Segregation Street

 Look at that. The both sides came together and found a compromise solution. 

The commission has also received recommendations to divide some of the more prominent streets, picking different names depending on the neighborhood - an idea with significant racial overtones. For example, the commission’s current recommendation is to rename Robert E. Lee Boulevard for musician Allen Toussaint, but an alternative would call it Toussaint in the Black neighborhoods of Gentilly and Hibernia or Lake Boulevard in the majority-white areas of Lakeview.

This project that was begun in order to correct a shameful legacy of white supremacy now proposes to do that by coding the notion that all the Black people live over here and all the White people live over there right into the name(s) of the street. That's what this was all about, right?

Not gonna "implicit bias" train your way to justice

Systemic racism is a material condition that obtains through the numerous inequities linked to the development of institutions and governments over the long course of history.  Redress against its embedded corrosive effects demands a complete societal overhaul of the ways we distribute wealth and administer justice. It's a collective project of building a better world for everyone.

Very likely, though, your organization... and in particular your boss... is not interested in doing any of that.  Which is why they develop tools for re-casting the problem as a matter of individual virtue.

It’s not a coincidence that corporate human resources departments love to contract diversity consultants like DiAngelo to do anti-bias trainings. Trainings more than pay for themselves if they can demonstrate a commitment to an inclusive workplace in the event of later anti-discrimination lawsuits. They’re also a lot cheaper than paying workers better and addressing structural inequalities. The more that blame for discrimination can be shifted on to individual racist “Karens”, the less onus there is on powerful corporations, and the politicians who defend them, to make real changes.

We do know, for example, of a tool far more useful than unconscious bias trainings in creating respect and equality: unions. Recent work in the American Journal of Political Science notes that union membership reduced racial resentment among white workers and made them more likely to support policies that benefit black Americans.

The difference is between offering workers a collective path to improving the actual conditions of their lives vs. forcing them to take "personal responsibility" for proving to the boss that they are on board with a performative company PR plan.  It is a choice between establishing justice or defending capitalism. And the latter route always requires that we heap the burden onto relatively powerless individuals.

So it's no surprise to find irretrievably racist institutions like police departments, when confronted with demands to surrender their funding and their authority in order that a more equitable and supportive means of societal justice can be implemented, respond thusly.

New Orleans – The NOPD is proud to announce its participation in the “Implicit vs. Explicit Bias & the Impact of Social Media” training program led by LSU School of Public Health and RacialBias.org.  The university and 501(c)3 organization worked in collaboration to design coursework to better equip law enforcement officers with the tools necessary to better understand and empathize with the citizens they serve.

Will events and like these serve their purpose?  Likely, they will.  But do not be deceived that the purpose is to actually alleviate or eliminate racial injustice.  Instead it is to preserve the racist institutions themselves.

Summer reading

The beginning of June is probably a good time to roll out a few book recommendations. I'm getting the brain worms in my early old age now and I find I need to do a better job of keeping a record of what I've been reading. I used to have a Library Thing account for that. And there's still a Goodreads linked here on this very blog but I haven't used that in ages. Recently I've reverted to just keeping a boring old spreadsheet. But I'm going to try posting books here more often.  Otherwise, like everything else in life, if I don't take a second to write it down, I'll never remember any of  it happened.  So here are some titles I've finished over the past few months.  If I remember to do this more frequently, these posts won't be quite so long.  

• Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age Of Revolutions by Rashauna Johnson (2016)
  
  There is a long overdue movement in the treatment of slavery in popular history writing to place it in its proper context as a (if not the) founding institution of modern global capitalism.  Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told and Matthew Karp's This Vast Southern Empire are a couple of relatively recent popular books I can recommend here. Also here is a two part episode of The Dig podcast recorded during this "Slavery's Hinterlands" symposium at Brown University.
  
  Johnson's book contributes something to this as it traces the movement of enslaved people to, through, and from New Orleans during a pivotal period centered around the Haitian revolution. The context of this book is global but most of the focus is local. Slavery marked every aspect of life in the city. Johnson describes its effect on domestic living patterns in the city's neighborhoods. She discusses its influence on popular culture and entertainment. One example of ths is an explicit characterization of the sometimes romanticized raquette matches played near Hunter's Field during this period as a brutal and exploitative use of black bodies.  She also writes about the local jail's role as an aggregator and lessor of slave labor (some things never change.)
  
  Here also is a brief WWNO interview with Johnson from last May.



• The Parade by Dave Eggers (2019)
  
  This is a short novel you can read in a day or two if you want to. I'm not sure you actually have to, though. The style is a faux parable where two main characters (their names are not given) go to work for a contractor building a new road across a recently war-torn country (also unnamed) supposedly located somewhere in the global south. Things happen along the way but it ends pretty much the way you expect.  Imagine if Dave Eggers had tried to write The Road by Cormac McCarthy and this is what you would get.



• The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson (2018)
  
  This is a juvenile/YA novel that will probably show up on a lot of middle school summer reading lists this year. A young girl and her mother spend the summer away from their home in Atlanta at her grandmother's house in a small town in South Carolina. She discovers a letter in the attic that leads her and a neighbor boy to investigate a mystery from the town's past. That premise frames a story built around fictionalized historical episodes from the segregationist South combined with a sort of Count Of Monte Cristo story.  Explores themes of racial justice and LGBTQ acceptance.



• Automating Inequality: How High Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks (2018)
  
  Data driven systems for intake and management of social services make poor people easier targets for police. Eubanks describes experiments with screening systems for welfare benefits in Indiana and homeless services in Los Angeles as well as a "predictive" tool for assessing the risk of child abuse in Allegheny County, PA. She argues that these and systems like them constitute a "digital poorhouse" and an insidious expansion of the 21st Century police state.
  
  This is all very much worth paying attention to for New Orleanians as the City Council and Mayor implement so-called "tough love" homeless management and juvenile justice policies that can end up doing a lot of harm to vulnerable people under the very likely bad faith offer of aid.



• She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore (2018)
  
  This week, protesters took to the streets in Monrovia to express frustrations with the Liberian government headed by former soccer star George Weah.
  

