New Orleans Is Our Gettysburg

From the Black Commentator:

This Saturday’s elections in New Orleans represent yet another element of the vast crime committed against Black America. With as many as 300,000 residents, overwhelmingly African American, strewn about the country in government-engineered exile, the elections are an insult to the very idea of democracy, and to the dignity of all Black people.

This farcical exercise in faux democracy will no doubt be followed by corporate media declarations that New Orleans is returning to “normalcy” – the same term that the media bandied about when the city held a shrunken Mardi Gras, in February.

Behind that bland word, “normalcy,” lies a wish list and narrative that sees white rule as normative in America – the way things should be – and Black electoral power as an aberration, a kind of organized pathology in which people are assumed to be up to no good. Despite Katrina’s vast damage to Louisiana infrastructure and commerce, there is a current of elation among white elites and common folk alike, at the winds and waters that cleansed New Orleans of its two-thirds Black majority, which was seen as a sore on the body politic, a den of Otherness and iniquity.

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When it became clear, after Hurricane Katrina, that most the Big Easy's black population had been strewn across the nation, I would hear, here and there, rumors of white whisperings: "it'll be better now." Saturday's mayoral elections in New Orleans make it utterly obvious that the city's and Louisiana's respective white power structures are taking the first steps toward formalizing the "better" Crescent City.

It's now looking like Mayor Nagin has made it into a runoff with his white opponent Mitch Landrieu. Good for Nagin; he's not perfect, but I was greatly impressed with his Giuliani-like performance during the reign of chaos after the hurricane. But, I think, if this election had been handled more democratically, in such a way that would have allowed New Orleans' far-flung black population to vote as easily as the city's white population, the result would be quite different: Nagin would have won an outright victory.

It sickens me that remote polling locations were not allowed in Houston, Atlanta, and other cities hosting large concentrations of evacuees. For god's sake, Iraqis in the US got to vote here in their elections. Why couldn't we do the same thing for our own? Answer: there is no reason. African-Americans were consciously screwed in order to make New Orleans "better." This is the largest and most overt act of American racism in my lifetime, an absolute return to Louisiana's old Jim Crow laws, all dressed up in procedural and administrative clothing.

I hope to god they don't get away with this shit.

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