Web Only// Features » February 24, 2006
Masking New Orleans
On Mardi Gras Day, the nation will be looking to New Orleans to see if we are wearing masks. We’ll be wearing them in New Orleans, but they’re being worn in Washington D.C. too. That’s because the face of our tragedy is being covered up with a big smile–we are having a party and pretending that the poor people can just go away.
The poor weren’t seen in the years before Katrina. Dark skinned women folded down white hotel sheets for revelers in the French Quarter. Men ported and washed dishes behind the screen doors of restaurants where beer-sodden tourists cheered. Children asked for a quarter to sing and dance as visitors from all over the world eyed them like a passing parade. The poor of New Orleans remained a feature of the local scenery as described in a 19th century novel.
The masks we’ll see this year have been worn in the past by outsiders who arrived with credit cards and attitudes of privilege and indifference. We too wore masks in our quest for the dollar. We smiled broadly and stepped lively–livelier perhaps than we should have. We made New Orleans a comfortable place for everybody but ourselves. For the sake of good business, we didn’t cry out that we were in dire straits.
At the last census, almost 40 percent of our households made under $20,000 a year, and in my neighborhood, 46 percent made under $15,000. When the police discovered that the seven square miles, which included the neighborhood where I grew up, led the city in homicides, we didn’t mobilize ourselves to sweep every block. Nor did we take to the streets screaming for more cops, courts and federal assistance when we threatened once again to become murder capital of the nation in 2005.
We let the bon temps roulle.
Now, with the sight of American citizens exiled on highways, the paint should have washed off all of our faces. But instead, the government’s plan for the poor masks a carnivaL economy without even a trickle down. Joseph Canizaro, chief author of the city’s redevelopment plan, who reportedly raised $200,000 for Bush’s 2004 reelection, told PBS’ “NewsHour,” “But I will tell you we will not have as many poor people. There’s no question. I’ve talked to a lot of them. They are better where they are. They want to stay where they are because they have a better life.”
In the past, we woke to the sounds of Mardi Gras Indians singing songs to wake the neighborhood. Homemade maskers walked to Canal Street, stopping at the wooden, shotgun houses of friends to eat breakfast. There was someone to visit, a place to sit, something to eat or drink and someone to dance with every few blocks.
This Mardi Gras, people will go to the parades, but mostly for their children’s sake. To keep up their spirits, they might even dress up and join the Blue Tarp costume contest. But they will remember that the last march that met on the corner of Clairborne and Orleans–where Black Mardi Gras is always held–was a month ago. Then, the second line clubs marched for housing.
Just as the nation watched and the first floats rolled out, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced a program that would give homeowners up to $150,000 to rebuild. But at its heart, New Orleans is home to people who loved where they lived–and that includes many people who rented. They lived in the now hollowed out streets of downtown and they created much of the magic of New Orleans.
For lack of homes, many of the friends who would usually costume on Mardi Gras are scattered to the winds. The charade is that they’re invited to come home, but can’t get a guarantee from the city or the feds that their communities will be safe, lit, have city services or funds to help residents with this overarching challenge.
On the contrary, according to Canizaro, with the redevelopment plan, 50 percent of the people in a neighborhood must be committed to coming back “before we have a neighborhood to design.”
To look at New Orleans on the eve of its most celebrated holiday is to see a city struggling with its own divided loyalties. No amount of tinsel floats can cure that crisis.
There is a way at Mardi Gras time to tell when the parade is coming. It is introduced with sirens and flashing lights. Then the drums sound.
Here’s the drumming we hear now: The rich and the developers are trying to appropriate land, and the blacks and the poor are being squeezed out. Each new plan reminds us that the president was still on vacation when we were drowning, and local leaders were confounded like lizards frozen on a branch.
Now, these same people are trying to run a parade through the tragedy in the hopes that Carnival can mesmerize us away from government responsibility, as if New Orleanians don’t know that the austerity of Lent begins at midnight.
Now, too many people who cook gumbo are gone, as are the people who wipe off the restaurant tables. Also gone are those who dance the alligator, belly down to the cement in the middle of the crowded street. Disappeared are the old men who sit on the steps and call “hey baby” to anyone under 90, and the old ladies who stand at the bus stop and give free advice. And too many arrogant people are saying out loud that New Orleans can do without poor people, as if they had no love of the place they were born.
In New Orleans, people are noticing that the poor just may not come back, given the obstacles put in their paths. They also see that a house of cards, king high, may just fall. The poor not returning home will cripple the food industry, hotel industry and the economy, but most especially the joie de vivre that has rested on them. The poor may not come home, but then, won’t New Orleans and the nation be sorry?
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Fatima Shaik is the author of four books set in Louisiana and a former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. She currently teaches at Saint Peter's College and is completing a non-fiction book about the Societe d'Economie, a black benevolent association that worked in her neighborhood for more than 100 years.