  Among protesters’ main gripes: a stagnant economy in which most still live in deep poverty and a scandal in which the country last year lost $100 million in newly printed bank notes destined for the central bank.
  
  “Weah is not governing our state the right way,” said Ishmael Hassan, who voted for Weah in 2017 but has since become disillusioned. “The economic situation in our country is going down the drain.”

  Weah's election had been seen as a relief from the stagnation and corruption of the EJ Sirleaf government. Sirleaf came into power with high hopes after years of civil war under the dominant influence of Charles Taylor. Taylor came into power having led a revolt against the corrupt Samuel Doe. Doe came in... look this goes back a ways. Maybe we should start from the beginning.
  
  Okay so the nation we know as Liberia finds its origin in the efforts of the, ostensibly abolitionist, but primarily white supremacist American Colonization Society.  The idea behind ACS was to remove as many Americans of African descent as possible from the US by sending freed slaves to a newly founded colony on the West African coast. The Americo-Liberian colonists clashed with and quickly came to dominate the indigenous tribes living there. This continued on into the Twentieth Century as the elite colonizing classes collaborated with international corporations (most notably Firestone) to exploit Liberia's natural resources.  Basically, it was run as a big rubber plantation. Later, like pretty much every Third World nation, Liberia became a pawn in the US/Soviet Cold War rivalry until that played itself out at which point matters really began to deteriorate.
  
  You won't learn any of this by reading She Would Be King. But Moore's magical realist novel does attempt to relay some of the essence of Liberia's founding elements. Her three main characters are basically avatars of the country's ethnic mix embodied as folk heroes. They begin their stories living separate and oppressed lives in Virginia, Jamaica and the African back country.  Each discovers a unique magical gift as they move along on their journeys before coming together at the moment of the nation's independence.  The novel is successful in creating a mock folk legend about the people of Liberia. It's less compelling as a beginning-to-end narrative but that's not really the primary aim.



• Cities: The First 6000 Years by Monica Smith (2019)
  
  This is a quick and engaging survey of the archaeology of urban places that isn't anywhere near as ambitious as the title might sound. It's really more a personal summary of the author's observations and general theories based on her own work in the field. Most of which is quite fascinating although here and there the reader gets a sense of a creeping Pinkerist message. Trash is good, actually. Capitalism and class hierarchy are good and permanent fixtures of human society, actually. Things that seem bad now are actually not that bad because they are not new.  Probably the author doesn't mean for this to come through quite so explicitly. But if you are a reader who is sensitive to that sort of thing you might grow a little suspicious. Don't let that detract too much from what is really a delightful book, though. You're probably overthinking it. 

Politically bankrupt

Here's a new ProPublica report on racial disparities embedded in the bankruptcy process. Even the American debt relief system is largely segregated. Typically, black debtors are much more likely than whites to be shunted into Chapter 13 bankruptcy than into Chapter 7. Here's why that's important.

Under federal bankruptcy law, people overwhelmed by debt have a choice: They can either file under Chapter 7, which wipes out debts and, since most filers lack significant assets, allows them to keep what little they have. Or they can choose Chapter 13, which usually requires five years of payments to creditors before any debts are eliminated, but blocks foreclosures and car repossessions as long as debtors can keep up. In most of the country, Chapter 7 is the overwhelming choice. Only in the South, in a band of states stretching from North Carolina to Texas, is Chapter 13 predominant.

The responsibility of knowing which path to pick falls to those seeking relief. In Memphis, about three-quarters of filings are under Chapter 13. That’s how Miller filed. She thought the two chapters were “the same,” she told me.

Initially, they are. Upon filing, debtors are shielded from garnishments and debt collectors. But whereas under Chapter 7 those protections are generally made permanent after a few months, under Chapter 13 they last only as long as payments are made. Most Chapter 13 filers in Memphis don’t last a year, let alone five.

As efficiently as cases are opened, they are closed — usually because debtors fail to keep up with payments, according to a ProPublica analysis of court data. In 2015, over 9,000 cases in the district were dismissed — more cases than were filed in 22 other states that year. Less than a third of Chapter 13 cases in the district result in a discharge of debts. And when their cases are dismissed, debtors are often in worse straits, because as they struggled to make payments, the interest on their unpaid debts continued to mount. Once the refuge of bankruptcy is gone, the debt floods back larger than ever. They’ve borne the costs of bankruptcy — attorney and filing fees, a seven-year flag on their credit reports — without receiving its primary benefit. A system that is supposed to eliminate debt instead serves to magnify it.

There are in-depth analyses here that focus on Memphis and on Chicago where the reporters hit on a common contributing factor to the disparity.

Court debt: In our sample, 29 percent of debtors from black tracts had this kind of debt (compared to 9 percent of debtors from white tracts), and for 6 percent of cases, it was the largest debt. The vast majority of this debt came from Shelby County’s General Sessions Criminal Court, which handles traffic cases and misdemeanors. In interviews, bankruptcy attorneys said this was generally related to driver’s license issues. Nonpayment of a court debt can lead to suspension of a driver’s license, and debtors often file under Chapter 13 either to prevent suspension of a license or to have their licenses reinstated. Debtors’ driver’s licenses are generally reinstated upon confirmation of their cases. This type of debt is not dischargeable in a Chapter 7.

The racial disparity for this kind of debt in bankruptcy cases is reflective of a disparity in the suspension of driver’s licenses. We obtained data on driver’s license suspensions in Shelby County and found that suspensions stemming from traffic infractions (the most common source of a suspension) were six times more common among black residents than white residents.

Terrible harm is being done to the most vulnerable people in the country because municipalities have become ever more aggressive in their efforts to squeeze revenue out of such people. The predictable result is spiraling debt, unstable communities, and violence. In particular it has meant police violence against black people. Municipal fees were at the heart of the tensions with police preceding the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. This John Oliver segment from two years ago on municipal violations and poverty still holds up. A national debate over civil asset forfeiture is still ongoing despite suffering a setback this year thanks to the stubborn bigotry of US Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

In New Orleans, we're struggling with these problems just like every other city.  At the same time we hand out special tax break "incentives" to for profit developers, we fund essential public functions such as the basic right to a due process defense with traffic camera revenues.

