by Tom Piazza
If we say we don’t help New Orleans, then what do we do when those silly people in San Francisco get destroyed again by an earthquake? Do we tell them, “Sorry, you were pretty dumb to build on a fault line”? Do we say the same thing to St. Louis and Memphis, both of which are on or near the New Madrid fault? What do we say when Los Angeles is hit by an earthquake, or is ravaged by wildfires and mudslides? Or when Mississippi and Missouri and Iowa flood again the way they did in 1993? Or to Florida, when hurricanes strike there, or to New York and Washington, D.C., if, God forbid, they or some other city becomes a target for a terrorist attack. Do we say, “Too bad for you—you were too stupid to live in Medford”?
I know this sounds sarcastic, and I guess it is, but I have heard far too many people advance this attitude, which to me sounds as if they are just writing off the “United” part of the United States. To paraphrase Ben Franklin (I think)—we must all hang together or we will certainly hang separately. Plus, New Orleans is one of the most important American cities, culturally, historically, and economically—the site of the signing of the Louisiana Purchase, birthplace of jazz music, location of one of the great treasure houses of vernacular American architecture . . . We go to great lengths, or we used to, to protect our cultural patrimony. We need to continue to do that, it seems to me, and New Orleans is the main place we should be focusing our efforts right now.
Arlington, Virginia: Certainly, it is the poor and disadvantaged segment of New Orleans’s population that has suffered worst thanks to Katrina. Are they best served, however, by efforts to rebuild and return, rather than resettling where they are? Are they more likely to escape poverty in a new community than if they return to N.O., which will certainly be in difficult circumstances through the near future, no matter how much renovation is undertaken? Should we be directing our public resources to help the resettlement effort rather than hoping for rebuilding?
TP: This is a very important question, with profound implications. The starting place for an answer is this: We need to begin by asking the displaced residents themselves what they need, and what they want. We need to have a much better and more honest and more open dialogue with New Orleans’s scattered population than we have managed to have so far.
Many of those who are displaced may well decide that they have found themselves in a better situation than that in which they had lived before the storm. Many others may decide that the most important thing to them is to return to New Orleans, to the traditions and culture that they knew, to whatever extent that culture and those traditions can be revived. In either case, the effort should be aimed at listening, with respect, to what they say, and then helping them, within reasonable bounds, to achieve their goals, rather than imposing a kind of abstract decision on them from above, arrived at by experts who have no true understanding of the residents’ original milieu.
It seems to me that this is the necessary starting point for any conversation about this question, and the only way for people who have already suffered close to the worst things that a human can suffer to be able to rebuild their lives with dignity.
And one more thing in response to that question. My strong feeling is that all people who want to return to New Orleans, no matter who they are, should be able to come back, and a place actively made for them. At the same time, the questioner has a point: The fate of those who were displaced needs to be addressed more seriously as well. As most of you probably know, those with the fewest resources are in many cases hanging on by the skin of their thumbs in hotels across the country, waiting for FEMA to pull the plug on them. I don’t know what the answer is to this situation, but the fact that no one else seems to know, either, scares me.
Washington, D.C.: I’m prone to agreeing with you that “New Orleans is one of the most important American cities, culturally, historically, and economically,” but I’d like to hear your thoughts on why this is so. Thank you.
TP: Anyone who is affected by the import and export of grain, textiles, hard or dry goods of any sort, electronics, automobiles—which is to say anyone in the U.S.—depends on the health of New Orleans as a port. Likewise seafood, especially shellfish. For that matter, anyone who uses petroleum products should recognize the importance of New Orleans, and Louisiana in general, to the supply of oil on which we depend for heat and mobility—not just imports through the Port of New Orleans but the offshore rigs miles out that are supported by New Orleans’s economic and technical infrastructure.
From a cultural standpoint . . . it is hard for me to get that into a small space. It took me more than one hundred and sixty pages to get it into Why New Orleans Matters! But I will say this: Beyond just being the birthplace of jazz, which is, after all, a fact of its past, New Orleans is today, still, one of the most remarkable cultural ecosystems in the world. The interaction, not just historically but in real time, in the present, between the deep cultural strains of France, Spain, Africa, the Caribbean, Italy, Germany, Croatia, Cape Verde, Ireland, and so many other cultures, has produced a music—many musics, as I say in the book—a cuisine, a style of dance, of architecture, of humor, of celebration, and of mourning that, taken collectively, is one of the glories of human history.
The side of New Orleans seen by the casual tourist during a weekend spent on Bourbon Street is not New Orleans, although it is a face of New Orleans. New Orleans is deep, and it must live, or something truly irreplaceable will be lost forever.
Omaha, Nebraska: I hear some people say things like, “They shouldn’t live there; it’s not our problem. Why should we pay?” Can you help me with a concise response to this?
TP: Hi, Omaha. I hope I addressed this in a previous answer. Basically it boils down to the Golden Rule, I suppose.
