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The Cost
of a Chocolate City: Blacks
and the Need
for
Progressive Economic Action in New Orleans
By Andrea
Roberts Part I: The Truth about “Us” and
“Them”
So-called progressive and African Americans
may be surprised to hear the discussion in the hallowed halls of
Ivy League universities these days around the future of New
Orleans. The concept of living in “two Americas” has never
been more acute than when discussing recovery and the future of
New Orleans in an academic context. “Why build in a city below
sea level?” “What’s this Chocolate City thing all
about?” “There’s no plan of action on the left concerning
the recovery and the future.” “I guess Ray Nagin is the
voice of the Left.”
I am confident that several of you reading
this have answers to counter all these questions and false
suppositions; but alternative voices have yet to penetrate the
national or academic dialogue. (And for many, Katrina is simply
an academic matter.) Political corruption exacerbated by the
color caste system, Nagin’s “favored Negro status”
pre-Katrina among Reagan Democrats and Republicans,
organizations on the ground like member groups of Common Cause
coming together to re-build one house and clinic at a time,
these are not part of the academic conversations of the future
government and business leaders studying in our
universities.
These are absent from the dialogue among
students of public and government administration soon to be
charged with righting the wrongs of the “Brownies” and
Chertoffs of the federal government. Rather, discourse in
professional schools is emblematic of the “perception gulf”
between races and classes. These intellectual exchanges
alternate between explications on the significance and
meaning of New Orleans and a cold and detached response to the
idea of rebuilding.
Matters such as the challenge of securing
levees and moving poor blacks back to an area below sea level,
end in a sense of the safe inertia endemic to academicians for
whom agency is a careful career move rather than survival.
If you are a progressive African American in
these arenas, it might be helpful to penetrate the cold
intellectual by asking that dispassionate observer to engage the
concept of rebuilding New Orleans, post-levee break,
intellectually and in terms of dollars and cents. To many
Americans those of us who hold a torch for New Orleans are
impractical, emotional and are too attached to the past. To
these people we might pose questions like:
If we knew there was a strong likelihood of
an earthquake in California arising along the San Andreas fault,
would we feel justified in telling those residents who live in
that area to relocate and not return?
If on 9/11, Ellis Island and the Statue of
Liberty were attacked and destroyed, would the government and
the country think twice about financing (and not just charitably
fundraise) to rebuild?
The answer to anyone of these questions by
those with some attachment to the collective consciousness of
American would quickly answer no to both questions. I would pose
these same questions to those who see rebuilding in some areas
of New Orleans and securing the right of return for its
residents as futile.
New Orleans is to African Americans,
historically our forced Ellis Island. By 1850, New Orleans was
the South’s largest slave trading center and was one of the
first and last places that most closely preserved our
pre-slavery culture, languages, and religions.1
This is the place many Anglo Americans metaphorically wish was
wiped off the face of the earth, so that never again would they
be reminded of the remnants of slavery that lie beyond the
drunken, fun-filled streets of the French Quarter.
Maybe if Americans were able to understand
that New Orleans was more than a place that the President used
to enjoy getting drunk in, they would be less inclined to
write off New Orleans as insignificant and not worth saving. On
the other hand, maybe not.
This country has avoided the history of
slavery and its generational curse on the nation. And this curse
was especially acute in New Orleans where the political system
largely reflected the plantation structure of power and
domination based on skin color and traditional southern
hierarchies. However, the challenge is to balance the reality of
the past with a vision for Black self-sustainable communities in
New Orleans.
Even more disturbing is that mired in the
reality of this history and those helping the evacuees heal and
survive are unwittingly releasing much of their will and their
future to leadership exhausting the same methods of resistance
and protest the community has utilized for the past sixty years.
Any vision of rebuilding focuses on what the government has
failed to provide African Americans, and little on what the more
privileged among us have neglected to provide for ourselves. A
new brand of leadership, empowerment, and resistance will be
critical to the future of black American in New Orleans and
around the country.
Part II: “Why We Can’t Wait”
Most recently, Jesse Jackson was named the
most important black leader in an AOL phone poll of 600 African
Americans. Greg Palast, noted leftist journalist, as recently as
January 10, noted Jackson’s being in the forefront of a
movement for right of return for Katrina evacuees. Noted also
for his “slave ship” metaphor and grand oratorical messages
and religious brand of spin, Jackson and TD Jakes are the most
seminal voices in the recovery discussions among African
Americans in the United States. Yes, there are several notable
ministers, business owners, entertainers, Mayor Ray Nagin, Louis
Farrakhan, and members of Congress who have called upon the
government to increase aid to businesses and New Orleans’
displaced African Americans to facilitate the “rebuilding
effort.”
Unfortunately, I would contend that the
African American community has exhibited a wanting sense of
purpose and vision to move New Orleans forward on behalf of its
African-American residents. There are those who are rightfully
taking the Bush administration to task for its almost genocidal
degree of neglect post-levee break. I am supporting their
efforts, but there is another front on which we must concentrate
our efforts.
