Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Birthplace of American Music Has Been Handed Over to Real-Estate
Speculators
________________________________________
The Birthplace of American Music Has Been Handed Over to Real-Estate
Speculators
By Adele Stan [1] / The American Prospect [2]
August 26, 2015
The first time I saw New Orleans, I entered an empty city. The streets were
marked with chalky streaks of salt and toxins left behind by the waters that
had filled them; the stench of rotten things filled the air.
It was September 19, 2005, three weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to
New Orleans when the levees were breached by the sea and the canals, whose
contents rushed into the roads and the yards and the living rooms of the
city's poorest residents.
By the time I arrived, the only vehicles on the streets were the
camouflage-painted Jeeps of the National Guard [3]. After abetting mayhem
with shoot-to-kill orders against the city's most desperate citizens, many
on the New Orleans police force simply fled the city.
With colleagues from the labor union I worked for at the time, I visited the
Greyhound bus depot, which was housing the inmates of the infamous Angola
Correctional Facility in its bus bays. Improbably, a white Rolls Royce [4]
sat parked in front of the station. Inside, a prison doctor implored me to
find a way to get him some antibiotics from the outside world, as well as
basic medical supplies like sutures and bandages. In the ostensible greatest
nation on earth, a city that had undergone the level of devastation that New
Orleans had couldn't count on any government to provide a government doctor
with the things he needed to care for those in his charge. But those in his
care were prisoners, nearly all of them black. So you know how that goes.
The convention center, now famous for the video footage of starving, thirsty
people crammed into an arena in which the dead were left to rot among them,
was empty. The Superdome, another empty "refuge of last resort" bore a
gaping hole in its roof. The awning of a Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen
fried-chicken franchise lay upside-down on a Canal Street sidewalk.
Today, they say, New Orleans is back. Except that it isn't [5]. The local
economy may be humming, but absent are some 100,000 people who fled the city
when the storm and its aftermath took everything from them. Many of them
descend from families whose presence in the town spanned the ages. Nearly
all of them are black.
When you think of New Orleans, you likely summon to mind the scent of gumbo
or the sound of jazz or the mysteries of the voodoo that seems to underlie
nearly all spiritual expression in the Crescent City. Each of these things
is a touchstone of the city's unique culture, born of a very particular mix
of ethnic and racial groups and a whole lot of pain. The history of New
Orleans-the pre-Katrina New Orleans-holds critical pieces of the nation's
history as a whole, and the nation's culture writ large. But America doesn't
like to see the city that way, and so it was left to drown.
In New Orleans, the legacy of slavery and the slave trade is everywhere.
There's nothing subtle about it; it can't be explained away. Its historic
buildings include those from which enslaved people were auctioned. The
voodoo is rooted in the West African culture of the Yoruba people; the
rhythms of jazz derived from the individual rhythmic patterns assigned each
of the Yoruban deities. The okra in your gumbo is there because of the seeds
carried by the abducted through the Middle Passage. They also carried, along
with the rhythms of the orisha, the seeds of the blues, the musical form
from which nearly all American popular music springs. And the lament of
Native Americans, nearly erased from the landscape of the Eastern states,
still resonates there. The Choctaw people, Kristina Kay Robinson reminds us
in her pensive essay in The Nation [5], "named the city Bulbancha, 'Many
Languages Spoken There.'"
A year later, I went back to New Orleans [6] for the first anniversary of
the storm. I followed a traditional NOLA funeral procession, complete with
second-line brass bands and a glass-windowed, horse-drawn hearse, conceived
in commemoration of those who perished in the storm.
After a big concert a day or two later, I spoke with Cyril Neville, the
percussionist in one of the city's musical dynasties. He told me that the
rest of the country just doesn't see New Orleans as part of the U.S. To most
Americans, he said, "We're the Northern-most point of the Caribbean."