From the Washington Post online, February 2006
An Exchange of Letters About Why New Orleans Matters
Here, as promised earlier, is an exchange of letters from May 2006, about the state of New Orleans. It was, like many others I received, occasioned by the publication of my book Why New Orleans Matters. For legal reasons, I am able to print only the gist of my correspondent’s remarks, with a handful of quotes included to give a flavor of the letter’s tone.
My correspondent was a physician who had relocated from New Orleans to another state well before Hurricane Katrina. He was apparently a cultured and affluent man, articulate and even at times eloquent in his remarks. He began the letter by giving me his own personal background, which included medical work with some of the New Orleans’s poorest residents when he lived in the city, his frequent post-Katrina visits to New Orleans, the fact that he continues to ride in one of the city’s most prestigious Mardi Gras krewes, and his taste for Southern music, fine cuisine, and the many “architectural gems” to be found in New Orleans. After telling me how much he enjoyed my descriptions of the city’s “sights, sounds, and smells,” he got down to business by claiming, in essence, that he found my book naïve and wrongheaded.
“I think it is inappropriate,” he began,
and a bit condescending, primarily to the black underclass, to suggest that the best thing for the city would be if everything and everyone came back the way it was. Do you realize the level of poverty that existed in New Orleans? Do you realize the misery that created? Generations of people were stuck in places like the Lower Ninth Ward with no idea how or if they could ever get out. Many barely knew that there was a better existence available.
He inventoried many causes of the city’s pre-Katrina problems, as he saw them: a “relaxed work ethic”; prejudice; malfeasance; political manipulation carried out first by white city officials and then, “after 1960 or so,” by mainly black city officials; a notoriously bad public school system; systemic inefficiency and corruption at all levels; population loss; and economic depression.
He went on to criticize my book’s criticism of the governmental response to the disaster, including my insistence that strong efforts be made to bring back as many of the city’s residents, including the poore
st ones, as wanted to return. Tens of thousands of those poorer residents were stuck hundreds or thousands of miles away from home in strange surroundings among people with whom they had little or nothing in common. Some did not want to return to New Orleans; many others were desperate to come back.
When the images of thousands of mostly black citizens stranded and suffering in New Orleans were shown over and over on TV in the days after the storm, and then in the months afterward the absence of rebuilding efforts by the government, what did you see? I suspect you saw a government that had broken its promises. What people in most other parts of the country saw was a group of people who were for the most part physically capable of evacuating before the storm, but had not done so. They then saw those people evacuated at government expense to situations that were usually safer and more comfortable than the homes they had previously been living in. And they saw a local government that was inept at best, if not truly making things worse. In other words, what was seen was a group of people who refused to take responsibility for themselves, and a local government that encouraged that.
He acknowledged that many of the city’s poorest residents took pleasure in “simple expressions of life—food, music, etc.,” and that the rest of society enjoyed the “expressions” that often originated at the bottom of the city’s social ladder. And yet . . .
Is it not condescending to suggest that those people would be better off returning to the poverty of a permanent urban underclass so they can continue to try to “amuse” themselves for our benefit? Would it not be better for them to finally have the opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their children in another location that didn’t celebrate corruption and irresponsibility?
On this apparently optimistic note, he sketched out his vision of the silver lining that Katrina offered, if only we would recognize it and act on it.
Perhaps local government in New Orleans will improve without the burden of the underclass to deal with. New Orleans could become not another Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but perhaps Charleston, Jamestown, or Savannah? In other words, perhaps New Orleans will become a kind of “museum” town, featuring a world-class university in Tulane, lots of great architecture in Uptown and the French Quarter, and not much else. Would that be so bad?
He closed by reaffirming how much he really did enjoy reading Why New Orleans Matters, promising to look for more of my writing, expressing optimism about New Orleans’s future, and wishing me good luck.
On its face, it may seem a perfectly reasonable letter, and yet it was not the first time I had seen a number of the rhetorical moves this writer had made. They were, in fact, all too familiar, even at that early date, and I wrote the response that follows.
Dear Mr. ———,
Thank you for your letter and for your kind words about my writing. It’s always good to hear from a reader whose musical tastes “wander between Memphis and New Orleans.” Of course mine do, too; sometimes they even end up in Nashville for a while.
I will try and respond to your points as candidly as possible, since you have felt free to be candid with me about your take on the questions you raise. I’ll take the time because you like music and because you wished me good luck. But I do not like your letter, and I will do my best to tell you why.
I get a lot of mail from all over the place, and I talk to a lot of people. I notice that those who want to see New Orleans turn into another Savannah or Charleston almost always present this desire as being for the good of the poor who are being displaced from their homes. They realize there is something not quite right, certainly not Christian, about the desire to get rid of the inconvenient, problematic poor (or the “burden of the underclass,” as you put it in your note), so they need to cloak their agenda in the guise of generosity. Years ago, I remember that David Duke advocated euthanizing severely handicapped people, claiming that it was for their own good, and that they themselves would have wanted it that way. Worlds apart, maybe, but still this doesn’t feel all that different to me.