The compound absurdities of this show up in our current election cycle where all of the major mayoral candidates have pledged to take down at least some traffic cameras. No doubt the cameras are unpopular with voters. But even as they try to make hay of this on the campaign trail, the candidates aren't instilling any confidence that they can make good on their promises. LaToya had to go through several rounds of clarification where her position changed from taking down all cameras, to only the "newer" cameras, and then back to all the cameras before what's lately become all except for the school zone cameras. There was one forum where Desiree said she would take them all down"if we can afford it."  When the entire system is rigged to make the cameras fiscally essential, that's going to prove a difficult qualifier to meet.

All of which indicates those cameras aren't going anywhere.  A candidate who is serious about removing them would first have to be serious about upending the status quo of systemic violence against poor people and especially poor people of color upon which the fortunes of its privileged classes is built. None among this group fits such a description. Is there a chapter in the code that covers political bankruptcy?

Please don't start the toppling party without me

Hang on a sec. Just gonna dial up AreTheMonumentsDownYet dot com. Probably still in limbo and... whoah, okay.

New Orleans officials can begin the process of removing the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at Lee Circle and three other monuments at the center of a long-running, city-led effort, a federal appeals court ruled Monday (March 6).

In the ruling, the three-judge panel with the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals found that the groups trying to block the removal of the monuments, Monumental Task Committee and the Louisiana Landmarks Society, failed to present a case that contained a legal argument that showed the monuments should stay up. The court wrote that the groups relied on two legal claims, "both of which wholly lack legal viability or support."

I last took a good look at the Lee monument a little over a week ago when our float passed (Tivoli) Circle.  I only had a second to take a picture. I was a little bit busy at the time. But I did take a moment to think about how ridiculously long the process of getting them down has been.



It's been so long, in fact, that earlier in the season I found myself sighing at monument floats in Druids and Chaos.  It had started to seem like such old news. Can't these guys just let it go?





But then I remembered the specific subject matter in question which is all about.... not letting it go.



Well it looks like the time has finally come now. When can we get started?

Mayor Mitch Landrieu's office said that a request for proposals will be issued within the next day to obtain bids for a company to remove the monuments, which will be stored in a city-owned warehouse until it's determined what will happen to them.

Oh boy. Well let's hope all the bidding contractors make sure they've got their auto insurance up to date. As for the monuments themselves, why not just give them to these parading krewes since they love them so much?  They could each make one into a recurring signature float. We'll give Lee to Chaos, Davis to D'etat, and Beauregard to Druids.  The Liberty Monument, of course, will have to be dragged down St. Charles each year to the Comus Ball where Erroll Laborde will curtsy to it thus signaling the end of Carnival for another season.

Welcome to your life

Congratulations to everyone who is no longer dead on Facebook. Unfortunately they couldn't quite rapture us all away for real.

President-elect Donald Trump faces a growing backlash against his decision to name campaign chairman and former head of Breitbart News Stephen K. Bannon as chief strategist at the White House, a choice critics believe will empower white nationalists.

A chorus of advocacy groups, commentators and congressional Democrats denounced Bannon as a proponent of racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic views as Trump began his first full week as president-elect. Trump named Bannon his chief strategist and senior counselor on Sunday while also appointing Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to be his chief of staff.

Anyway it's nice to know somebody tried. 

They get it from their racist parents

Atrios on "The Kids Today" who are still racist. 

We like to think our society is in general getting a bit less racist. I think that's probably true, and that it's probably true that The Kids Today are a bit less racist than my generation was (when I was a kid explicitly racist jokes were really not taboo, though by the time I hit college they probably were). Still there's plenty of racism, and The Kids Today have plenty of racists, too. I'm not talking about the kids being idiots stuff, like halloween blackface*, I'm talking about real solid racism. I know where all the racism came from when I was a kid. It was, you know, normal. I'm not quite sure where they get it from today.

That's easy, though.  They get it from the racist parents who raised them to also be racists in a still very racist environment. I think cosmetically, we present as slightly less racist today than say 30 years ago. But that's only the result of a lot of hard work and political pressure brought to bear on institutions. (And it's real progress. Don't get me wrong. I'm just saying it shouldn't be taken as evidence that we've defeated racism by any stretch.)

Anyway, the kids are still quite racist.  And it's because, contrary to popular belief, millennials didn't suddenly arrive from Mars one day.  They were raised here. By people like us.

Still waiting on that toppling party

Remember way back in December when we were wondering if the monuments would come down before the New Year?  Yeah, well.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration has scrapped its request for bids on a contract to remove Confederate monuments from the city, citing a court order.

The bids were due to be opened Monday (May 23), but the city canceled the solicitation.

Landrieu's attempt to remove monuments to Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard has been put on hold since March 25 when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order saying the statues had to be kept in place while it considered a request by preservationists to block removal altogether.

So, you know, yay. We'll still have monuments to kick around for another summer. Which is fine by me (as long as we eventually get to take them down.) In the meantime, it's one of my favorite issues to watch people argue about.  Which is what they were doing last week when Tulane Hillel hosted a monuments edition of its public debate series. I'll let you go read Alex Woodward's account of the meeting but allow me to quote his concluding paragraph.

As futile as these meetings seem, and as intense as they get, misinformation aside, they're worth having. All the public meetings on the monuments — from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities to Tulane to the City Council Chambers — have attempted to find that common ground. Instead, at nearly every debate or hearing, someone mentions how "divided" the city has become under Landrieu's watch, specifically, that black New Orleanians are speaking against the monuments, in public. If this is the first time monument supporters are hearing the aftershocks of slavery and Jim Crow, they haven't been listening at all.

I agree that these meetings are worthwhile.  I'm less interested, though, in finding  "common ground" with racists so much as I am interested in seeing them display the full ugliness of their ignorance. It is an abundantly instructive exercise and this monuments issue has been excellent for it.

