Horrible

Mother's Day second-line shooting on Frenchmen Street leaves about 12 people injured

Just trying to enjoy a Sunday afternoon.

Update: By now I'm sure most people are aware Deb Cotton was among the 19(!) people injured.   I'm sure she won't want this to be a story about her.  But it is one that she has been closely familiar with for a while.  I can't think of any individual whose work has done more to promote and celebrate the current generation of New Orleans backstreet parading culture than Deb has with her writing and videography. She very recently launched a new magazine site focused on music and street culture.

By now, also, I'm sure we're all aware that this story has made news around the whole world today.   I'm a little puzzled as to why that is, exactly, although the bizarre phrasing of this AP report provides a hint.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Gunmen opened fire on dozens of people marching in a neighborhood Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans on Sunday, wounding at least 19 people, police said.

The FBI said the shooting appeared to be “street violence” and wasn’t linked to terrorism.

Nobody was worried some sort of international plot was at work but thanks for putting us at ease about that, I guess.

Not that anyone is at ease. Especially not the Mayor and Chief of Police now that violent crime in New Orleans is back in the international headlines. Here are some videos of them saying tough guy things. Expect some sort of symbolic "action" within the next few days.  Maybe more "NOLA4Life" ads.

Or worse, they could end up blaming the parades themselves instead of the actual crime problem.  Deb wrote about this tendency a few years ago for Gambit.

In response to shootings that occurred at second lines in '06, Superintendent Riley raised social aid and pleasure club parade permits to six times their pre-storm amount of $1,200, a fee hike that was not applied to White Mardi Gras clubs even though similar incidences of shooting have occured during their parades such as the Muses parade in ’04, the Bacchus parade in ’07, and the Krewe of Crescent City parade in ’09. The ACLU fought and won several cases on behalf of the Social Aid and Pleasure Club Task Force and parade permits for the SAPCs were eventually reduced to $1,985.

The Fox news article is not an isolated incident of a bias reporter getting it wrong. The local mainstream media in New Orleans has a long history of racial bias against the Black community in general and second line culture in specific. One would think that weekly parades which tie up traffic in large swatches of the city for four hours at a time would at the very least merit local media announcements of parade routes and times. With the exception of this blog, which I published on Nola.com before migrating it here to Gambit online, the local media by and large ignores social aid and pleasure club culture - except in instances when it attempts to equate second line parades with lawlessness. In a city that has a majority Black population, it begs the question of motivation behind the press’ wholesale omission in coverage of a century old African American tradition that hosts annual half day parades every Sunday for nine months out of the year. The fact that these events rarely get positive coverage in the mainstream media is consistent with the attitude of neglect and ostracism that catalyzed these benevolent societies back in the 19th century with their mission of providing assistance and resources to the Black community during segregation.

Upperdate: More from Gambit here. It looks like  they're planning to organize a benefit for the victims of today's shootings.