Our Culture is in jeopardy

A week has passed since the frozen, strange Mardi Gras of 2021, yet fences remain around the Claiborne Avenue underpass, preventing people from congregating. This caged off and heavily-policed space that usually holds Black artists, revelers and musicians seems like a metaphor for everything this terrible pandemic year has brought. We, Black people, are literally being pushed to the margins and removed from the land. Illness, death and fear pervade the city, but they hover particularly close to the bodies of Black people.

Though Blacks make up only 59 percent of the New Orleans population, we account for 77 percent of COVID deaths — and even more when you only look at the population outside of long-term care facilities. We are constantly put in harm’s way. We are your low-paid essential workers at the grocery store, driving buses, at daycares, working in hospice. We are the workers who cannot do our jobs from home, safely and remotely. And as this pandemic devastates our community, home prices are on the rise. We are evicted, our houses are sold from under us, the demographics of our neighborhoods shift. There will be no second lines through the 7th Ward this year, and for how much longer will there even be a “7th Ward?”

Meanwhile, who is getting the vaccine? Disproportionately the wealthy and white residents of our city. Though Louisiana failed to report accurate racial data, the data we do have demonstrates that yet again Black people are last in line. Certainly, many people of all races have declined the vaccine, and given the history of medical experimentation on Black bodies, Black people may have more justification for vaccine skepticism than most. Nonetheless, there remains an enormous gap in access. To sign up for the shot at Walgreens, for example, you need to make an account online. Yet there is a technological divide in our community, especially for those who live in poverty. And the vaccine has been fast-tracked for professionals – social workers, for example, and soon university employees – while our low-paid frontline workers, garbage collectors, grocery clerks, bus drivers, remain without.

The city wants to relocate City Hall into Armstrong Park, further encroaching on space that once belonged to the Black community. We are sick and dying, from COVID-19, from racism, incarceration, displacement, unemployment and poverty. Our culture is disappearing and our sacred spaces are barricaded off or bought up and redeveloped. Once this pandemic recedes, will there be any Black history left?

– Ernest Johnson
Ubuntu Village

This article originally published in the March 1, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.