Alex also points out at the opening of this article that as the same day this meeting was convened, the Louisiana Legislature was passing an obnoxious law that says persons unfortunate enough to find themselves in conflict with police could be prosecuted for "hate crime." I wish someone at the Hillel event could have asked one of the monument defenders if this means the White League rioters the Liberty Monument celebrates committed a "hate crime" against the police they murdered that day. But oh well.

Today our ineffectual Governor confirmed that he plans to sign the monstrous Blue Lives Matter bill.  No doubt John Bel thinks this is the best way to find "common ground."  But that's the trap such rhetoric sets for us.  The only way to defeat racism and abuse is to overthrow it.  And as long as our political leaders are content to reward police for their violent licentious racism, there's no reason to seek "common ground" with them.

The Clintons are not good people

This should be obvious by now. Go find your own links.

Whoops!

As the rent gets too damn high in the suddenly fashionable city, we're eventually gonna have to all go live in the burbs. But first we have to figure out which burb is best for you. So everybody stand by to be sorted.

A Metairie landlord accused of discriminating against African American renters and using racial slurs to describe them was ordered Thursday (Nov. 5) to pay more than $172,000 in damages. One of the firm's operators also agreed, as part of a settlement to end litigation, never again to work in the real estate industry.

It's going to keep happening.  Not every landlord is dumb enough to leave a paper trail. 

Four months later, Denise Thornton received at her workplace an anonymous letter that contained Brion Ebey's list of prospective renters. The list contained the names of the Thorntons as well as many of the Fair Housing Center's undercover testers. Next to the names of the African American people, including the Thorntons, Ebey wrote racial slurs and "puta," the Spanish word for "whore."

The curious way in which #BlackLivesMatter to Mitch

On Tuesday this week we learned, as we expected to learn, that the police convicted of the Danziger Bridge shooting and cover-up will be granted a new trial because the US Attorney's office happened to have been run by NOLA.com commenters for a while during the past decade.  The circumstances that allowed this to be so are their own strange and complicated sideshow. Sadly, it is less strange to us that justice in a case of police violence against young black men would prove to be this elusive for any reason. In fact, it's almost to be expected.

The Black Lives Matter movement grew out of protests in Ferguson, Missouri over the murder of a young black man by police. Over the past year, the movement has grown as it continually shines a light on the regularity with which such horrifying violence is committed by police all across the country.

The British newspaper The Guardian, combining traditional reporting with "verified crowdsourced information," has counted 704 people killed by police in the United States this year, including 150 that the newspaper classified as unarmed.

Among The Guardian's other findings was that blacks have been killed by police this year at a rate two and a half times that of whites.

This is a protest movement against structural racism and its ugliest expression in the form of habitual murder of black people by police. In response to this outcry, conservative pundits and other racists have reflexively pointed fingers directly back at the victims.

For every unarmed black man, woman or child killed by unrestrained police officers, there’s an intellectually impoverished response when black people get visibly upset about it: What about black-on-black crime?

There was a time, in another surreal reality not so long ago, when conservative pundits reflexively grimaced at even the mention of it—and, oh, that whole notion that black people were unjustly shackled or slaughtered in advanced Western societies.

Now black-on-black crime is a thing, with famous heavy-right rags embracing it as frequently as they knock the black president. It’s a fresh, new, nasty, stick-your-tongue-out retort to shut down any justifiable complaints from grieving black communities.

Which means, sure, we can talk days on end about being black ... so long as it pertains to black people hurting other black people. Others have signed on, too, including some prominent black celebrities and half-intelligentsia feeling ignored or irrelevant as the #BlackLivesMatter banner passes them by.

"But what about black on black crime?"  You hear it every time someone wants to deflect blame away from systemic racism.  It is a disingenuous, innumerate, bullying,  misleading and imperious way to engage with a direct cry for justice.

It's also Mitch Landrieu's go-to. This recent Atlantic puff piece about the courage of his "risky" defiance of oppressive "liberal" convention attests.

It is politically (and intellectually) risky to attribute the weaknesses of a historically besieged group to the shortcomings of its culture. In the years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was an assistant secretary in the Labor Department, released his seminal report on the fragile state of black families in 1965, many conservatives came to argue that what would save African Americans was not government programs but rather the development of a culture of self-sufficiency and self-improvement. Some liberals, in contrast, came to believe that the near-exclusive conservative focus on bootstrapping (something also emphasized periodically by prominent African Americans, including President Obama and—now notoriously—Bill Cosby) was a way to absolve the country’s white majority of responsibility for the conditions that led to hardship in the first place. “Landrieu is a liberal making a conservative argument that was once a liberal argument—he’s trying to reappropriate it,” says Daryl Scott, a professor of African American history at Howard University. “He’s arguing for structural reforms and personal reforms all at the same time.”

It is "risky" to shout down at the poor and desperate that they need to fix their "culture" and be more "self-sufficient."  What a bold position Mitch has staked out for himself  It takes a real trailblazing visionary to stand up and proudly march urban social policy right back to 1994.

Paternalistic Democrats like the Landrieus and the Clintons have been at this game for decades. It's only this year, as Hillary anticipates criticism from Black Lives Matter activists, that Bill Clinton has begun to acknowledge the damage his wrongheaded "tough on crime" policies wrought on the generation who lived with their consequences.

Even Bill Clinton now says it's time to revisit those laws and policies. In the foreward to a new book on criminal justice reform, the former president concedes that " ... plainly, our nation has too many people in prison and for too long — we have overshot the mark."

Bill Clinton was still able to win reelection with the strong support of black voters. Virginia Sapiro and David Canon, in their book “Race, Gender and the Clinton Presidency,” cite the former president’s cultural fluency with African Americans, as well as his having appointed a record number of black cabinet members and vocally defending affirmative action, for his ability to keep that important bloc of Democratic voters. They also said that he counted on “structural dependence” – the notion that black voters were unlikely to vote for the GOP candidate anyway, to allow him leeway to take positions that would signal to white voters that he could stand up to black leaders. One such instance was his condemnation of the rapper Sister Souljah over comments she made two months after the L.A. riots that seemed to dismiss the slayings of some white people during the six days of violence.

