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.
The white American narrative, which begins with national
“democratic” elections after the birth of the republic in which
only a tiny fraction of the population – white male owners of substantial
property – could vote, bestows mythic significance to the electoral
exercise, no matter how bogus and profoundly undemocratic. Thus,
two ink-dipped elections in U.S.-occupied Iraq are heralded as benchmarks
of progress, despite the deepening and widening conflict and misery
that afflict the Iraqi people. In New Orleans, the mystical mantra
of elections in which the majority of the population cannot fully
participate, is equated with a kind of “recovery” from the storm
and flood – when no such thing has occurred.
But the whites of New Orleans are free of the overwhelming
Black presence – free at last! – a prerequisite for the creation
of a “new” and “better” city. Some speak openly of the new lease
on life that the dispersal of Black residents has afforded the high-ground
whites that have found themselves the new majority. (See “New Orleans
Elections Fever,” April
20, 2006). When their rule is sanctioned by this weekend’s elections,
“normalcy” will be just around the corner.
“At the same time that they were talking about holding
elections, they were holding evictions,” said Rev. Lennox Yearwood,
chairman and CEO of Washington-based Hip
Hop Caucus, who has immersed his organization in New Orleans
political organizing and relief work. “What needs to happen is the
organizing of our people, wherever they are.”
The task is formidable, because the entire national
and state white power structure is determined to be permanently
rid of those exiled by Katrina. The Louisiana state legislature
has rushed to put New Orleans schools up for sale, to preclude the
return of Black families. The bill states that "the
recovery district may sell any property which the school district
determines will not be used for providing educational services on
or before August 29, 2006."
“Recovery district.” What a deformation of the English
language. The white powers-that-be want only to “recover” New Orleans
for themselves, and ensure that there will be no place for even
the most determined Black exiles to return to. The white search
for “normalcy” is, in reality, an ongoing crime against humanity.
Saturday’s election is intended to bestow respectability to the
crime.
However, a bleached New Orleans will never be legitimate
to African Americans, who understand that they have been collectively
raped of their personhood, not by weather, but by man. Bogus elections
provide a false facade of due process – a fragrance to hide the
stench of raw expulsion of a people – but it does not fool a single
African American anywhere in the nation.
In the words of University
of Chicago political scientist Michael
Dawson, Katrina “could very well shape
this generation of young people in the same way that the assassinations
of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King shaped our generation” – the
men and women who developed their political consciousness in the
Sixties.
Rev. Yearwood agrees. “People are becoming much more
political,” said the 26-year-old minister. “The common person in
Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans is much more engrossed in politics,
in the spirit of self-determination. I’m encouraged.”
Katrina is becoming a rallying cry for all of Black
America, creating a new generation of activists. “I’m beginning
to see more Fannie
Lou Hamers emerging,” said Rev. Yearwood. "People don’t
need more organizations telling them what to do. They are saying,
Just give me the tools and I’ll get the job done."
While
the powerful conspire to make a fait accompli of the New Orleans
diaspora, the results of which will be certified by the most undemocratic
election since passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the political
consciousness of Black America is being transformed. A horrible
lesson has been relearned: Katrina "suggested
to Blacks the utter lack of the liberal possibility in the United
States," says Prof. Dawson. We must strike out on our own path,
with whatever allies are willing to make common cause with us. The
New Orleans election will never be “closure” for us.
“New Orleans is our Gettysburg,” said Rev. Yearwood.
“If we lose there, we lose all the marbles.”
The forces arrayed against a Black return to New Orleans
do not realize that they have set in motion the entire national
Black polity. Just as President John Kennedy inspired western Europeans
when he declared “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I am a Berliner”) in
1963, all Black people see their fates entwined with the New Orleans
diaspora – “I am a New Orleanian.”
We understand that the enforced
exile of hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters is an
assault and disenfranchisement of us all, and that we cannot afford
to lose in this twilight struggle. Defeat is not an option.
As Rev. Yearwood put it: “You can live
in LA – you lose. You can be in New York – you lose. If we lose
in New Orleans, we lose it all.”
BC Publishers Glen Ford and Peter
Gamble are writing a book to be entitled, Barack Obama and the Crisis
of Black Leadership. |