(At the same concert, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the son of another of the
city's great musical dynasties, cautioned the audience to not voice their
grievances too loudly, lest they turn the politicians against the city just
as it was appealing for redevelopment money. It was a controversial speech.)
New Orleans, added to the United States through Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana
Purchase, is as American a city as you can get. But the American story told
by New Orleans is the one we would like to forget: the mother standing on an
auction block as her children look on, the racial mixing of the oppressor
and the oppressed, the disproportionate level of poverty among the
descendants of the Africans, the epic levels of police brutality against
black people. We want the gumbo, but not the history of how it came to be.
Today, New Orleans, it's said, is on its way up, but the city's black
residents don't see it that way. Maybe that's because the windfalls of the
city's redevelopment have not fallen to them. The white people who are
winning in the new New Orleans are not simply those who were always part of
the city's life, but many who washed in with the flood of white people who
came to the city to be part of its on-its-way-up-ness. Writing in The
Washington Post [7], Abby Phillips notes that "84 percent of African
Americans now in New Orleans lived in the city before the storm, while only
61 percent of whites did."
The Christian Science Monitor reports [8] that while income levels for the
black people of New Orleans have barely budged since the storm, white
residents saw their incomes jump by 35 percent.
Some 72 percent of those displaced by the storm are black, Phillips reports,
while only 14 percent are white. In the Monitor, Patrik Jonsson writes:
Federal buyout and recovery grants to homeowners were based largely on
pre-storm property values, which meant that the primarily poorer
African-American residents who are now seeing half-million-dollar homes
being built next door tended to receive the smallest rebuilding grants.
In short, New Orleans, long a majority-black town, is becoming much whiter.
With 100,000 of its black residents gone, and the city dependent on the
tourist trade, it risks becoming a Disneyesque stage set designed to
represent a prettified version of culture that no longer exists, at least
not in its fullness.
When I reported [9] on the first anniversary of Katrina for the Prospect in
2006, I stole a minute with the New Orleans pianist and vocalist Dr. John,
who was furious over the city's loss of population, and the fact that many
of those left behind still didn't know where their friends and family
members were.
"Over half this city don't have a clue [where their people are]," he said.
"They're either missin' in action, dead in St. Gabriel [10] and nobody knows
who they are-and I could go on with a list of gripes. So there, babe."
And then there's this: After World War II, the United States rebuilt
Salzburg, the Austrian city that gave birth to much of Europe's great
classical music. During the years of the Marshall Plan, U.S. leaders
understood that the rebuilding of Europe and the safeguarding of its living
cultural history was critical to the preservation of Western civilization
and peace on the continent.
The redevelopment of New Orleans, on the other hand, birthplace of America's
great classical music-jazz-has been left to the enterprise of real-estate
speculators, with no regard for the city's living cultural history. Among
the 100,000 missing are many strands of that history.
The saddest part of this tale, however, are the ways in which New Orleans's
story continues to be so very American. It's the 21st-century version of the
same old, same old-private capital reigns supreme, at the expense of all
that is humane.
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [11]
[12]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/birthplace-american-music-has-been
-handed-over-real-estate-speculators
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/adele-stan
[2] http://www.prospect.org/
[3]
http://katrinafiles.blogspot.com/2005/09/issues-mobilization-specialist-bren
dan.html
[4]
http://katrinafiles.blogspot.com/2005/09/communications-specialist-adele-sta
n_18.html
[5]
http://www.thenation.com/article/ten-years-since-a-meditation-on-new-orleans
/
[6] http://addiestan.blogspot.com/2006/08/holdin-on.html
[7]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/08/24/white-people-in
-new-orleans-say-theyre-better-off-after-katrina-black-people-dont/
[8]
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/0825/Ten-years-after-Katrina-a-new
-New-Orleans-emerges
[9] http://prospect.org/article/message-1
[10]
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060827/ZNYT02/6082
70849
[11] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Birthplace of
American Music Has Been Handed Over to Real-Estate Speculators
[12] http://www.alternet.org/
[13] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Birthplace of American Music Has Been Handed Over to Real-Estate
Speculators
The Birthplace of American Music Has Been Handed Over to Real-Estate
Speculators
By Adele Stan [1] / The American Prospect [2]
August 26, 2015
The first time I saw New Orleans, I entered an empty city. The streets were
marked with chalky streaks of salt and toxins left behind by the waters that
had filled them; the stench of rotten things filled the air.
