Broken city, broken promises
18th April 2016 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
When New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton said after the death of former Saint Will Smith that New Orleans is a “broken city,” it struck a chord with a lot of people.
That’s exactly what New Orleans is: A broken city that is broken by design, a town of broken promises and broken dreams of a better life.
Sadly, it is a city that has always been broken and flawed.
The city’s system, which has been on autopilot since the founding of New Orleans in 1718, is designed to break the spirits and resilience of its residents of African descent, rendering them permanent slaves and third-class citizens. The system was given an upgrade after the Haitian Revolution and the 1811 revolt — the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in U.S. history — in an effort to ensure that the Black masses would never again mount an organized challenge to the ruling class in these parts again.
If we are going to be honest, we have to admit that we live in a city whose business titans and shot-callers are more interested in maintaining the status quo than in growth and progression.
This dogged determination to keep things unchanged in New Orleans, particularly the inequitable distribution of power, wealth and privilege, can perhaps be better understood when one considers the fact that even wealthy white “outsiders” who migrated to the city were encouraged to leave by the old guard which refused to offer corporate big wigs membership in blueblood Carnival organizations, even if that meant those rejected folks taking their corporations out of state.
No one has to wonder why there are so few Fortune 500 companies in the city and state. They were run out of state by New Orleans’ old money, who refused to grant them entry into the highest rungs of society.
Why was that a critical move?
Because allowing these newcomers to infiltrate the city’s upper echelon might pave the way for the infusion of new ideas like access to quality education for the masses, economic justice and equal protection under the law.
While the rest of the nation advanced to some degree after Brown v. The Board of Education and the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, those monumental developments in U.S. history were never really given a chance to alter the social, economic or political landscape in New Orleans.
Not even the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation or the Union’s triumph over the Confederacy in the so-called “War of Northern Aggression” had much of an impact on the City That Care Forgot.
It’s no coincidence that New Orleans was once the center of the domestic slave trade or that people from other parts of the U.S. and the world still look to New Orleans for inspiration and guidance on ways for a ruling white minority to dominate, exploit, control and oppress a large majority of people of color.
As the late, great Dr. John Henrik Clark pointed out during a visit to New Orleans in 1996, while some of the particulars have changed in America since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the historical relationship between European Americans and people of African descent has changed very little.
Here in New Orleans, poverty and educational apartheid are used to harvest Black people for two destinations: as toilers in dead-end jobs as maids, cooks, doormen, etc. in the tourism industry that promotes the city’s allure as Antebellum Disney and as fuel for the ever-growing prison industrial complex.
Those who somehow summon the hope, resilience and strength to break through the roadblocks and get a decent education are routinely forced to serve as concubines for the white political establishment or leave the state altogether in search of better economic and/or educational opportunities.
New Orleans has been called the most African city in America and despite the stifling oppression, political chicanery, nepotism, abuse of power and blatant economic discrimination, this is one of the most charming, magical places on the planet. That’s a testament to the resilience, faith, generosity and indomitable spirit of the residents of the majority-Black city.
But despite that welcoming spirit and joie de vivre, there has always been a hint of rage and discontent just beneath the surface.
It is that rage, despair and discontent, along with chronic poverty, widespread discrimination, cultural insularity and a fundamental lack of respect for the Black masses of this city, that often spark senseless acts of violence.
The mayor reacted strongly to comments by Saints coach Sean Payton, who also said that the many murders and shootings of Black people across the city are New Orleans’ “big little secret.” The powers that be would like nothing more than to keep the oppression, economic exploitation, and senseless murder of Black people a secret. It is the way the city’s ruling class has always handled things.
Comments by Payton, Arizona Cardinals player Tyrann Mathieu and others were a problem because these remarks pose a threat to the economic health of the tourism industry. Never mind that people in this city are dying long before they ever had a chance to live.
If anything good comes of out Will Smith’s death, it may be that it helps to spark a new movement to end the root causes of senseless violence in New Orleans and other cities.
Given the severity of the oppression, exploitation, brutalization and abuse the Black masses face daily in this city, it is perhaps a miracle that there haven’t been more high-profile acts of senseless violence in recent years.
People love Will Smith and many of the other professional athletes who play for and/or live in New Orleans, even if the white business community limits those athletes’ interaction with Black people in general. It wasn’t that long ago that professional athletes moving to New Orleans were encouraged homes in neighboring, mostly white parishes, far from the less-safe “jungle” that has often been dubbed the nation’s murder capital. It wasn’t until after Hurricane Katrina that you began to see professional athletes taking up residence in the Warehouse District or Garden District.
But Hurricane Katrina also brought more rage, desperation, despair and frustration to the Black masses of New Orleans. Tens of thousands were prevented from returning to the only city they had ever lived in. Many homeowners were cheated out of money earmarked for them to rebuild their homes by the state’s Road Home program under the direction of current New Orleans Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin. Thousands of Black teachers, administrators and staff were wrongfully terminated by the state and replaced with out-of-state educators after the state took over the city’s public school system. The Recovery School District then started merging and/or shutting down schools without any input from the community. City leaders did the same thing when they decided to demolish public housing projects at a time when rental rates were going through the roof. Those rental rates continue to rise as property taxes, water service fees and utility bills continue to rise sharply. Most of the decisions made since Katrina have disproportionately impacted middle-, working-class and poor Black families negatively.
Add to that the loss of a mental health care facility to the North Shore, feverish gentrification and limited post-Katrina recovery in the Lower Ninth Ward and eastern New Orleans. That anger has certainly not been quieted by the failure of the justice system to hold NOPD officers accountable for several post-Katrina shootings that claimed the lives of James Brissette, Ronald Madison, and Henry Glover among others and the NOPD’s resistance to implementing reforms designed to bring an end to the department’s long, sordid history of corruption, abuse and deadly force.
Make no mistake about it: New Orleans is a violent, dangerous city. And in New Orleans violence takes many forms, from building schools for Black children on toxic landfills, to framing suspects for murder, to depriving criminal suspects of their constitutional right to legal counsel, to treating school children like prison inmates, using Katrina recovery funds to renovate the Mercedes-Benz Superdome rather than to rebuild some of the communities hit hardest by the devastating storm and routinely depriving the overwhelming majority of the city’s of residents any semblance of decision-making power.
Is it any wonder there are so many angry, frustrated people in virtually every part of the city?
Violence is the language of the oppressed and in these parts oppression flows like cane syrup and the Mighty Mississippi.
We can no longer afford to pretend that we don’t see the myriad of racial and economic injustices and abuses of power being committed in the name of government, local tradition and public policy. Nor can we refuse to talk about the things we see that threaten to tear apart this city and its residents.
The scary part is that all of this — the scourge of violence, the rash of armed robberies and carjackings, and yes, the tragic killing of professional athletes — may very well be the calm before the proverbial storm.
This article originally published in the April 18, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