Not, of course, that I see your thinking as having anything in common with David Duke’s—not with your defense of the “black underclass” against my “condescension” and your implication that I am ignorant of the poverty and ignorance in which the faceless members of the underclass dwell. But I’m afraid that in your zeal to defend the underclass you may have forgotten about large parts of my book (I hope you didn’t skip them!). You ask whether I “realize the level of poverty that existed in New Orleans . . . the misery that created”; I would point you to pages seventy-five to ninety-five of Why New Orleans Matters, in which I discuss it, along with the official corruption and other urban ills you raise in your letter. I never suggest that “the best thing for the city would be if everything and everyone came back the way it was,” nor did I suggest that “those people would be better off returning to the poverty of a permanent urban underclass so they can continue to try to ‘amuse’ themselves for our benefit.” This is a distortion of my argument. I would like them to be able to return, if they choose to do so, to a city capable of making a commitment to addressing these problems instead of just wanting them to disappear.
I have lived in New Orleans for eleven and a half years. I have spent a lot of time at street level, in many different neighborhoods of the city. I’ve been in houses with no doors, in conditions that I had previously seen only in San Juan and Dakar. I have seen things that I never could have imagined. I have also been in houses in the poorest neighborhoods where the owners have made warm, inviting, and soulful lives and environments for themselves and their families. I have known people who have been killed over nothing, and I know people who spend their lives helping others, even though they themselves have very few material resources. As you must know from your medical work among the city’s poor, the people not just of the Ninth Ward but the Seventh Ward and Central City and all the rest represent the full range of humanity—intelligent, not intelligent, generous, selfish, well-read, illiterate, thoughtful, impulsive, devious, straightforward, lazy, and hardworking. They are not susceptible of easy generalization.
So, an axiom: We are talking about human beings. Although neither I nor any decent person can look on the kind of poverty that has existed in some parts of New Orleans and think it is a good thing, anybody who actually spends time in those neighborhoods will see that they are not simply pits of misery. The Lower Ninth Ward, since that is the example you use, consisted mainly of working people. This is a fact, not an opinion. Poor for the most part, yes, but in most cases hardworking, mostly homeowners, and also people who, as I say in the book, have found a way to express an extraordinarily vibrant sense of life in music, cuisine, humor, speech, and other less tangible ways. Crime? Yes. Illiteracy? Tell me about it. Are these problems to work on? Surely, and people have been saying this for years. But the point is that being poor and born into a partly hostile environment with diminished opportunity does not disqualify anyone from being a complex human being with a connection to their home and neighborhood, and not just a figure in a set of statistics.
Secondly, and stemming from this: Since these people are recognizably human, even if they are operating under tremendous disadvantages, then presumably they should be granted the dignity of making decisions for themselves. At least their desires and aspirations and preferences should be taken into account in the decisions others make about their lives. Those displaced New Orleanians who feel that they will have a better chance at a new life, more opportunity, better schools for their children, etc., outside New Orleans should be helped in their decision to try and better their lot in that way. But those who decide that the culture and the life that they have known, in many cases, for generations—their house that they or their father built and furnished, their neighborhood, the familiar food and surroundings—is important to them should be helped in their attempt to come back and build a better life here in New Orleans. They surely have as much right to be here as the developers who would like to turn the city into
another Charleston.
You raise the question, as many have, of why so many people did not evacuate. You front-load it with the notion that most of them were “physically capable” of doing so, and then claim that this is evidence that they “refused to take responsibility for themselves.” The extraordinarily complex and multifarious reasons why all kinds of people—white, black, brown, poor, working-class, and otherwise—did not leave town for the storm have been well documented and discussed at great length and are, in any case, not all that hard to figure out.
I realize that it is not automatic for people who have money and at least one car to imagine that it might be difficult for people who don’t own a car and who rely on public transportation—who barely make enough money to survive and who are often taking care of disabled or elderly family members as well as children—to pack up the whole gang a couple of times every hurricane season, find their way out of town, pay for a hotel room for a couple of nights, pay for the family to eat every meal out someplace, pay for gas (if they do have a car), and all the rest—especially when it turns out to be a false alarm 95 percent of the time. There is simply no excuse for not trying to imagine just how difficult that is for people before calling them irresponsible. It doesn’t take all that much effort.
You say you suspect that when I watched these people’s lives fall apart around them that I saw a government that had broken its promises. Yeah, in fact, I did. By “promises” I assume you mean things like the assumption that the federally mandated and constructed levee system would be built to reasonable specifications and then maintained? Or like the promise that there would be fallback plans for communications for police and fire departments in the case of a repeatedly predicted disaster? Or do you mean like the promise that there would be transportation provided for people who couldn’t otherwise get to the shelters of last resort? Or the quaint notion that, once they got there, United States citizens would not have to sit in unspeakably filthy conditions with no water or food or medical care or other supplies for five days in the sweltering heat in a disaster area while the president of the United States sat around with his thumb up his ass? You ask what I saw—what, exactly, did you see when you looked at all this?
