Big Issues in the Big Easy

First of all, thank you for everyone who shared their opinion on our recent blog poll! The statement was: “If the worst hurricane-affected communities in New Orleans were mostly white, the government would have responded more quickly.” 16 percent disagreed strongly, 8 percent said they disagreed, 37 percent agreed, 33 percent strongly agreed, and four percent weren’t sure.

I had some pretty disjointed ideas about my time in New Orleans. Any joints or transitions would have come out pretty contrived, so here we go on a rockily-written ride….

NOLA Nostalgia

New Orleans does a great job of selling nostalgia. It’s one of these cities whose walls are covered in black and white photos and ancient advertisements framed sentimentally, whose colorful souvenirs herald to a time when the city boomed with a unique energy. Jazz musicians, kings and queens of their time, are convincingly made synonymous with New Orleans and crafted into glazed statues. You can sit your very own Mississippi steamboat complete with big red paddle-wheel right on your home bookcase. Or you can purchase the memorabilia of America’s racial past- reminders of the darker side of this indefinite time period we are made so nostalgic for. A framed label for “Mammy’s Authentic Recipe New Orleans Pralines” with a full-figured black woman in a red handkerchief and yellow apron, or figures of jazz-players painted jet black, with rounded red lips smiling ear to ear.

Mixed Messages at Mardi Gras

Hard to believe, but true—I didn’t realize I was going to New Orleans during Mardi Gras until long after I booked the ticket. And I had never heard of the Zulu Parade at Mardi Gras until I was preparing to leave for New Orleans, but as soon as I saw that there would be a procession of people marching through the streets in blackface and that it was more than socially acceptable, I knew I had to check it out. How many situations are there in this country in which painting on blackface, historically such an offensive and disparaging act, is not only accepted, but celebrated?

Not that the parade hasn’t had its share of controversy, specifically during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s when many in the movement condemned the Zulu’s use of blackface, grass skirts and other undignified stereotypical gear. Today it seems to be most commonly defended as tradition, but there is some public disagreement about how that tradition has evolved. Some say it’s a send-up of vaudeville and the people who actually believe in those stereotypes, some say it developed as a cheap and creative way to celebrate Mardi Gras, where black people have historically been excluded.

If there is so much confusion among the people of New Orleans about the practice of donning blackface for the Zulu Parade, you could imagine the mess of ideas among visitors. As a performer passed, dressed in a grass skirt, Afro-wig and blackface, dancing provocatively, the extremely enthusiastic Alaskan woman crushing my ribcage against the barricades declared, “Oh, that’s so Zulu!” It occurred to me that “Zulu” could be substituted for some other racially-defined words and the statement still have a similar meaning. Clearly, I don’t know this woman or really what she meant by that, but it struck me that individuals watch this type of event with very different eyes and very different understandings. What does being “Zulu” mean… to her, to the performer, to other observers?

The Zulu parade is very popular, and there is a lot information out there about it. What I couldn’t find any discourse or analysis of were the white-skin-colored masks some people in different parades wore. It seemed mostly to be white people wearing these plain soft plastic masks with baroque green, gold and purple suits. They seemed almost to be like a subdued “white-face” in answer to Zulu’s blackface. But honestly I don’t know how to read these costumes, so if anyone knows anything about it, please email us at RaceMonologues@gmail.com!

Reverse Racism or Racialized Discrimination?

Having trouble finding anyone out and about to interview on a rainy Sunday, I treated myself to an IMAX movie my last day in town. The film, “Hurricane on the Bayou” severely juxtaposed the images of the streets I’d been walking for the past two weeks against footage of the city during and directly after Hurricane Katrina. It really brought into focus the incredible recovery New Orleans has made in four years, and the work there still is to be done.

And although the film’s concentration is on the human toll of the destruction of the wetlands, it doesn’t venture into issues of environmental justice, and just how disparate these effects are on different communities. As one of the people I interviewed said, “there weren’t a lot of white people waving for help from their rooftops”.

Which certainly isn’t to say there weren’t any white folks affected—please don’t misunderstand. That’s another recurrent theme I’ve seen around New Orleans—white folks asserting that they, too, are victims of racism. In other parts of the country, it was a lot more common when I interviewed a white person and asked them about racism that they’d shrug and say they didn’t know much about it because they were white.

So is there more hostility toward white people in New Orleans than in some of the other places where I’ve done interviews this year? Or have whites down there been chastised for what’s seen as pervasive racism in the region for so long that there’s a backlash that has them flipping the script and claiming victimization? Or was it chance that I bumped into unrepresentative individuals who felt this way?

I was left thinking that these individuals had over-stated the case for white victimization in the South and wondering how this idea has developed. But one narrative in particular definitely gave me pause—Charlie Sooner (an alias). I interrupted a very cozy-looking guitar lesson a teenage white boy was giving his female classmate in Auduon park. Charlie told me energetically he thought racism was worst against white people because he, one of the only white kids in the school, was always being called cracker, and (in a rather graffic description) told me about recently getting his head stuffed into a toilet by black kids and being barred from sitting with black kids at lunch. He was certainly prone to exaggeration in the presence of the cute guitar tutee next to him, but the point is still worth considering in the context of the little world of Ninth Ward high school he described.

“Reverse racism”, or discrimination against whites, is not racism per se, but racial discrimination, a distinction that may sound fussy, but links to what I believe is at the core of race issues: power. In the United States, white European-Americans are in the majority, and more importantly, have disproportionate power in our society. White people are the majority of the CEOs, owners, partners, senators, proprietors… of just about every industry or decision-making body. The concept of race that currently operates in our society was (and is still constantly being) constructed out of power struggles. “Race” is a categorizing system we’ve come up with to divide people into neat taxonomies, to name, to order and to impose hierarchy. So racism is the reinforcement of this oppressive system by discriminating against people based on notions of what people are and what they are capable of according to characteristics assigned to racial categories.

Saying the bullying and abuse Charlie suffers isn’t racism doesn’t belittle the pain or difficulty it causes him. But if Euro-Americans aren’t the majority at this Ninth Ward school, why don’t we say that they experience racism when they are targeted for violence because they’re white? As teenagers, a lot of us felt that our high school world was a microcosm of the wider world, that what happened there was pretty much the end-all. So it’s somewhat understandable that Charlie thinks that white people experience the worst racism today—that’s what he sees in his school, and perhaps his community.

That’s the thing about white privilege, though. It’s pretty hard to see, especially when you’re in the middle of it. High schools don’t operate in a vacuum. We’re all still affected by cultural norms-- stereotypes, standards of beauty and disparate expectations, and even at his school, white privilege shapes how we view the world and how the world views us. There is a greater likelihood that this boy’s teachers will subconsciously expect different results from him than his non-white classmates, and in subtle ways this will affect the way they treat him and the ways he thinks about his own possibilities. And the fact is, once he leaves high school, assuming he leaves his immediate neighborhood to work, live or entertain himself, he will have the benefit of white privilege.

Don’t buy it? Have something to add? Comment on my blog entry down here!