White Chocolate City
29th June 2015 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
cash loans in goodna Almost a week after New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s “performance” at Wednesday’s “Welcome Table” event at the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts, I still can’t believe the things that continue to fly out of the mouth of this mayor.
This mayor truly does the most.
As the “Welcome Table” racial reconciliation ruse continues to roll on, the mayor decided to add a little spice by talking about removing a number of racist, monuments from public spaces in New Orleans in the wake of the recent mass killing of the “Mother Emanuel 9” in Charleston, South Carolina. With a mostly white audience looking on, the Crescent City’s emperor flirted with the possibility of doing away with monuments to avowed Civil War-era white supremacists like Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis, all of whom are heroes of the ill-fated Confederacy.
The whole time he was speaking, I was hearing the classic protest song by The Last Poets who famously told the Establishment, “Don’t you give me no broccoli and tell me it’s greens!”
What the mayor didn’t mention was removing the statue of former President Andrew Jackson from Jackson Square in the French Quarter, the same Andrew Jackson who proposed giving Native Americans blankets used by former smallpox patients as a genocidal strategy
He also didn’t mention the John McDonogh statue, named for the famous slaveowner who gave money to public schools in New Orleans and Baltimore, or streets named for former Gov. William Claiborne, who used the aftermath of the 1811 slave revolt to push Louisiana into accepting statehood and Confederate General Frances T. Nicholls.
The mayor actually apologized for slavery but some in the audience were not at all moved by his words, for they did nothing to undo the harm that has been done and continues to be done to Blacks in New Orleans by elected officials and the business community.
You don’t have to go all the way back to slavery, Mr. Mayor, to find something to apologize for.
He should apologize for doing and 80 10 10 loans saying absolutely nothing when the white business community blocked a sister who is a war veteran from opening up a business in the French Quarter and for not saying a peep about efforts to convince the State Legislature to allow Algiers to secede from New Orleans, a move that would significantly reduce the percentage of Black voters in majority-Black New Orleans.
While he’s at it, he should apologize for the white business community’s complete takeover of the annual Bayou Classic football game and the Essence Music Festival as well as the slave wages paid to Black and poor New Orleanians who work low-wage, dead-end jobs in the tourism industry.
He should apologize for doing and saying nothing about food service giant Sodexo’s mistreatment and economic exploitation of cafeteria workers at Tulane and Loyola universities and local public schools.
He should apologize for allowing charter school profiteers to get away with criminalizing Black students and treating them like lab rats and guinea pigs.
Instead of apologizing for slavery, he should have acknowledged the 200th a anniversary of the 1811 slave revolt, the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in U.S. history, four years ago. He should apologize for failing to say a single mumbling word about how his ancestors hunted down enslaved Africans in what is now the River Parishes, tracked and killed many of them in the surrounding swamps and jailed others that they captured at the Cabildo in the French Quarter before giving them bogus trials and sentencing them to grisly deaths. But they didn’t stop there. They then beheaded these corpses and placed their heads on spikes along the Mississippi River and throughout what is now Jackson Square.
He didn’t apologize for that dark episode in New Orleans history, probably because the descendants of the slave owners who fled from Santo Domingue during the Haitian Revolution and those who fled the German Coast (River Parishes) during the 1811 Slave Revolt — who still run everything in the City of New Orleans — won’t allow him to do so.
Instead of offering a best cash advance Ariz. general apology for slavery, the mayor should have apologized for the white business community’s stranglehold on the past, present and future of Black people in New Orleans. He should apologize for the meticulously orchestrated post-Katrina takeover of the city’s public schools and the mass firing of thousands of Black teachers, staff personnel and administrators who worked in the school system before the devastating 2005 manmade disaster. He should apologize for the blueprint the white business community created to prevent tens of thousands of displaced Black residents from returning to New Orleans and the massive gentrification effort that continues as we approach the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. He should apologize for the white business community’s plan to tear down the city’s public housing developments while raising rental rates exponentially.
He should apologize for the handiwork of his Deputy Mayor/CAO Andy Kopplin, the former director of the state’s Road Home program which routinely shortchanged Black homeowners and made it impossible for many people to rebuild their homes and lives in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I suspect his performance as Road Home director played a pivotal role in his selection by the ruling white elite to serve as the mayor’s right-hand man.
The mayor should apologize for allowing the white business community and the Recovery School District to move ahead with plans to build a new school for Cohen College Prep and the Rosenwald Community Center atop the former toxic landfill that once was inhabited by Booker T. Washington Senior High School.
Long before the mayor’s proclamation last week that “we” should talk about removing these racist monuments, Rudy Mills has led a small group of community activists who have been working to remove these symbols of white supremacy from public space. The mayor has not acknowledged the group’s efforts and continues to paint himself as the Crescent City’s great emancipator and unifier while working behind to scenes to maintain the status quo.
As important as is it is to remove these white supremacist monuments, it is even more imperative that we directly address systemic and institutional racism in New Orleans, as well as economic inequity, unequal justice, educational apartheid, unconstitutional policing, taxation without representation, environmental racism and housing discrimination.
We can’t allow the carefully orchestrated and well-timed colorful rants, political chicanery and proclamations of any elected official to distract us from the tasks at hand.
As for racial reconciliation, there can be no racial reconciliation until racial justice, balance and fairness are established. To propose racial reconciliation without righting the wrongs of the past and the present, is to present a total sham and a hollow mockery of the highest human ideals.
There has never been racial justice, economic fairness or a level playing field throughout the nearly 300-year history of New Orleans. The ruling white minority has never acknowledged what it has done in the name of Manifest Destiny and white supremacy or made a serious effort to make amends to those it has oppressed and exploited. It has never relinquished its life-draining stranglehold on Black New Orleans.
Does anyone really think it is a coincidence that New Orleans, the epicenter of white supremacy, is the goose that lays the proverbial golden egg for Louisiana, the “prison capital” of the world?
Make no mistake about it, New Orleans is a house that is just as divided along color lines as it was in 1718.
It is an insult to the intelligence and dignity of Black people to suggest otherwise.
Mitch please. Don’t talk about it — be about it. Actions speak louder than words and your actions over the past five years have led many to questions your motives, priorities and agenda. Your maneuverings and actions since becoming mayor have given many of us in the community little reason to trust anything you say or even take anything that comes out of your mouth at face value.
Sorry, Mr. Mayor, but many of us are not buying what you’re shoveling and selling.
All power to the people.
This article originally published in the June 29, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
