Sometimes I go to New Orleans but avoid seeing my friends who work at Tulane University. This can be embarrassing if I run into them on the street and they say, but why did you not call me, why are you not staying with me, because the truthful answer would be the uncharitable and incomprehensible sentence, I like you very much and I appreciate knowing you, but this time I wanted to be in New Orleans without your moneyed, academic, Yankee filter walking alongside me. It is not that my activities are so different from theirs, it is that I do not want to adulterate the Caribbean vibration that wafts down every block. But when I go down to visit with a recently released prisoner, and spend the weekend hanging out with them and their families, I realize very sharply that by myself in New Orleans, I am in fact surrounded with my own Bohemian but bourgeois San Francisco vibration. I also remember how much Black life in New Orleans is like Black life in Brazil – Brazil being the first place I experienced real ghettoization first hand, and saw so many traces of slavery and vestiges of the nineteenth century all around.
I noticed once again this weekend how comparatively upscale and Caucasian oriented the activities I think of as funky and cool are. I realized once again how small the town really is if you are poor and Black – even smaller than it is if you are white and scared – and not only because you would feel out of place in many white and even many mixed venues. You also cannot go to as many Black areas and venues as I can, partly due to the cost of transportation and partly because of the animosity between neighborhoods. I can walk around in both the Third and the Ninth Wards, for instance, but natives of each are not necessarily safe in the other. The result of the limitations set in place by these multiple factors is that many people are born, live, and die in their neighborhoods without venturing abroad at all. That is why some wish to return so sorely, and others do not wish to return at all.
The house ‘Baki grew up in is near Kid Ory’s house. It still has the original pot-bellied stove which in his childhood was used for heat, and the old-fashioned irons they would heat on it to iron. This was in the fifties and sixties. In those days the Superdome had not been built and the ground where it stands was dotted with houses surrounded by flowering bushes and trees. Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard was still called Dryades Street and all the businesses there which are now bombed-out shells of buildings were busy and booming. There was a large open market where you could buy live chickens, fresh fruit, vegetables just in from the country, and yams just dug out of the ground. People still knew how to use the herbs.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
“I like you very much and I appreciate knowing you, but this time I wanted to be New Orleans without your moneyed, academic, Yankee filter walking”
I feel you here. Sometimes it takes too much to explain. The nuance. The reason. The unreasonable.
For me the more I stay away from the “filter” the less I like my colleagues or friends who ‘don’t get it’, ‘won’t get it’, or mostly, ‘can’t get it.’
And at times it can be quite a lonely. But still, a reasonable loneliness.
I trust you have had a wonderful weekend.
Peace and struggle,
Ridwan
OK.
I have so much to say about this post, but I am dead tired from working today.
So, I will just say, I wish I could fly to NOLA tonight.
I just posted a long one over at my blog re: my trip to NOLA last week. It does little to convey my personal struggles with being a white, Northern academic Yankee (because of my family background, I have a really hard time thinking of myself as “moneyed”, even if it’s certainly true at this stage of my life) working with mostly Black, but really a diverse group of activists from LA, MS, AL – white, Latino, Vietnamese, Creole, Northern, Southern, immigrants, native-born, bougie, working class, organizers, foundation types, multi-generationed Gulf Coast, transplants, etc. etc. etc. – re: equitable recovery. Though NOLA itself never fails to challenge my perceptions about race, class – the usual suspects – this current work around political campaign building (see: http://www.equityandinclusion.org) is really clawing at me to confront my own stereotypes, my own privilege and my own distance and lack of real understanding re: hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, the color line, the South, inequality, and so on.
My roots are urban, white working class and poor. I’m talking multiple generations of poverty and insecurity on one side of my family, and a more steady if belated progression of upward mobility from poor to working to middle class on the other side. Because I originate from and live within this family background while also now hailing from MIT, I feel like an outsider just about everywhere – not quite street enough when with my relatives or in Dorchester or Southie, but certainly enough so to carry around an enormous chip on my shoulder in the Ivory Tower. And because of this first hand understanding of poverty, class and its intersection with race and place (e.g., Southie’s poor but white? Crazy!) I expect in my professional work that anyone who has lived at the margins or experienced inequity, injustice, a lack of privilege, etc., should get me and incorporate me into their lives right off the bat. Surely my motivations behind my white do-gooder ways are the right ones, no? I’m no trust fund baby! C’mon. 😉
But it just ain’t that easy, and though I’ve come to terms with the fact that I really look “white” (if a funkier, NY’ed version of New England preppie) and that’s continuously an obstacle in the predominantly non-white or non-Christian (I’m a Brandeis undergrad) realms I’ve been orbiting most of my adult life, I can’t seem to accept that I’m not entitled to walk into any of these rooms and open up my PC to “assist” with other peoples’ struggles just because my economic background should compensate for the fact that I’m still white at the end of the day.
The more I do this work the more I realize how blunt and crude race is as a metric, boundary, etc. that we use to evaluate our different struggles, legitimacy, and rights. But, it’s just so convenient and quick for all of us – I can’t pontificate on my own righteousness every time I meet someone new, as much as I’d like to! One of the best things about New Orleans – like Brazil – is the nuance of the color line in comparison to the rest of the U.S. Overlay this onto the white and Creole power structure and the excess of neighborhood boundaries and you’ve got some serious politics circumscribing just about every personal and professional interaction. White elite types, esp., I’m noticing, in the funding world HQ’ed in NY/Boston, cannot seem to accept this explicit politicking as part and parcel of the fieldwork, and take pains to disparage or minimize it even as they engage in it, perpetuate it, and capitalize on it to maintain their positions of power.
These days my personal struggle is to come to terms with how much of a “disaster capitalist” I really am, working in NOLA and now the Gulf Coast since the storm hit, finally on a project I am ideologically committed to from the start vs. using as a foothold to ultimately do “good” work, and believing in myself and my motivations and my skills re: what I can contribute, but not wanting to take responsibility for my post-storm arrival on the scene and the freedom I insist on maintaining to come and go as I relatively please (i.e., I won’t move there, I wouldn’t be able to take it, I know first hand from living and working in NYC post-9/11).
All this rambling is to say I appreciate your perspective on NOLA and how you are situated there, admitting to your own SF background while also wanting the distance from the white Tulane scene. Per usual, your willingness to speak frankly and get down into this is much appreciated.
Hi everybody and thanks for long comment, Leigh! Unbeached, come back and say what’s on your mind, I would *love* to know!
I should be preparing class so I won’t say a whole lot now but on race and privilege, for reasons I suppose I can guess at (such as always having lived in racially hierarchical places, very often with white minorities) it has been clear to me since jump that being white was a huge advantage, no matter what other elements there were in one’s situation … and going to a good institution as an undergraduate (not just one which bills itself as good to people who don’t know how good good can be) is another really big advantage.
On New Orleans, Brazil, and the nuance of the color line … I wonder where else this exists, for example, what the situation really is in the Caribbean. I’ve been to Cuba and Trinidad and they seemed similar, but then I have only been in each for a couple of weeks. Cuba did have a huge free people of color class, like Brazil and Louisiana, and / but I know there is great Indian / Black animosity in Trinidad (despite all the mixing).
Nuance of color line … I feel it in California too, although that may just be an idiosyncratic effect of my bicultural-esque upbringing, I don’t know.