A New Orleans Black activist who prefers anonymity
put it this way: “People say that you’re an Uncle Tom if you support
Mitch [Landrieu] for mayor. Another brother answers, ‘but you’ve
already got an Uncle Tom in office.’”
By the logic of the anecdote, one-quarter of New
Orleans Blacks could be viewed as having Tomish tendencies, while
two-thirds want four more years of Uncle Tomism at city hall.
Although the battle over who will become the next mayor of the
devastated city cannot be encapsulated in a cute quip, one political
fact emerged from last Saturday’s tortured election: neither of
the two men that made it into the May 20 runoff are proper vessels
for the aspirations of New Orleans’ 67 percent pre-Katrina Black
majority.
With more than half of New Orleanians still in exile,
most of them African American, the results of the April
21 vote could only have been bizarre, a twisted exercise unworthy
of a Third World country. Incumbent Ray Nagin, the Black Republican-turned-conveniently-Democrat
who was the successful Great White Hope in 2002, garnering 85
percent of the white vote and only a minority of Black support,
became the default African American candidate after nature and
the Bush regime combined to empty New Orleans of most of its Black
population. Whites discovered they no longer needed their Black
surrogate, who quickly scrambled to establish racial credentials
that he previously neither possessed nor wanted.
Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, brother of Louisiana Democratic
Senator Mary Landrieu and son of the city's last white mayor,
Moon Landrieu (1970-1978), is considered “liberal” by white southern
standards, as was his father.
Residual Black affection for the father combined with widespread
Black disgust at Mayor Nagin, to create a degree of ambivalence
among Black voters that is unusual in a Black-on-white contest.
On Saturday, Landrieu won 24 percent African American support,
to Nagin’s 66 percent. Nagin got 38 percent of the general vote,
Landrieu 29 percent, white business candidate Ron Forman 17 percent,
with the other 19 candidates trailing far behind, including the
only progressive Black hopeful, Rev.
Tom Watson. Of 300 majority Black precincts, Nagin carried
281 of them.
Politics of Protest
“The vote had nothing to do with Ray Nagin,” said
Mtangulizi Sanyika, spokesman
for the African American Leadership Project (AALP). “When
the media tried to define the election, the Black electorate turned
the race into a protest. This was an election about a Return to
Protest.”
Almost from the moment it became evident that a
return to white rule was mathematically possible in a “new” New
Orleans, local and national corporate media began using coded
language to frame the anticipated election – terms like “historic
opportunity for renewal.” African Americans understand racial
code, too. Despite Ray Nagin’s abysmal and maddeningly confused
Katrina performance, despite his previous role as the White Man’s
Candidate and Mayor, majorities of African Americans believed
it necessary to coalesce around a common point: Nagin’s bald head.
Thus, his two-thirds share of the Black vote.
“They saw Black people under attack,” said Sanyika.
“They saw white people smiling at the prospect of taking the city
back.” An April
1 march led by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition
and the NAACP and co-chaired by Rev. Al Sharpton, further crystallized
Black perceptions that “the effort to push the Black candidate
[Nagin] out the door” was a threat to Blacks, according to Sanyika,
who was among those who addressed the 3,000-strong rally.
Election Day Surprise
Right up to Election Day, it appeared to many that
Blacks would be a minority of the electorate. Through official
incompetence or design, no one could offer even a confident ballpark
figure on the number of residents that remained in the city, or
how many might return for the day to cast their ballots. One key
factor was painfully evident: only a fraction of a (loosely) estimated
60 percent of residents living in exile had cast absentee or early
ballots – about 21,000 voters. “The diaspora did not vote anything
like their proportion,” Sanyika reported. Things did not look
good.
Nevertheless, when the results were in African Americans
comprised a slim majority of voters – 52 percent of 108,000 ballots
cast. This, despite a white turnout of 44 percent versus 24 percent
for Blacks. “The fact that as many Black folks popped up as they
did on Election Day was a surprise to the White Power Structure,”
said Sanyika. New Orleans still clung – albeit barely – to its
Black electoral identity. The turnout shocked Black activists,
too, because “we had no way of knowing” how many people were actually
in the city.
Historically, even
in a city as Black as pre-Katrina New Orleans, the consensus “Black”
candidate must get something approaching 90 percent African American
support to overcome the “white” consensus candidate. (Remember,
the white
consensus candidate in 2002 was Ray Nagin.) On Saturday, 62 percent
of the general population voted for someone other than Nagin,
with one out of four Blacks backing Mitch Landrieu. Nagin, Sanyika
opined, “will be in for a very tough
race.” But the larger question is: what kind of campaign will
unfold in the few weeks until the runoff – a color-coded contest,
or a debate about “content and substance?” Organizer Sanyika wants
an “open debate – not just among Nagin and Landrieu, but among
the voters. We need to go beyond protest. How do we get home,
rebuild neighborhoods and schools, deal with the wealth gap, gentrification…bring
public housing residents home…ensure that renters get home?”
Challenge to Activists
The permanent government of developers and financiers,
meanwhile, goes about its business of gentrification and Black
removal with barely an acknowledgement of the electoral process
– the reality in every American city regardless of the public
promises of politicians.
The Nagin-appointed city reconstruction commission,
effectively dominated by Republican businessman Joseph C. Canizaro,
continues to refine its upscale and corporate dreams for New Orleans.
As the April 25 New York Times reported:
City council-enacted legislation calls for equity
in awarding contracts and jobs and for every neighborhood to be
treated the same. However, as Sanyika points out, “it’s a very
progressive piece of legislation…but it has to be implemented.
We have to be part of the shaping of the city. We must impact
the neighborhood planning process…the city legislative process.”
The task is “rebuilding an entire city from the
bottom up. You have to be part of the shaping of the city. You
have to do everything simultaneously. There is no choice. You
find yourself in the midst of an historic moment. We will not
disappear.”
Just as the masters of capital forge ahead with
plans to shape urban America to their own ends, 365 days a year,
so too must servants of the people, like the African
American Leadership Project’s Sanyika and fellow strugglers.
“The challenge for planners, organizers and activists is to rebuild
the social movement on the ground. Even if Rev. Tom Watson, the
most progressive candidate, had won, the challenge would still
be the same.”
BC Co-Publishers Glen Ford and
Peter Gamble are writing a book to be title, Barack Obama
and the Crisis in Black Leadership.