If Clinton has begun to reconsider the choices he made out of political expediency during the 90s, it's worth noting that he's mostly doing so because that is politically expedient for Hillary now. Mitch, on the other hand, is still having his "Sister Souljah moment." 

Landrieu told me he understands that he would be on safer ground if he limited his analysis to, say, the impact of discriminatory housing policies born out of white-supremacist ideology. “You know what? The culture developed out of a particular history. But I can’t reverse history. I can work on the problem right in front of me. So what I’m saying is, if I knock you off a chair, that’s on me. If you’re still on the ground a week later, that’s on you.”

That's on you, says Mitch.  Why aren't you bootstrapping yourself up, welftard? Please stop whining to me about history and fancy "intellectual" concepts like structural racism and get back up on that chair I knocked you off of.

Last month, the New York Times' resident personification of white privilege, David Brooks, wrote a widely rebuked response to Ta-Nehisi Coates's book, Between the World and Me in which Brooks chastises Coates for "distorting history" and abandoning the "American Dream." 

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

Astonishing. Brooks asserts that it is not so much the centuries of struggle and injustice that "trap generations" in a cycle of destitution but rather Coates's "excessive realism" in addressing those circumstances. In other words, "If you're still on the ground, that's on you."

Mitch had already addressed this remark to Coates himself, in fact. Here is the video of a remarkable conversation between the two this summer at Mitch's second home, The Aspen Ideas Conference.



Here is a pretty good write-up of the exchange by Gambit's Alex Woodward.

The audience and Coates questioned Landrieu about the chair analogy — which was interpreted as Landrieu pointing the finger at African-Americans for cultural violence and oppression. Landrieu clarified, "If all you do is sit on the floor and you do nothing and you stay there waiting for the person to come back and pick you up, and nothing changes, the laws of nature are that you're going to wind up staying there. You've go to do something to get up."

"I don't think that's actually what's happening," Coates later said. "Black people are struggling mightily in a situation that was put upon them. ... The people who have lapsed, in terms of their debt to African-Americans as citizens, is us as a society and as a government. There's no history of a lack of responsibility among black folks."

"I did not say nor did I try to intimate that the black community is sitting on the ground doing nothing," Landrieu said. "Let's say together as a country that we want to save the lives of young African-American men and figure out how to do it, and how to talk in a way that gets us into a positive place so that we can find specific things that all of us can do on the ground."

Mitch and the crowd go around in circles like that a few times. Mitch says a thing. The audience asks, "Hey what did you mean when you said that thing?" Mitch responds, "I did not say nor did I try to intimate" that thing. He then says the thing over again.  The audience gets upset again. Mitch concludes, blah blah "both sides" need to be positive. It's fascinating to watch.

It's also incredibly frustrating to watch in the knowledge that this behavior is what is winning Mitch Landrieu applause from elites across the country for his innovative expertise in crime fighting.  Especially when his most serious initiatives in that regard are the dubious slush fund of patronage known as NOLA for Life and the even more dubious scheme to hand law enforcement duties in the French Quarter over to a quasi-private police force run by an eccentric millionaire.

Landrieu conceded, though, that Torres was the ‘‘impetus’’ that led to many of the current measures falling into place. ‘‘We have a way here of reaching out to the private sector in everything that’s happening in the city,’’ explained Landrieu, who has accepted on his city’s behalf more private grants than any mayor in the nation, including $4.2 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2011. Noting similar arrangements in areas like the city’s sewage department and its recreation programs, he said, ‘‘It’s a new government model that’s emblematic of what the rest of the country should be doing.’’

If you want to know what makes a meathead like Mitch a celebrity on the national neoliberal circuit it's in that paragraph. Mitch's enthusiasm for talking about even the most vile notion of libertarian dystopia such as a privatized police force like it's a triumph of reason is what's going to punch his ticket to post-mayoral success. Or so he thinks.

Mitch has a few options available after 2018, perhaps in tourism promotion or in Aspen making speeches on "resilience" for the next 20 years. But an even nicer plum might come in the form of a federal appointment by, say, a future President Clinton, as some sort of "urban crime czar."  But for that to be a possibility a lot of other things need to happen first.

For one thing, Hillary needs to become President which is no simple matter. For another, the city of New Orleans has to maintain the illusion that it serves as an example of law enforcement progress rather than.. well...  

By now, most New Orleanians know the broad strokes of what happened the Sunday after Hurricane Katrina when those police officers – who wrongly believed officers had been shot at the bridge – killed two innocent people, wounded four innocent people and immediately went into cover-up mode.

But it's the finer details provided by Associated Press journalist Ronnie Green – a tightly-knit family's hunt for nourishment for an ailing diabetic, two buddies horsing around and racing, the police stomping the camera of a hotel maintenance worker caught photographing the bloody bridge scene, JJ's mother growing sick with worry over his unexplained absence – that give power to Green's new book: "Shots on the Bridge: Police Violence and Cover-up in the Wake of Katrina." Published by Beacon Press, the book goes on sale, Tuesday, Aug. 18.

Not only is there a new book out this week about Danziger, but also we now know for certain that the cops convicted in the case will be granted a new trial.

Hours before this ruling was announced, Mitch Landrieu was in Washington D.C. "thanking America" for helping to rebuild New Orleans and, of course, talking about his work crusading against the "culture of violence." Notice the rhetorical flourish he's added to his act. 

The Democratic mayor said crime and racial divisions remain, not only in New Orleans but other communities, too, and that America needs to find a way to talk about those challenges.

"This year, unfortunately across, the nation and in New Orleans murder is ticking up," Landrieu said. "And with nearly 15,000 Americans lost every year to murder in this nation, a disproportionate number young African-American men; it is clear that this crisis goes well beyond New Orleans. It is a national disgrace and stopping murder should be a national priority. Black lives matter."

That line brought the mayor applause from the several hundred people at the luncheon

A full year into this national protest movement against racially motivated police violence, what Mitch Landrieu has learned is that if he appropriates the words ‪"Black Lives Matter" and uses them to talk about the murder rate in general, then a room full of Washington political and media elites will applaud.

