of money. We had about a hundred dollars left, and we was like, “We ought to try to see what we could do with this tape; we might find somebody we could give this tape to; well not give it, but either sell it, or license…you know, see what it’s worth.” (Cole) Robert’s comments capture the DIY ethic that has informed hip-hop geneartion expression, but also taps into more traditional African-American sensibilities that can be best captured in the notion of “make a way out of no way.” (Neal) If we think about survival as distinctly improvisational mode of navigating in the world, Trouble the Water finds it grounding by harnessing the rhythms of black improvisation via Robert’s audio and visual narration.



There’s a telling scene early in the film, when Roberts travels the streets of New Orleans alone shortly before the storm and sings to herself “On My Own” in reference to the Patti LaBelle recording. Seemingly a random utterance, the reference would have a particular resonance to African-American audiences familiar with Labelle, who possesses iconographical stature in many black communities. Mirroring the sampling practices of contemporary hip-hop, the film is littered with such references, offering audiences the possibility of gaining greater literacy in Black New Orleans culture and African-American culture more broadly. In another example the Roberts’s family dog is named “Kizzy” in reference to a popular character from the groundbreaking miniseries Roots. Within black vernacular expression, the term has been utilized as a metaphor for overburdened black women. In fact, Robert’s deployment of African-American vernacular culture as part of the metaphorical shelter that she and her comrades construct in response to Hurricane Katrina helps establish Roberts as the most credible intellectual agent in the film, despite her claim early in the film that she was the “only stupid nigga who stayed.” Robert’s use of black vernacular culture is akin to what Woods more formally describes as the “blues tradition of investigation and interpretation.” According to Woods, “the blues began as a unique intellectual movement that emerged among desperate African-American communities in the midst of the ashes of the Civil War, Emancipation, and the overthrow of Reconstruction.” More specifically in the context of Roberts’s narration, Trouble the Water, “draws on African-American musical practices, folklore, and spirituality to reorganize and give a new voice to working class communities facing severe fragmentation.” (Woods)



Roberts’s narration of Trouble the Water is also notable because it illuminates the gendered realities of Katrina survivors. That Roberts is an aspiring hip-hop artist, using rap music—a decidedly male centered cultural space—as a vehicle to express the specificity of her life as a black women, speaks to the extent that Trouble the Water succeeds in disturbing “official” readings of black urban life. Though Roberts does not openly discuss some of the specific challenges faced by women survivors of Katrina, her visibility in the film’s narrative allows for productive speculation about what exactly those challenges were. In a city in which more than half of the adult female population were single mothers, black women were particularly vulnerable to the economic and physical displacement experienced by many Katrina survivors. In addition issues of child care and parenting, for a population typically overburdened by such, were made tragically more difficult. Kathleen Bergin, suggest though, that it was the submergence of sexualized violence disproportionately experienced by black women that particularly highlights the gendered dynamics of the storm. Ironically the circulation of false rumors about bands of black male rapists—directly related to the production of Katrina survivors as “moral panic”—undermined what were legitimate cases of sexual violence and rape against black women. According to Bergin, “To deny the violently sexualized reality of Katrina on account of previous false reporting only compounds the horror of the storm for both black men and black women.” Ultimately Bergin holds the State at fault for its failure to anticipate a well known phenomenon: “The reality of gender specific violence, particularly sexual assault, is so predictable during times of catastrophic upheaval that major human rights instruments that address the needs of refugees and displaced persons…presume a heightened risk to women.” (Bergin)