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Reader Comments
“New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again,” Alphonso Jackson, the secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development said describing the state of affairs for post-Katrina New Orleans.
Everything looks different, feels different. New Orleans has a different flavor. Being a transplant from San Antonio I can only fathom what has happened by asking myself what would San Antonio look like with an 80% reduction in Hispanics? It is mind-boggling and sad. The poor of New Orleans have left and may not come back, but they are still out there and we should still care about them by doing what we can to bring them back and help them help themselves. We can not let people like
US Congressman Richard Baker ( Wall Street Journal-post Katrina) who said after the storm:“We finally cleaned up in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Mr. Baker, how dare you talk about New Orleanians in that manner!
Posted by Joseph Duran on Feb 25, 2006 at 8:47 PM
Demographics change. Is the percentage of identifiable races (a social construct perpetuated by it’s own prejudice and shibboleths against sex and reproduction with “others”) really the issue here? Does it matter, Joseph, if the maids turning down sheets in what is probably now one of the most toxic places on earth, check “caucasian” or “African American” on government forms and job applications?
Racism is definitely an issue in New Orleans as it is anywhere in the U.S., but isn’t class and power structure the real issue? Isn’t obscene amassing of money and the abilities it gives individuals and small groups to buy governments and towns and to live under the radar of law to build personal little empires the reality we’re looking at in New Orleans? Isn’t the system rigged so that obscene amassing will happen and will be protected?
Is the disenfranchising and neglect of the New Orleans poor, not neoliberalism economic theory launched with the same vigor in N.O. as it was in Iraq, on the backs of broken and desperate people (who were broken for just that reason)?
New Orleans has been seized. This is economic guerilla warfare conducted against anyone who can not afford to protect themselves or play the game.
Corporate fiefdom. A serf is a serf. We’re all individuals here! NO! We’re not!. As long as the corporation has the rights of individuals and only one responsibility, the overwhelming majority of us will remain peasants and pay for everything every corporation destroys.
Why is it outspoken panic time among governments when population growth slows? A couple of generations of real slow population growth will spell it out neatly. There won’t be enough serfs to keep the wages down, or to support the laws in favor of useless parasitic plutocracy. The job of protecting royalty won’t be worth the wages, and the work of enforcing privilege won’t be worth the bother. Wealth is produced by labor. Capitol is produced by labor. There won’t be a large enough army to keep the aristocracy filthy rich if we boycott and strike in the serf making factory.
As long as we buy into the lies about how economies work, and markets behave, we will be serfs looking at every other social issue imaginable to find the explanation for our servitude.
The owning class may prefer to have white niggers ironing their sheets, but who would be wise to argue for the rights of people of color to iron the master’s sheets? That sure would amuse the master’s—- yes, they’d be slapping their thighs and laughing at the country club over that one, I do declare.
Posted by wileywitch on Feb 27, 2006 at 12:18 AM
why don’t you guys ever post my comments, do I have to buy the magazine to get my thoughts heard, or do you have that many people posting?
Whats up?
Posted by your pal mal on Feb 27, 2006 at 5:32 PM
Hi, pal mal. I have no idea what is up with your posts. You might want to take it up directly with the contact us at the bottom of the page.
This last post of yours clearly posted. Too bad you expressed your frustation with not being heard on that one, instead of the thoughts you want heard. That was a crumbly cookie.
Posted by wileywitch on Feb 27, 2006 at 5:37 PM
I’ve spent only a little time in New Orleans, but since the storms and floods I’ve carried with me a feeling of malaise in a small place in the back of my mind whenever I think about the city. It’s not crippling depression, just a tone of sadness in my thoughts when I imaginatively place my feet back on the streets there. Haven’t been there since 2003, but I have rich memories.
I could easily write too much about my time in NO, but I’ll cut to the chase and say merely that the place left an impression. For those who call (or once called) the city Home, avoiding depression after the repeated traumas must take some real effort.
Even if the parades could be thought of as trivial when seen in the context of the storm and the complete failure of government at all levels to prepare or assist, it’s understandable why they’re being held anyway. People want to reach for something fun and happy to mitigate their distress, even when the cause of the distress is measured in acre upon acre of destroyed homes and businesses. It’s natural. Some people think of it as admirable. Actually, even if it’s just a psychological defense mechanism, or just a moment of distraction from the other ugly realities, that’s not a bad thing, is it? Considering the magickal currents that have been said to circulate in the NO region, maybe it’s talismanic to parade. A gesture of refusing to throw in the towel, yes?
Perhaps the people who want the festivities to continue fear the finality of saying, “No more Mardi Gras in New Orleans”. Maybe for them, it would turn their home city into a dead thing, instead of merely a terribly wounded and neglected thing.
Well. Good wishes to all y’all in New Orleans. Lots of people around the country still have concern for you, even those of us who have only been there briefly.
Posted by Kuya on Feb 28, 2006 at 2:19 AM
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