Mitch is literally answering "Black Lives Matter" with, "Well, actually, it's about black on black crime." Conservative pundits like David Brooks are regularly excoriated for this precise dick move. But Mitch does it here... and he actually is doing something worse by twisting the words of the protest itself in such a way that they blunt its purpose.  And the important people applaud him for it.

Mitch Landrieu's star is rising among the important people. And why shouldn't it? There aren't many establishment white politicians who can willfully sanitize "Black Lives Matter" and get away with it in the current environment.  At the moment, in fact, I can name only one.

That thing about the past not being past

Politico:

For much of the post-Civil rights era, Confederate perspectives were in retreat, or so it seemed. What happened in the 1980s, however, was the establishment of magazines, such as Southern Partisan, that published reinterpretations. of recent American history through a Confederate lens. By the 1990s, publishers like Pelican Books of Gretna, Louisiana, offered new jeremiads like The South Was Right! (which boasts on its inside cover of 120,000 copies in print) and this small but active cohort began spreading their viewpoints through websites and by hosting conferences on topics such as a state’s legal right to secede. By the 2000s, supporters were able to fund the creation of research venues such as the Abbeville Institute. In these various forums, proponents rearticulated 19th century Confederate beliefs for a post-Civil Rights audience, joining tired but persistent arguments about states’ rights to articulations of laws regarding secession and the right to nullify federal legislation.

The important thing to understand about the Confederate strain in our national politics is that it is an essential component of the mainstream.  Too often it is papered over as some sort of anachronistic fringe but that description does more harm than good.  Seeing the past as merely the past slows the pace of progress.

It is precisely the lie that old battles have been "won" that allows them to go on in perpetuity through new generations ignorant of the significance of what has gone before them.

Maybe just don't be in the club

As Jason reminds us, the Oklahoma story that is buzzing around this week is hardly an exception. He digs out an older post about a local "problem frat" as an example.

I originally wrote the post during the 2010 New Orleans mayoral election after candidate and now owner of the The Advocate, John Georges, had the chutzpah to declare himself "the black candidate" in the race while simultaneously touting his role as a former Tulane DKE president on his political resume.  My hope in making the post was that Georges would exorcise the demons of his past by denouncing the fraternity's actions and history of racism.  Instead, he simply ignored the entire issue. When opposing mayoral candidate Rob Couhig pressed him about the matter on a WWL-TV candidate forum, Georges wrote it off as simple fodder from blogs that can't be trusted.

I thought it prescient to repost this story today to remind folks that institutionalized racism is still alive and thriving behind the closed doors of collegiate fraternities throughout the South

But it goes beyond just "the closed doors of collegiate fraternities."  In fact, the drawing power of campus greek organizations rests in the assumption that they feed into the elite circles of post-graduate society.  And the fortunes of  those elite circles are based on a long history of white supremacy merged with an ongoing system of political and economic oligarchy.  

In other words the whole damn system is morally corrupt and always has been. It's the point I tried to make when the Steve Scalise story was in play. And it's the thing to pay attention to here. These aren't just dumb kids acting dumb. These are sons of the club following the path that club members always follow so that one day they can be in the club too. 

Don't be in the damn club.

Tourism matters

I like to think of this as the "New Orleans Will" campaign of Selma.

The billboard was erected by the friends of Forrest, Inc., a historical group that says it meant nothing racist by placing the billboard so close to this historic Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Spokeswoman Patricia Goodwin told the News, “That billboard was put there with positive intent to ask people who come to Selma to explore and enjoy our 19th century history. Does it say anything in the Constitution where a certain faction of people cannot be offended? I’m offended by all these people walking around with their pants hanging around their knees.”

What? All we're doing is promoting the tourist industry.  Wouldn't it be better, too, if the people walking around our historic attractions would behave in a less scary way?  That's all we're trying to do. Also, pull up your pants.

#Gentrifytoday

I like it when they just come out and tell you what they're all about.

In a series of Facebook posts obtained by ThinkProgress, the senior adviser for policy and communications to Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) posted racial comments and endorsed gentrification of his neighborhood.

Benjamin Cole, a former Baptist pastor and energy industry spokesman, posted a series of videos and comments on October 13, 2013 mocking two African Americans outside his DC apartment. In the first, he compared them to animals escaping from the National Zoo engaged in “mating rituals.” That message included a video of a woman, shouting and seemingly engaged in an argument with someone not visible as she walked. In each of his posts, he used the hashtag “#gentrifytoday.”

Advocate "Voice Of God" editorialist defends Scalise

But this paper does not do political endorsements. Because principles or something. 

Anyway, this is as terrible as you might expect.

Scalise’s initial assertion that he didn’t know about EURO’s background when he spoke to the group — reportedly about tax policy — is hard to believe. We’re more encouraged by Scalise’s later, less equivocal statement of regret about accepting a speaking engagement from extremists.

Scalise certainly isn’t the first politician who’s kept company with odious characters. During his first race for governor, Mike Foster’s campaign purchased mailing lists from Duke. Despite that lapse, Foster governed well for two terms.

"Foster governed well."  From what I can tell the Advocate's criteria for good governance pretty much ends at unindicted.... although I suspect there are bonus points for whiteness. Certainly there are big points for being powerful. And Scalise was well on his way up the ladder there.

For kicks, the unsigned Voice Of God editorial offers us Jeremiah Wright as presumably a David Duke equivalent proving, again, that this paper has no moral compass.. or common sense...  whatsoever.

Perhaps the more compelling precedent concerns President Barack Obama, who, before he became president, was a member of a church pastored by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a cleric whose toxic pronouncements included the suggestion that Americans somehow prompted the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks because of aggressive foreign policy.

Ummmm, yes.  9-11 was unquestionably blowback... enacted, of course, by murderous zealots.. but  encouraged by decades of disastrous, imperialistic US foreign policy. This fact does not exonerate terrorists by any means, but it is nonetheless unassailably true. 

But just that someone would think to equate Wright with David Duke is astoundingly ignorant. 