When queried as to why she decided to carry a hand-held video during the storm, Roberts told the Brooklyn Rail, “I decided to film because I realized we weren’t going to be able to leave—that was the fact. And just in case it happened like how people said it was going to happen, I wanted to film it, just in case we died. I didn’t want to go out like that. With all I had been through my whole life, I always felt to some degree that my life was meaningful and that I was put here for a reason. If I died, people gonna know how I died. So to some degree, I was feeling like my legacy should live on and people would know what had happened to us. “ Though Roberts and her husband survive the hurricane, Trouble the Water still serves as tribute to those who were lost in the storm and I’d like to suggest the film serves as a kind of “second line” performance—the parade of dancing, shuffling bodies that occurs, often after a funeral. According to musician Michael White, “at the time of their origin, these parades offered the black community an euphoric transformation into a temporary world characterized by free open participation and self expression through sound, movement and symbolic visual statements.” White adds that “impositions and limitations of ‘second class’ social status could be replaced by a democratic existence in which one could be or become things not generally open to blacks in the normal world: competitive, victorious, defiant, equal, unique, hostile, humorous, aloof, beautiful, brilliant, wild, sensual, and even majestic.” (White) As such Trouble the Water serves as a critical intervention into a national memory that would rather ignore the cultural gifts that New Orleans gave the young country, the dead bodies that were sacrificed in the midst of catastrophic circumstances, as well as the possibility of rebirth that the Katrina-Politians embody.

Works Cited



Bergin, Kathleen. "Witness: The Racialized Gender Implications of Katrina." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 173-190.



Cole, Williams. "Rising Above the Flood." September 2008. The Brooklyn Rail. 26 January 2009.



Diawara, Manthia. We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World. New York: Basic Civitas, 2003.



Durant, Thomas J. and Sultan, Dawood. "The Impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Race and Class Divide in America." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000. 193-194.



Graham, Darwin Bond. "The New Orleans that Race Built." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race and Public Policy Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 18.



Harris-Lacewell, Melissa. "Do You Know What It Means...?: Mapping Emotion in the Aftermath of Katrina." Marable, Mannning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Palgrave, 2008. 153-171.



Houston Grey, Stephanie. "(Re) Imagining Ethnicity in the City of New Orleans." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 131.



Leonhardt, David. "U.S. Poverty Rate Was Up Last Year ." The New York Times 31 August 2005.



Mosley, Walter. "Shouting Underwater." The Nation 23 August 2007.



Neal, Mark Anthony Neal. ""...A Way Out of No Way": Jazz, Hip-Hop and Black Social Improvisation." Fischlin, Daniel and Heble, Ajay. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Wesleyan Press, 2004. 195-223.



Nwankwo, Ifeoma. Black Cosmopolitan: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.



Thomas, Lynell. "The City I Used to...Visit." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Plagrave, 2008. 256.



Tuakli-Wosornu, Taiye. "The New Africans Called Afro-Politans." 30th August 2007. The Zeleza Post. 25 January 2009 .



White, Michael. "New Orleans African American Musical Traditions." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 87-106.



Woods, Clyde. "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?: Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues." American Quarterly (December 2005): 1005.

Race and Housing in Post-Katrina NOLA

Four years after Hurricane Katrina, affordable public housing still isn’t available for many New Orleans residents. How white residents in St. Bernard Parish are keeping blacks out.

Keeping St. Bernard Parish White
by Brentin Mock

St. Bernard Parish, southeast of New Orleans, has the distinction in Louisiana of taking the most direct hit from Hurricane Katrina four years ago this week.

In the slow, painful rebuilding that followed, the parish has gone out of its way to keep low-income, working black families from living there. A federal court ruled twice this year—once in March and again last week—that St. Bernard’s attempts at deciding who could move in and who had to stay out were violations of the Fair Housing Act. According to the ruling, the parish’s ordinances were shown to have both a disparate racial impact and discriminatory intent. They wanted to keep black people from living there. A federal judge described the parish’s efforts as “camouflaged racial expressions.”

The St. Bernard debate has resurrected housing segregation concerns and highlighted the ongoing difficulty of trying to implement and prove the benefits of integration in terms of race and class. One commenter on the New Orleans Times-Picayune Web site recently wrote of the St. Bernard court ruling: “Everybody knows that St. Bernard is a white community. I just don’t understand why African Americans would want to move there.”

In the 2000 census, St. Bernard Parish was listed as being 88.29 percent white and only 7.62 percent black. The direct hit from Hurricane Katrina destroyed virtually all of the houses, buildings and other structures in the parish. Among the destruction was Village Square, a cluster of over 100 buildings inhabited mostly by low-income, African-American renters. Parish officials would like to keep Village Square, or anything that resembles it, from ever being built again.

