We need to kill the term "culture bearer"

I cringe every time I see it used. A "culture bearer" is not some separate class of person.  We're all culture bearers. All of us here participating in society together, whether we like it or not, are creating a culture together. Right now it's not a particularly healthy culture. In part this is because of our failure to understand what is happening and to whom. What's happening in Treme is a crime. But it's not just something happening to "culture bearers." It's happening to all of us.

Like the second lines that pass through the neighborhood, those who used to call Tremé home say the culture has become transient. Leaving it with no sense of community.

“All the juice, or the oxygen rather, has been sucked out of the room,” says Al Jackson, owner of the Tremé Petit Jazz Museum. “The culture, oxygen, the children, the raison d’etre that we once woke up in the morning and lived for. It’s gone.”

Jazz Vocalist John Boutté says the community was effervescent. You could hear kids playing and laughing, you’d see people talking on the steps and everyone said hello.
Today, Boutté believes he’ll never see that part of Tremé again.

“The folks aren’t there anymore and unless you bring those people back, you’ll never have that part of Tremé again,” Boutté said.

What's happened to Treme is a crime of capitalism. It is the same crime that is happening to every neighborhood to some degree. It is the same crime that is happening to most cities.  Land is hoarded by real estate speculators. Housing prices and rents are artificially inflated. Wages and benefits are stagnant for most working class people so they can no longer keep up with the escalating cost of living. People take on second jobs or part time jobs or jobs where schedules are unpredictable so their time for leisure (or "creative labor" if you prefer the more commodified term) is limited. 

Meanwhile, the aforesaid real estate speculation encourages the city to crack down on institutions and mores that might disrupt profits such as substandard lawn maintenance, corner bars, and outdoor musical performance. So not only is time for creative leisure reduced but so are the physical spaces where it formerly flourished are also taken away. Those that remain are under increasingly intrusive police surveillance which further intrudes on our social space to think and act creatively.  These are sinister processes meant to commodify basic human freedom.  Everyone has the right to be creative. Everyone has the right to spend their leisure time appreciating or conversing with, the fruits of that creativity. It is our collective creative leisure, the act of creating but also just enjoying what others create that generates authentic "creative culture." 

Despite what the oligarchs who control the extractive tourism economy would have us believe, that isn't something they can put that in a bottle and sell in a shop. They can't manufacture it at New Orleans & Co. no matter how much public money the city dumps into their hands. "Culture bearer" is a term they encourage, though, because it conjures a specific product they're already primed to profit from. It isolates a bland branded and frozen version of New Orleans Culture and limits it to something they can control.

We all bear the culture. It is ours to share, to replicate, to elaborate on, and, most crucially, to evolve. But we can't do that when the marketers, hoteliers, land speculators and the homeowners association product who is currently our mayor conspire to steal what we've already created and deny our right to continue as before.  That's what's happened to Treme. And it's going to keep happening until we recognize that a threat against a "culture bearer" is a threat against us all.  A good way to start is to dispense with using that term at all anymore.