It was September 19, 2005, three weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to
New Orleans when the levees were breached by the sea and the canals, whose
contents rushed into the roads and the yards and the living rooms of the
city's poorest residents.
By the time I arrived, the only vehicles on the streets were the
camouflage-painted Jeeps of the National Guard [3]. After abetting mayhem
with shoot-to-kill orders against the city's most desperate citizens, many
on the New Orleans police force simply fled the city.
With colleagues from the labor union I worked for at the time, I visited the
Greyhound bus depot, which was housing the inmates of the infamous Angola
Correctional Facility in its bus bays. Improbably, a white Rolls Royce [4]
sat parked in front of the station. Inside, a prison doctor implored me to
find a way to get him some antibiotics from the outside world, as well as
basic medical supplies like sutures and bandages. In the ostensible greatest
nation on earth, a city that had undergone the level of devastation that New
Orleans had couldn't count on any government to provide a government doctor
with the things he needed to care for those in his charge. But those in his
care were prisoners, nearly all of them black. So you know how that goes.
The convention center, now famous for the video footage of starving, thirsty
people crammed into an arena in which the dead were left to rot among them,
was empty. The Superdome, another empty "refuge of last resort" bore a
gaping hole in its roof. The awning of a Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen
fried-chicken franchise lay upside-down on a Canal Street sidewalk.
Today, they say, New Orleans is back. Except that it isn't [5]. The local
economy may be humming, but absent are some 100,000 people who fled the city
when the storm and its aftermath took everything from them. Many of them
descend from families whose presence in the town spanned the ages. Nearly
all of them are black.
When you think of New Orleans, you likely summon to mind the scent of gumbo
or the sound of jazz or the mysteries of the voodoo that seems to underlie
nearly all spiritual expression in the Crescent City. Each of these things
is a touchstone of the city's unique culture, born of a very particular mix
of ethnic and racial groups and a whole lot of pain. The history of New
Orleans-the pre-Katrina New Orleans-holds critical pieces of the nation's
history as a whole, and the nation's culture writ large. But America doesn't
like to see the city that way, and so it was left to drown.
In New Orleans, the legacy of slavery and the slave trade is everywhere.
There's nothing subtle about it; it can't be explained away. Its historic
buildings include those from which enslaved people were auctioned. The
voodoo is rooted in the West African culture of the Yoruba people; the
rhythms of jazz derived from the individual rhythmic patterns assigned each
of the Yoruban deities. The okra in your gumbo is there because of the seeds
carried by the abducted through the Middle Passage. They also carried, along
with the rhythms of the orisha, the seeds of the blues, the musical form
from which nearly all American popular music springs. And the lament of
Native Americans, nearly erased from the landscape of the Eastern states,
still resonates there. The Choctaw people, Kristina Kay Robinson reminds us
in her pensive essay in The Nation [5], "named the city Bulbancha, 'Many
Languages Spoken There.'"
A year later, I went back to New Orleans [6] for the first anniversary of
the storm. I followed a traditional NOLA funeral procession, complete with
second-line brass bands and a glass-windowed, horse-drawn hearse, conceived
in commemoration of those who perished in the storm.
After a big concert a day or two later, I spoke with Cyril Neville, the
percussionist in one of the city's musical dynasties. He told me that the
rest of the country just doesn't see New Orleans as part of the U.S. To most
Americans, he said, "We're the Northern-most point of the Caribbean."