Here is a Bill Moyers interview with Jeremiah Wright from 2008.  I would encourage the invisible person responsible for the Advocate editorial to watch the whole thing. But here is a passage where Moyers asks Wright to talk directly about the problem of a misinformed or half-informed American historical understanding.

BILL MOYERS: What is your notion of why so many Americans seem not to want to hear the full Monty - they don't want to seem to acknowledge that a nation capable of greatness is also capable of cruelty?

REVEREND WRIGHT: I think I come at that as a historian of religion. That we are miseducated as a people. Or because we're miseducated, you end up with the majority of the people not wanting to hear the truth. Because they would rather cling to what they are taught. James Washington, now a deceased church historian, says that after every revolution, the winners of that revolution write down what the revolution was about so that their children can learn it, whether it's true or not. They don't learn anything at all about the Arawak, they don't learn anything at all about the Seminole, the Cheek-Trail of Tears, the Cherokee. They don't learn anything. No, they don't learn that. What they learn is 1776, Crispus Attucks was the one black guy in there. Fight against the British, the- terrible. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal while we're holding slaves." No, keep that part out. They learn that. And they cling to that. And when you start trying to show them you only got a piece of the story, and lemme show you the rest of the story, you run into vitriolic hatred because you're desecrating our myth. You're desecrating what we hold sacred. And when you're holding sacred is a miseducational system that has not taught you the truth. I also think people don't understand condemn, D-E-M-N, D-A-M-N. They don't understand the root, the etymology of the word in terms of God condemning the practices that are against God's people. But again, what is happening is I talk a truth. Reading the scripture or the hermeneutic of a people who have-

BILL MOYERS: Hermeneutic?

REVEREND WRIGHT: Hermeneutic is an interpretation, it's the window from which you're looking is your hermeneutic. And when you don't realize that I've been framed- this whole thing has been framed through this window, there's another world out here that I'm not looking at or taking into account, it gives you a perspective that-- that is-- that is informed by and limited by your hermeneutic. Dr. James Cone put it this way. The God of the people who riding on the decks of the slave ship is not the God of the people who are riding underneath the decks as slaves in chains. If the God you're praying to, "Bless our slavery" is not the God to whom these people are praying, saying, "God, get us out of slavery." And it's not like Notre Dame playing Michigan. You're saying flip a coin; hope God blesses the winning team, no. That the perception of God who allows slavery, who allows rape, who allows misogyny, who allows sodomy, who allows murder of a people, lynching, that's not the God of the people being lynched and sodomized and raped, and carried away into a foreign country. Same thing you find in Psalm 137. That those people who are carried away into slavery have a very different concept of what it means to be the people of God than the ones who carried them away.

BILL MOYERS: And they say, "How can we sing the song of the Lord of a foreign land?"

REVEREND WRIGHT: Correct.

From the particular hermeneutic through which the official company editorial page of The Advocate views matters, Rev Wright and David Duke are pretty much the same thing.  

It's nice that they still print 7 days but maybe you really shouldn't read all of that paper. 

It was probably bad for tourism, you know

Rudy Lombard, civil rights activist and former mayoral candidate, dies at 75

He was arrested his senior year during a sit-in at the McCrory’s dime store on Canal Street on Sept. 17, 1960, which was organized by the local chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.

Lombard, who was the senior class president at Xavier and a national vice president of CORE, was joined at the whites-only lunch counter by Lanny Goldfinch, a white Tulane University student, plus Cecil Carter Jr. and the late Oretha Castle Haley, both of whom were black.

The group, known as the “CORE Four,” refused orders to leave and were arrested.

The Supreme Court, which reviewed the case even though New Orleans had no official segregation ordinances for stores, tossed out their criminal mischief arrests in 1963 in the case of Lombard v. Louisiana.

Days before the arrests, Mayor Chep Morrison had made a pro-segregation statement that banned such protests.

“I have today directed the superintendent of police that no additional sit-in demonstrations ... will be permitted ... regardless of the avowed purpose or intent of the participants,” Morrison said in a statement released Sept. 13, 1960, following a similar sit-in at a nearby Woolworth store. “It is my determination that the community interest, the public safety and the economic welfare of this city require that such demonstrations cease and that henceforth they be prohibited by the police department.”

“These convictions, commanded as they were by the voice of the state directing segregated service at the restaurant, cannot stand,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court’s decision.

You can just hear the important people talking about how bad such disruptions might be for the city's image and brand or whatever.  It doesn't really take much imagination.  A few weeks ago a protest against police brutality somewhat distracted the presentation of a corporate-sponsored light show at Gallier Hall.  You don't have to go too far into the comments to that story before you find,

This is an embarrassment for our city as many tourists had to leave their cabs to walk to their locations.  Then to view cops with he hands in their pockets doing nothing for over an hour as well. I would like to know why the cops did nothing as they blocked traffic by laying in the street last night.  Is this how they will react going forward?

According to the story, one onlooker suggested that the police shoot the protesters.   Presumably this would have been helpful to the tourists as well.  
 

This is who they are

Mentioned this last week but let me pull this Jarvis DeBerry quote again. It captures perfectly what conservatives (I include President Obama among them, btw) are all about.

Leading America requires declaring its goodness. And not just that. Leading America requires declaring that America always has been good, that it always has treasured the law. Never mind that the law failed to prohibit the destruction of one people or the enslavement of another.

Any serious examination of our problems constitutes a failure. No one is accountable. Nothing ever gets resolved and there is never any actual justice because, "The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome," and that's all anyone ever need know.

United States of nostalgia

This is from a Jarvis DeBerry column last week.  He's writing about his disappointment in the President's remarks about Ferguson.  But really this is a lament about the dumb nature of the job of being President.

"First and foremost," the president said, "we are a nation built on the rule of law."
 
You could make a stronger case that this nation was built on stolen land; that it was built with stolen labor; that the descendants of those who had their labor stolen are yet struggling to have their humanity recognized.

