I certainly have to ask what has love to do with it when I read about the white South African farmer who has been given a life sentence for killing a black South African and feeding his body to lions, and then hear a handful of black and white South African students insist that the crime was not necessarily racially motivated. Such postmodern deconstruction of death unsettles me, because such postmodern deconstructive attitudes are championed in various circles of American higher education. How do such attitudes color love or its opposite? How powerfully active are such attitudes in the discussions and plans to reconstruct life in New Orleans and other sites devastated by our recent hurricanes; in the covert forums conducted by private conservative and liberal (or gliberal, to use Ishmael Reed's word from years past) foundations and semi-public agencies of government?

 Conversations with Kind Friends /  Dollar Day--Katrina Klap (Audio-Video)

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Racism: A History, the 2007 BBC 3-part documentary explores the impact of racism on a global scale. It was part of the season of programs on the BBC marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. It's divided into 3 parts.

The first, The Colour of Money . . . Racism: A History [2007]—1/3

Begins the series by assessing the implications of the relationship between Europe, Africa and the Americas in the 15th century. It considers how racist ideas and practices developed in key religious and secular institutions, and how they showed up in writings by European philosophers Aristotle and Immanuel Kant.

The second, Fatal Impact . . . Racism: A History [2007] - 2/3

Examines the idea of scientific racism, an ideology invented during the 19th century that drew on now discredited practices such as phrenology and provided an ideological justification for racism and slavery. The episode shows how these theories ultimately led to eugenics and Nazi racial policies of the master race.

And the 3rd, A Savage Legacy . . .  Racism: A History [2007] - 3/3

Examines the impact of racism in the 20th century. By 1900 European colonial expansion had reached deep into the heart of Africa. Under the rule of King Leopold II, the Belgian Congo was turned into a vast rubber plantation. Men, women and children who failed to gather their latex quotas would have their limbs dismembered. The country became the scene of one of the century's greatest racial genocides, as an estimated 10 million Africans perished under colonial rule.