(At the same concert, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the son of another of the
city's great musical dynasties, cautioned the audience to not voice their
grievances too loudly, lest they turn the politicians against the city just
as it was appealing for redevelopment money. It was a controversial speech.)
New Orleans, added to the United States through Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana
Purchase, is as American a city as you can get. But the American story told
by New Orleans is the one we would like to forget: the mother standing on an
auction block as her children look on, the racial mixing of the oppressor
and the oppressed, the disproportionate level of poverty among the
descendants of the Africans, the epic levels of police brutality against
black people. We want the gumbo, but not the history of how it came to be.
Today, New Orleans, it's said, is on its way up, but the city's black
residents don't see it that way. Maybe that's because the windfalls of the
city's redevelopment have not fallen to them. The white people who are
winning in the new New Orleans are not simply those who were always part of
the city's life, but many who washed in with the flood of white people who
came to the city to be part of its on-its-way-up-ness. Writing in The
Washington Post [7], Abby Phillips notes that "84 percent of African
Americans now in New Orleans lived in the city before the storm, while only
61 percent of whites did."
The Christian Science Monitor reports [8] that while income levels for the
black people of New Orleans have barely budged since the storm, white
residents saw their incomes jump by 35 percent.
Some 72 percent of those displaced by the storm are black, Phillips reports,
while only 14 percent are white. In the Monitor, Patrik Jonsson writes:
Federal buyout and recovery grants to homeowners were based largely on
pre-storm property values, which meant that the primarily poorer
African-American residents who are now seeing half-million-dollar homes
being built next door tended to receive the smallest rebuilding grants.
In short, New Orleans, long a majority-black town, is becoming much whiter.
With 100,000 of its black residents gone, and the city dependent on the
tourist trade, it risks becoming a Disneyesque stage set designed to
represent a prettified version of culture that no longer exists, at least
not in its fullness.
When I reported [9] on the first anniversary of Katrina for the Prospect in
2006, I stole a minute with the New Orleans pianist and vocalist Dr. John,
who was furious over the city's loss of population, and the fact that many
of those left behind still didn't know where their friends and family
members were.
"Over half this city don't have a clue [where their people are]," he said.
"They're either missin' in action, dead in St. Gabriel [10] and nobody knows
who they are-and I could go on with a list of gripes. So there, babe."
And then there's this: After World War II, the United States rebuilt
Salzburg, the Austrian city that gave birth to much of Europe's great
classical music. During the years of the Marshall Plan, U.S. leaders
understood that the rebuilding of Europe and the safeguarding of its living
cultural history was critical to the preservation of Western civilization
and peace on the continent.
The redevelopment of New Orleans, on the other hand, birthplace of America's
great classical music-jazz-has been left to the enterprise of real-estate
speculators, with no regard for the city's living cultural history. Among
the 100,000 missing are many strands of that history.
The saddest part of this tale, however, are the ways in which New Orleans's
story continues to be so very American. It's the 21st-century version of the
same old, same old-private capital reigns supreme, at the expense of all
that is humane.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [11]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[12]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/birthplace-american-music-has-been
-handed-over-real-estate-speculators
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/adele-stan
[2] http://www.prospect.org/
[3]
http://katrinafiles.blogspot.com/2005/09/issues-mobilization-specialist-bren
dan.html
[4]
http://katrinafiles.blogspot.com/2005/09/communications-specialist-adele-sta
n_18.html
[5]
http://www.thenation.com/article/ten-years-since-a-meditation-on-new-orleans
/
[6] http://addiestan.blogspot.com/2006/08/holdin-on.html
[7]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/08/24/white-people-in
-new-orleans-say-theyre-better-off-after-katrina-black-people-dont/
[8]
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/0825/Ten-years-after-Katrina-a-new
-New-Orleans-emerges
[9] http://prospect.org/article/message-1
[10]
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060827/ZNYT02/6082
70849
[11] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Birthplace of
American Music Has Been Handed Over to Real-Estate Speculators
[12] http://www.alternet.org/
[13] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