You could, but the president of the United States cannot.  Leading America requires declaring its goodness. And not just that. Leading America requires declaring that America always has been good, that it always has treasured the law. Never mind that the law failed to prohibit the destruction of one people or the enslavement of another.

DeBerry's thoughts echo those of Ta-Nehisi Coates who wrote this in The Atlantic.

In the case of Michael Brown, this is more disappointing than enraging. The genre of Obama race speeches has always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, "You wear the mask."

In 2008, Barack Obama's task was to capture the presidency of a country which historically has despised the community from which he hails. This was no mean feat. But more importantly, it was not unprecedented. And just as Léon Blum's prime ministership did not lead to a post-anti-Semitic France, Barack Obama's presidency should never have been expected to lead to a post-racist America. As it happens, there is nothing about a congenitally racist country that necessarily prevents an individual leader hailing from the pariah class. The office does not care where the leader originates, so long as the leader ultimately speaks for the state. On Monday night, watching Obama both be black and speak for the state was torturous. One got the sense of a man fatigued by people demanding he say something both eminently profound and only partially true. This must be tiring.

It is beyond reasonable expectation that the President would speak "for the state" and also speak truthfully.  It is beyond reasonable expectation that the President would tell us anything other than a comforting lie.

Why don't we expect better of our leaders? It's not a new question.  In his new book (which I've been talking a lot about, I know), Rick Perlstein looks at the last time Americans seriously asked it of themselves. The Invisible Bridge covers the mid-70s period dominated by Watergate and the gradual rise of Ronald Reagan from fringe nut to Presidential contender.

Among Perlstein's more intriguing themes is the country's yearning for nostalgia as a means of escape from the difficult questions of the day.  When confronted with harsh questions about corruption and injustice in American life, the public gravitates toward the most comforting lie.  In Perlstein's telling, voters seek a kind of comfort... a belief in their essential goodness.. first from Jimmy Carter but later in more colorful, heroic fashion from Reagan.  

Here is an interview with Perlstein conducted by Thomas Frank where they talk a little bit about this.  It's difficult to read this book and not find multiple parallels between that time and ours both in the political and popular cultures.  Here's a passage where they talk about pop culture retro fetishes.

Well. So the culture of nostalgia in the ’70s — I mean, everything from “Happy Days” going on the air in 1975 to Bette Midler having a huge hit with the “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,” to all these restaurants like the Ground Round and Shakey’s that kind of promise this 19th century kind of…

Yes. The vogue for the 1890s—what was up with that?

…vaudeville experience. Yeah. Or “The Sting” which is about the 30s but has music from the 1890s. And then, the signal example being “American Graffiti,” which literally, the tagline of the movie was: “Where were you in ’62?” And invites people to kind of imaginatively place themselves before the 60s happens. Which was part of the huge appeal of the POWs. This idea that they had somehow skipped the 60s. And they are these perfect innocents. So, yeah, they were like these Rip Van Winkles. They devote a whole hour of the “Today Show” to explaining to the POWs what had happened in their absence. But we’re the POWs. We want to be them. We want to miss the 60s.

Now, where the disaster rhetoric and the nostalgia rhetoric come together most profoundly is something around which I organized an entire chapter which is this fascinating movie which actually did better box office than “Gone With the Wind” — “The Exorcist.”

What year was that?

’74, January of ’74, in which people are waiting in lines around the block in the middle of this really vicious winter in New York. You have this symbol of our perfect innocence, our daughters, our young daughters, who are basically possessed by demons, which of course was happening all the time. This was the winter of Patty Hearst.

And to make a long story short, the plot of the movie is that science and modernity avails us nothing to fight these demons. If you remember, there’s this kind of faithless priest who is a psychologist, and the mom takes the daughter to all these doctors who have all these fancy machines and they’re not able to do anything. And finally what restores her to sanity is this ancient orthodox priest, this medieval rite. The exorcism. And then the last scene is really striking, because you have the mom, who I’ve heard is based on Shirley MacLaine, who is this kind of liberated, pants-wearing Hollywood liberal actress. And her daughter, in the last reel when she’s exorcized, she hugs the priest who has found his faith again, the young priest, and mother and daughter are wearing outfits that make them look like Jackie Kennedy in 1962.

Again the throwback.

The throwback. So again, you have the disaster being redeemed by the nostalgia. Which is Ronald Reagan.

Anyway I don't want to reproduce the whole thing here but there is this last exchange which really brings the whole thing home.

Is anyone nostalgic for the ’70s?

I am. And for the following reason: If you read my preface, I explain that Americans at the level of popular culture, at the level of grassroots politics, were thinking very hard about what it would mean to have a country they didn’t believe was God’s chosen nation. What would it mean to not be the world’s policeman? What would it mean to conserve our resources? What would it mean to not treat our presidents as if they were kings? That was happening! And the tragedy of Ronald Reagan most profoundly wasn’t policy — although that was tragic enough — but it was robbing America of that conversation. Every time a politician stands before a microphone and utters this useless, pathetic cliche that America is the greatest country ever to exist, he’s basically wiping away the possibility that we can really think critically about our problems and our prospects. And to me, that’s tragic.

As long as we're willing to accept the comforting lie, as long as we believe that, as Deberry puts it, "leading America requires declaring that America always has been good, that it always has treasured the law," our political apparatus is never going to allow us to think critically about our problems.

Racism still happening

But, you know, Mary Landrieu was wrong to say so.

African-American families are often steered away from the opportunity to rent in more affluent neighborhoods in New Orleans, according to a report released Thursday (Nov. 6) by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center.

The nonprofit sent two undercover "mystery shoppers," one black and one white with matching incomes, careers and rental histories, to Lakeview, East Carrollton, and Uptown near Audubon Park.

They attempted to view or apply for 50 apartments and 44 percent of the time the black tester was denied the opportunity to rent or were treated unfairly, according to the report.

Hardly shocking that this should go on in a city where gentrification is pretty much official city development policy, though. 

There's a realtors' convention in town this week, by the way. Maybe we can ask some of them about redlining.  Although, looks like they're already too busy with their "previtalization" party.

Update: Had trouble finding the report at the GNOFHA site earlier. Here it is.