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<br><br>
<a href="http://www.blackcommentator.com/180/180_cover_new_orleans_gettysburg_pf.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.blackcommentator.com/180/180_cover_new_orleans_gettysburg_pf.html<br>
</a>April 20, 2006 - Issue 180<br><br>
<b>Cover Story<br>
'New Orleans is our Gettysburg'<br>
A Generation's Defining Event <br>
by BC Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble<br><br>
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</dl>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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Behind that bland word, “normalcy,” lies a wish list and narrative that
sees white rule as normative in America – the way things should</i> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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,”
<a href="http://www.blackcommentator.com/180/180_new_orleans_election_fever_flaherty.html">
April 20, 2006</a>). When their rule is sanctioned by this weekend’s
elections, “normalcy” will be just around the corner.<br><br>
“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 <a href="http://www.hiphopcaucus.org/h2c/">Hip Hop
Caucus</a>, 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.”<br><br>
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."<br><br>
“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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
In the words of University of Chicago political scientist
<a href="http://www.blackcommentator.com/180/../165/165_cover_katrina_study.html">
Michael Dawson</a>, 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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
Katrina is becoming a rallying cry for all of Black America, creating a
new generation of activists. “I’m beginning to see more
<a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/hamer.html">Fannie Lou Hamers</a>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“New Orleans is our Gettysburg,” said Rev. Yearwood. “If we lose there,
we lose all the marbles.” <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.</b> 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.”<br><br>
Elections be damned.<br><br>
BC</b> Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble are writing a book to be
entitled, Barack Obama and the Crisis of Black Leadership.<br><br>
</i><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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