Noted academics and African American scholars
have not failed to note the economic impact and devastation
exposed and exacerbated in the wake of the levee breaks
post-Katrina. However, even after Jackson’s convening of the
Wall Street Summit, Farrakhan’s Million More Movement March on
Washington, essays, and studies bemoaning the poverty and class
issues of New Orleans, a comprehensive, transparent finance
oriented self-empowerment program for African American people of
the region has yet to publicly materialize.
The first matter to address is that of a
transparent plan with buy-in from New Orleans and Gulf Coast
region grassroots. Part of that is confronting the question of
asking poor blacks to move back to areas below sea level in
which many of us wouldn’t live. Yes, there have been forums
and speak outs in which the mainstream characterizes the voices
of the displaced as emotional and irrelevant to progress.
Katrina got less then a paragraph and not even a direct mention
on the State of the Union.
Why? Because, the devastated landscape, begs
questions that no one in Black or White leadership wants to
answer, such as
Why have our richest African Americans, the
Oprahs, want to-be-Hedge Fund leader and Hotel mogul Robert L.
Johnson, Kimora Lee Simmons and her Baby Phat line, not stepped
forward to build tax base via investment in new enterprises in
New Orleans?
Why have the leaders in public finance and
business in the African American community not publicly sought
to organize support for their rebuilding and infrastructure
investment plans via the Black church or traditional civil
rights institutions like the NAACP in a visible manner?
Why has no one addressed the role of the
color caste system and the colonialist nature of African
American leadership in New Orleans and its role in fostering the
poverty and disempowerment of the low income and underground
economy blacks?
This is the greatest opportunity for our
community to reverse the trend toward classism and elitism
within our community. Rather than the most privileged among us
seizing their own piece of the economic pie in the redevelopment
efforts, let us have a more inclusive vision of what urban
renewal can mean for ALL the residents of New Orleans.
Those who build businesses, factories, or
become major employers create the tax base and largely control
the future of New Orleans. There is not any reason to wait on
the US government to tell rich and successful African Americans
how to build a tax base, join and organize new grassroots
redevelopment authorities and boards, and issue bonds backed by
black insurers and black wealth. Build now. Fight harder for tax
incentives later.
Some answer, that the Bush administration,
largely responsible for hundreds of storm and post-Katrina
deaths, Middle Passage like displacement, and lethal neglect of
Katrina evacuees must step up to the plate to release funding
and deploy government resources to make any of these things
happen. No, we don’t let GW and his administration off the
hook. Chertoff, Brown, Bush, and all levels of government failed
the Gulf Coast and that is a non-contestable fact.
However, I would argue that in the wake of
this devastation and level of government inaction, African
Americans must see this dark moment in our history as a grand
opportunity.
This is not the Western states that Farrakhan
speaks about in his speeches or the forty acres and a mule many
of us were promised but never attained after Reconstruction. New
Orleans is an ecological and environmental disaster area, and is
nothing like where we African Americans would think to build our
“Promised Land.” I do think that this is our chance to do
just that. This is our self-directed 21st Century
Reconstruction.
The wealthier among us and those lone
progressives in the worlds of business and finance can bring new
tools of resistance and empowerment to bear in New Orleans. And
we don’t have to wait on Uncle Sam to make all of it happen. (That
is, if the wealthy blacks we see in Ebony are as rich as they
say they are.) Reverend Jackson, you might be a large part of
the solution, but I would implore you and others who are part of
the solution to let more of the community know about the works
in progress.
Many are focused on survival or are stuck in
a holding pattern. Many of the more progressive among us want to
be able to say there is a plan on the Left or among Progressives
for the economic future of New Orleans’ displaced blacks. I
challenge the middle, upper middle and wealthy African Americans
to stop perpetuating the behind closed doors, gatekeeper
mentality that arises among us, when it comes time to dole out
the funding dregs that trickle down to our community and the
limited wealth that exists within the community.
The more privileged of us are, I believe,
called to be intercessors for Katrina evacuees, scattered,
desperate, and poor in spirit. Those recently evicted from
hotels and still unable to locate missing children and elders
can not see opportunity, but those of us privileged with
backgrounds in finance, business, economics, management, and
urban planning have an opportunity to stand in the gap like
never before for our community.
Yes, there are tax breaks, the right of
return, and matters of reparations for all of those displaced. However,
the harder questions of where and how to rebuild are not solely
in the purview of redress from local, state, or federal
government. We needn’t wait to build on the higher ground
above sea level and move our people out of the below sea level
Ninth Ward. We can do it now.
I have had my ear to the door, and the young
men and women of academia are not privy to nor do they
understand what is at stake in New Orleans. We can’t afford to
wait for them to understand. The conscious among us, outside the
traditional political worlds must act.
This is the hour in which African Americans
are to fight on several fronts simultaneously, and our fort is
the least fortified down in the Gulf from those who would come
before government even gets there and rebuild New Orleans and
the Gulf in their own graven image.
1]
State Museum of Louisiana, http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/cabildo/cab1.htm
posted 20 February 2006 |
