the mayor’s ‘race’
The permutations of race in this election remind me of those pear-shaped Russian dolls that fit one inside the other, except that in this case each layer of the doll would be a different ethnicity.
Ok, so let me see if I have this right: our light-skinned black mayor who campaigned as a businessman (business being a white power structure in New Orleans) in the last election and won via the white vote is now running against a white career politician (city government being a black power structure here) who has strong support of black voters. Layer two: This is a big deal because supposedly we haven’t had a white mayor since Mitch’s father, Moon Landrieu, but that’s counting Mayor Sidney Bartholemy who was supposed to be black but is whiter than I am.
A third layer: Ray Nagin has always sided with big business and developers against poor black people. He’s screwed over the lower 9th ward time and time again, yet they showed up in droves to vote for him. Mitch Landrieu has more progressive politics, but just got the endorsement of Foreman, the most right-leaning of the three major candidates (also a businessman and white). So rich white people Uptown are going to vote for Landrieu even though he embodies policies they dislike to beat the man who dared to call this a chocolate city, and poor black people are going to vote for the man who is giving away their neighborhoods to developers and letting them languish without services because they know that they are being electorally disenfranchised again.
A fourth layer: Nagin’s ‘Chocolate City’ speech was made at the official city-sanctioned MLK day parade, which was in the business district, because Ray Nagin had chosen to abandon the traditional route which started in the Lower 9th ward. How’s that for a symbolic gesture? However, the march that was held in the lower 9th was organized by local vanguardist white activists and largely attended by out-of-town white activists (mostly brought in by the Common Ground collective), which annoyed both locals of all colors on the parade route and the few dozen outnumbered black people who attended. Incidentally, city council member Cynthia Willard-Lewis showed up to make a speech and drive off like the amateur thespian that she is but Charmaine Marchand and Oliver Thomas actually walked the route.
And then there is the whole matter of our construction of race. This city has a long history of racial intermixing, but ever since Jim Crow all those people who look even vaguely African-american are deemed black. So we have Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman, who self-identifies as Creole, Cynthia Willard-Lewis, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, Marlin Gusman, and a host of other light-skinned and mixed-blood “blacks†running city government, and I call them black in my newscast because that’s the correct usage of the word and I don’t have time to explain (which would make for a weird news story).
It would be a really radical thing if we elected a dark-skinned black, someone like Reverend Tom Watson, but he has arisen from a local black power structure, churches. And because of that he scares white liberals and some white radicals, myself included. Sorry- I know as a good radical I was supposed to support the most progressive black candidate, but religion in government scares me.
I recall an argument that I had with a gentrifier in my neighborhood in January who said she didn’t care about race, she just wanted good government. And I now find myself wishing that it was that easy, that we could put race aside and focus on policy. The problem is, we can’t, and living in New Orleans reminds me how impossibly far we are from that day.