for when we perform is really nice because it gives me the opportunity to go through a bunch of media that missed my radar, or that I saw or heard, but didn’t fully process. This DN! interview with Michael Eric Dyson about racism and hurricane Katrina is a good example of this.
Being in New Orleans, even months of time and an onslaut of media coverage since the hurricane, it was still startling how destroyed and vacant some of the neighborhoods seemed. It was interesting to go through a lot of radio broadcasts and finally have a first-hand visual for the things they were talking about. Still, the whole experience was really difficult to process or to come to any coherent conclusion. I saw something Ryan wrote, and I feel like it sums things up pretty accurately. To paraphrase him, “it was a picture of everything that’s wrong about the world, with no good solution”.
As we were driving away from the city, to play another show, in another town, we talked about some hard questions. Is there really someone who can be blamed? Was there ever the infrastructure to evacuate less mobile communities? Would folks have evacuated if they had the chance? Peoples homes and lives aside (which, I know, is an assy place to start), does it make sense to rebuild in geographically disadvantaged areas?
In the interview, Dyson makes some compelling analysis to the issue of responsibility for the injustices of the response (or lack thereof). Dyson describes that some of the apathy towards trying to aid some residents of NOLA as “a southern racial narrative playing itself out on a global stage.” He continues:
I think we saw the vicious politics of the collective racial imagination of the South, which has no tolerance, as one historian put it, either for black pain or black suffering on the one hand or black agency or success on the other. Both of them are obliterated in the Southern imagination, and we saw that down in Hurricane Katrina.
This same understanding helps explain not only the response, but why people lived in such dangerous areas to begin with, and why many couldn’t leave on their own. Its a systemic and shared neglect of injustices that have compounded, over and over, for as long as America has been around. Can we blame our forefathers? The first slave owners in the Americas, or ourselves for lacking the collective motivation so that these same old injustices play out again and again.
What is troubling is not only stories of apathy towards some New Orleans residents, but actively turning away resources that could have saved lives like seats on an empty Amtrak train or international aid. Other reports, such as this one aired on This American Life tell stories of police preventing people from passing to safer areas of the city. Ultimately, what is horrible about these stories is that they don’t represent an example of a lack of resources, but, simply, people intervening in other people’s attempts to do what was common sense to try to save their lives.
Returning to the idea of the injustice and tragedy of the hurricane being a direct result of a troubling history and a failure by all of us in the US to acknowledge that history and how it still shapes our country and many, many lives, such an understanding does give us some ideas for rebuilding NOLA, and maybe for using this reconstruction as an opportunity to start building a more just society. Many, such as Mitch Landrieu, a Louisianna politician, argue that hurricane hurt everybody, meaning that communities were destroyed and people displaced across many lines of race and class. In that case, shouldn’t the rebuilding of the city and the people in it be so egalitarian. Perhaps, ultimately, we will have to accept that some places will not be rebuilt, that New Orleans will have fewer residents. But there are parts of the city that are being rebuilt (some parts, in fact, that it is difficult to perceive having undergone any trauma) and people returning to carry on with their lives. The city can either be one of rhethorical diversity, or one that tries to really be that. There can be a collective decision about who those people who get to return to the city and live in the higher-lying areas, or there can be no real decision. The new, New Orleans can reflect our collective legacy of racial and economic injustice or it can be the start of something more.
I do feel strange writing about a city that I have absolutely no ties to. And it was strange to see packs of largely non-resident, largely-white, largely middle-class, largely college student folks helping to rebuild some of the most devestated parts of the city. But I think what is important to think about is that while the hurricane is a story about a region of the country endangered by nature, and one that most accutely carries the legagy of an unjust history, the dynamics that made the event so tragic are ones that are playing out in communities all over America, and that play out all over the world. Maybe we’re all so fascinated with the hurricane because the the end result of our history is so apparent, so tangible, that we are holding our collective breaths waiting to see if it could be a turning point for this history. The mass protests by Latinos and Chicanos against anti-immigrant legistation offers us the same hope in a point of divergence. It might be a mistake, though, to be patient gawking bystanders waiting to see if those in power try to create justice in NOLA. Rather, we should create our own justice, and if each of us can’t make it in NOLA, we need to create it wherever we can.