(No, I am not
referring to a Matchbox 20 song, apologies if that is what you are now
singing.)
In thinking of
where I'll be in 12hours, and as an Urban Studies student that will spend the
weekend between the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard's Parish, I've been
thinking of how New Orleans reacted after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
There is a clip
from Tim Wise on white privilege and its mechanism of ‘divide and conquer.’ The
part I find the most relevant to my topic is the part in which he discusses the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in St. Bernard Parish, in which the local
working class whites failed to recognize they had more in common with the local
working class blacks than they did with the white politicians who failed to
protect their interest.
I'm sure some of
you may have already viewed this in one class or another but here is the clip:
(the whole clip is great but feel free to fast-forward to 6:05):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Xe1kX7Wsc
The fact that the
Parrish Council meeting passed an ordinance saying that you can't rent property
in St. Bernard to anyone who wasn't a blood relative was too much for me to
understand at the time. I simply could not wrap my mind around this ordinance.
Yes, there were repercussions afterwards. More cases have been opened in
response, but we are still bringing up similar discussion of race relations in
the United States. Many have written posts on the response of the Treyvon
Martin, which as we all know received not only national coverage but also sparked
interest of other countries. So what happens to the local ordinances, laws, and
everyday interactions? It’s clear that race relations in the US are not improving,
but we get such limited exposure, how are we to measure where we are today?
Here is the
Matchbox 20 video just in case you actually want to hear the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9vOwc-6t-8
I very much enjoyed the attached video. I had not seen it or even heard about this ordinance. Granted, I was a lot younger then and living about an hour and half away, but a quick Google search on the St. Bernard Parish ordinance led me to find local articles regarding their discrimination allegations on trial as recent as 2011. It seems there were more bans and moratoriums aimed at preventing property owners and firms from leasing and building family units that were probably going to be lived in by members of the growing African American population. I am also intrigued as to what happens to local laws and wonder why isolated events like Trayvon Martin’s death continue to hold the public’s rapt attention for so long while even nearby residences know nothing about local councils’ and districts’ current attempts of discrimination. I know “bad news sells,” but isn’t this blatant bias bad news too? Limited exposure is most definitely part of the problem.
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