Since Katrina, many residents and the elected leadership of St. Bernard have fought to exclude development of rental properties and multi-family housing units in the parish. After the storm, Craig Taffaro Jr., president of the St. Bernard Parish Council, introduced a “blood-relative ordinance,” which decreed that only immediate family members of local landowners could rent property there—and only from their relatives. With an 88 percent white population which owned 93 percent of the housing stock before the storm, it was pretty clear at whom that ordinance targeted: black people, particularly those dislocated from their homes, and especially those who lived in the demolished public housing projects.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

NOLA Lovesong

from The Root.com

With the help of its Oscar nod, the Katrina doc Trouble the Water has brazenly summoned the voices and spirits of those-who by force or choice-have not returned since the hurricane.

***

Katrina's Second Line
by Mark Anthony Neal

...Trouble the Water serves as tribute to those who were lost in the storm. In that way, the film serves as a kind of “second line” performance—the parade of dancing, shuffling bodies that occurs, often after a funeral. According to musician Michael White, “at the time of their origin, these parades offered the black community an euphoric transformation into a temporary world characterized by free open participation and self expression through sound, movement and symbolic visual statements.”

White adds that in the moment, the second line obliterates social class and status. “...one could be or become things not generally open to blacks in the normal world: competitive, victorious, defiant, equal, unique, hostile, humorous, aloof, beautiful, brilliant, wild, sensual, and even majestic.”

Indeed, Trouble the Water serves as a triumphant and critical reminder to a nation that would rather ignore the dead bodies that were sacrificed and cultural gifts that New Orleans gave our country. And that in itself is troubling.

Read the Full Essay HERE

The Katrina-Politans

The Katrina-Politians:
A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and the Katrina Generation
by Mark Anthony Neal

Can “niggas” be cosmopolitan? The answer was emphatically no, two years ago, as we all witnessed the drama(s) of misery and suffering unfold in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast region. To be cosmopolitan suggests an access to economic resources and the leisure time to travel the world unfettered by the demands faced by everyday folk. But those black bodies that that made themselves visible in the days after Hurricane Katrina made its landing were not “everyday folk”—they were “niggas” and “niggas” is perhaps apropos for a nation that struggled to name the landlocked and waterlogged black bodies that encroached upon the casual comforts and carefree expectations of our tiny little worlds. We called them “looters,” “refugees,” “unfortunate,” “sinners,” “animals,” “hapless” and “helpless”—anything but citizens. And it is in this context that I’d like to offer yet another linguistic reference: “Katrina-Politans,” a term that obviously references notions of cosmopolitanism, but more so draws from Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s decidedly classed concept of Afro-Politians—those Africans who live in the world. What is to be said about the humanity, desires and survivalisms of those black bodies that bore witness to Katrina’s fiercest moments, even as they are deemed expendable, and dare continue to think themselves citizens of the world?

What I am suggesting here is a form of cosmopolitanism, that speaks to the relationship between those black bodies so many observed two years ago—bodies that were rendered visible, yet invisible at the same time—and the State. This is a type of cosmopolitanism marked, in part, by a symbolic homelessness from notions of mainstream American morality, political relevancy and cultural gravitas; a cosmopolitanism that finds resonance in the “Katrina Generation”—those black bodies that were deemed as little more than “refugees” by mainstream corporate media. In this regard the evoking of the term, “refugee” duly reinforced the inhumanity and foreignness of this population. In the early moments of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the evoking of “refugees” also cast illegitimacy on those so called “refugees” who might view themselves as national subjects—citizens—deserving of relief in a moment of national crisis. The term “refugee” also cast aspirations on the desires of the “Katrina Generation” to seek citizenship in whatever locale they chose—or likely were forced—to relocate.

When Walter Mosley makes the point, as he recently did in The Nation, that “not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age,” he captures the tragic irony of Katrina’s aftermath: many Americans and dare I say the State, have never deemed those black bodies as legitimate citizens. In her book Black Cosmopolitanism, literary scholar Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo suggests that efforts to deny black bodies access to the resources of the State, are historically related to fears among whites that blacks might view themselves as cosmopolitan subjects.


Read the Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

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