Quick! Close your eyes and think of New Orleans. What comes to mind? Mardi Gras beads? Beignets and café au lait? What about the legacy of racism left behind after slavery, or the devastation following Hurricane Katrina?
I went to New Orleans for Spring Break this year and found that, while the tourism industry continues to thrive, much of New Orleans’ complex history is overlooked, and what absolutely has to be discussed is often brushed over and whitewashed.
The only mention of Katrina we observed was during a comprehensive tour of the city. Our guide showed us houses on stilts 10 to 15 feet in the air – raised as high as the water once reached to guarantee insurance coverage in the event of a future flood – as well as houses with the original spray paint left by FEMA to notify families and neighbors of deaths on the property. He even drove us to the third levy that broke to show how high the water line was compared to the ground of the Ninth Ward.
I was impressed with the apparent sincerity until he brought up his experience with the hurricane, and stated, drawing laughs, that his “mama didn’t raise no fool,” and he left town for the week to escape the storm. Murmurs in the crowd showed the audience shared his opinion, that staying in town despite the warning of an impending hurricane would be foolish.
What the guide and tourists failed to acknowledge was the reason so many Ninth Ward residents may have stayed: financial insecurity as a result of centuries-long systemic racism and economic inequality. Not everyone can afford to take off work for a week to get out of town. Not everyone has family nearby with whom they can stay while they wait out the storm – and what if all of your family members live in the Ninth Ward, as well? Not all Ninth Ward residents can afford to stay at a hotel for an indeterminate amount of time, until things clear up. Many do not have access to the necessary transportation to leave, even if they have somewhere to go.
What put this group of people in such a disadvantaged situation that over a decade later they are still recovering from a hurricane?
Part of it can be attributed to the history of slavery, and the following years of racial hierarchy. On a tour of a plantation, we heard about the duration and severity of slavery in Louisiana. We learned that brutal conditions lasted long after slavery was abolished in 1865. In fact, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves; the North granted exceptions to certain areas, including much of Louisiana, whose slaves would be useful to Union Soldiers. That’s right – the side fighting to end slavery kept and used slaves to their own advantage.
The government’s apathy for black lives at this time is just the beginning of the problem. Even after the war, it took years for slaves to actually be notified that they were free. And once they were notified, because of the conditions they faced under slavery, most did not have the education, financial resources, or social networks to find jobs from their former plantations, so they continued to work for company store credit. As generations passed, this evolved into a sharecropping system, where the workers were still effectively powerless at the hands of their managers.
Centuries of systemic racism contribute to the disadvantage the urban poor in New Orleans face today, and the response of outsiders is often incredulous and unsympathetic, or simply disinterested.
A cocktail called the Hurricane is sold at nearly every restaurant and bar in New Orleans, while people are still struggling to recover from the most devastating hurricane to hit the U.S. in nearly a century. People working in the tourism industry rarely bring up Katrina, and tourists seem not to want to learn about it either, but rather listen to horror stories with the sick fascination typically reserved for rubberneckers watching emergency responders at the scene of a car crash.
It is remarkable to me that people can happily bar-hop on Bourbon Street, sipping on Hurricanes, turning their noses up to homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks, completely oblivious to the gentrification surrounding them.
The juxtaposition of a tourism industry that thrives off of sensationalizing racial strife, without benefiting those suffering from it, seems to be lost on so many visitors to New Orleans. While I think it is perfectly acceptable to partake in tourist staples, the experience of New Orleans is lost without understanding its historical context.
The same can be said for any city.