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Table Announcements Hurricane Library Relief featuring  Kalamu ya Salaam   *   *   *   *   * Correspondence (E-Mail)   Call for Artists and Photographers  (Chuck Siler) Conversations with Miriam (Rudy, Miriam) Defining Religion, Describing Religious Practice (19 October; Wilson, Rudy) Do New Orleans Folk Have a Choice?  (Kalamu, Rudy, Miriam) Governor says everyone must leave New Orleans HBCUs & Black Educators    Jerry Ward Reports on Dillard (Jerry Ward, Mona Lisa, Miriam) Katrina & Kalamu (Rudy, Miriam, Clare, and others) Katrina New Orleans Flood Index    Aug 31- Sept 1    Sept 2    Sept 3    Sept  4   Sept  5 Magical Negro: The Root (Arthur Flowers) Responsibility of Blacks in Cyberspace (Rudy, Miriam, Joyce, Ethelbert) *   *   *   *   * Discussions Regarding Revolutionary Suicide & Nathaniel Turner   The Acklyn Model Not Sufficient (6 October) Conversations with Miriam and Wilson (1 October) Corporate Colony, Civic Virtue (7 October) Death of the Black Church (17 October; liberation of black female religious) The Defection of Eldridge Cleaver & Reactionary Suicide (30 September; Huey) Defining Religion, Describing Religious Practice (19 October) Egalitarian Slaveowners (4 October) Empowerment Temples & Ideological Orchestrators (29 September) Feel-Good Giving & Capital I Am We (28 September; Huey) Love Should Deflect Contentment  (2 October) Manifesto Revolutionary Suicide: The Way of Liberation  (6 October; Huey) Political Movements, White Issues (5 October) *   *   *   *   * New Orleans neighborhoods that suffered worst flooding lost most residents, census data show—6 February 2011—In New Orleans, several public housing complexes, including the largely demolished Big Four developments, were among the neighborhoods that experienced the largest exodus. The Lower 9th Ward, which became a global icon of Katrina's destruction, also was virtually emptied, losing about 80 percent of its inhabitants. . . . In all, about 90 percent of New Orleans' 70-plus neighborhoods lost population between 2000 and 2010. About a dozen neighborhoods lost more than half their residents, while in nearly 20 others, the 2010 population was between 30 and 50 percent smaller than in 2000, according to separate surveys by consulting firm GCR & Associates and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. . . .Five years after Katrina prompted the largest mass migration in modern American history, the city's overall population stood last year at 343,829 people, a 29 percent drop since the last head count a decade earlier and 3 percent less than the Census Bureau had estimated in July 2009.—NOLA *   *   *   *   *  The Importance of Civil Disobedience in Post-Katrina New Orleans By Elizabeth Cook   Professor Celia Chazelle Advocates Christian Social Activism   Roland Martin Reflects on Obama   *   *   *   *   *   Kalamu Correspondence All Hands on Deck (Kalamu) Hurricane Library Relief (Kalamu) I WANT TO BUT I DON'T (Kalamu) Kalamu Needs Work (Kalamu) kalamu on the road  9 oct 2005 Kalamu Travel Update (Kalamu) Kalamu Update ("I'm in Nashville")  Kalamu update 30 sept 2005  (in New York) Listen To The People (Kalamu) LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE: The Neo-Griot New Orleans Project Neo-Griot Workshop (Kalamu) quick notes from the field (Kalamu) where in the world is kalamu   *   *   *   *   * Slumdog Tourism—By Kennedy Odede—Nairobi, Kenya August 9, 2010—Slum tourism has a long history—during the late 1800s, lines of wealthy New Yorkers snaked along the Bowery and through the Lower East Side to see “how the other half lives.” But with urban populations in the developing world expanding rapidly, the opportunity and demand to observe poverty firsthand have never been greater. The hot spots are Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai—thanks to Slumdog Millionaire, the film that started a thousand tours—and my home, Kibera, a Nairobi slum that is perhaps the largest in Africa. Slum tourism has its advocates, who say it promotes social awareness. And it’s good money, which helps the local economy.But it’s not worth it. Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from.  People think they’ve really “seen” something—and then go back to their lives and leave me, my family and my community right where we were before. I was 16 when I first saw a slum tour. I was outside my 100-square-foot house washing dishes, looking at the utensils with longing because I hadn’t eaten in two days. Suddenly a white woman was taking my picture. I felt like a tiger in a cage. Before I could say anything, she had moved on. When I was 18, I founded an organization that provides education, health and economic services for Kibera residents. A documentary filmmaker from Greece was interviewing me about my work. As we made our way through the streets, we passed an old man defecating in public. The woman took out her video camera and said to her assistant, “Oh, look at that.” For a moment I saw my home through her eyes: feces, rats, starvation, houses so close together that no one can breathe. I realized I didn’t want her to see it, didn’t want to give her the opportunity to judge my community for its poverty—a condition that few tourists, no matter how well intentioned, could ever understand. NYTimes *   *   *   *   * Katrina New Orleans Flood Index What's Going On by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band  /  Louis Armstrong—Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans Kid Ory 2—Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans Fats Domino—Do You Know What It Means, To Miss New Orleans Billie Holiday—Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? *   *   *   *   * Billie Holiday—Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans Performed by Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong (New Orleans 1947) Music by Louis Alter, Arthur Lubin,  Zutty Singleton, Barney Bigard, Kid Ory, Bud Scott, Red Callender & Charlie Beal *   *   *   *   * Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?                                                               Lyrics by Eddie Delange.   Do you know what is means to miss New Orleans? And miss it each night and day I know I'm not wrong the feeling's getting stronger The longer I stay away Miss the moist covered vines, the tall sugar pines Where mocking birds used to sing And I'd like to see the lazy Mississippi... a hurrying into spring The Mardi Gras memories of creole tunes that filled the air I dream of oleanders in June And soon I'm wishing that I was there Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? When that's where you left your heart And there's something more I miss the one I care for More than I miss New Orleans *   *   *   *   * Dianne Reeves—Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? Aaron Neville—Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans Sweet Home New Orleans—Dr. John James Rivers—New Orleans Zulu Lundi Gras JAZZ  *   *   *   *   *  *   *   *   *   *   Katrina Essays  Bush seen as doing too little, too late  (Richard Luscombe) Cataclysmic Katrina (M. Quinn) Christmas in New Orleans Civil Disobedience in Post Katrina New Orleans The Conspiracy to Whiten New Orleans The Cost of a Chocolate City: Race and the Casualties of Hurricane Katrina  The Contradictions of Black Comprador Rule  Deliverance from Marksville The Difference Between being Displaced and a Refugee  (Tamara Nopper) Dreamers Die Young  Eighteen Months After Katrina FEMA Evicting 50,000 Families Hold the United States Accountable How the Free Market Killed New Orleans (Michael Parenti) Hurricane Katrina: The People Did Not Have to Die (Carl Dix) Hurricane Looting Not Over Yet  (Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.) The Impact of Katrina Race and Class Katrina, Bush, and Capitalism Tea Party Anyone? (Mary Meekins) Katrina killed those already dying Katrina Made Me a Better Archaeologist Katrina Refugee Housing (Charles Shea) Leaving the Poor Behind Again! (Bill Quigley) Letter from Michael Moore You hang in there, Mr. Bush Losing New Orleans  (Maxwell) Media as a Weapon: New Orleans' 2-Cent Media Crisis and Grassroots Response Millions More A Tale of Two Cities From DC to Toledo (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor) Missing School in the Big Easy Nagin's Reelection as Mayor of New Orleans New Orleans a Ghost Town?   (Bill Quigley) New Orleans is Modern America New Orleans Peoples Committee Organizing New Orleans: The American Nightmare (Amin Sharif)  NOLA SPEAKS  NOPD Verdict Reveals Post-Katrina History (Flaherty) Notes from Inside New Orleans (Jordan Flaherty) People of Color Owning Cars The People of the Dome Plan Designed to Take Treme? (a report) The People of the Dome  (Mitchel Cohen) The Plan for Public Housing in New Orleans  (Carl Dix) Portrait of a Suicide/Death in Yellow Flooding Post Katrina One Hundred Thousand Yet to Return (Junious Ricardo Stanton) Potential to Double Black Entrepreneurship Press dismay at Katrina chaos ( BBC NEWS) Protesters Pepper Sprayed, Tasered, Arrested (Carl Dix) Race and the Casualties of Hurricane Katrina The Real Looting   (Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright) Return to Pontchartrain Park Six Years After Katrina The Battle for New Orleans Continues (Jordan Flaherty) So Poor, So Black! (Maxwell) Time Longer Than Rope (Maxwell) Tom Watson Running for Mayor of New Orleans Viewpoint: New Orleans crisis shames US  (Matt Wells) Wall Street Bailout, New Orleans Recovery (Borders) "What’s with Mayor Nagin?"  *   *   *   *   * Poems Address on the Battle for New Orleans  (Rudolph Lewis) After Katrina . . . (Latorial Faison) After the Hurricanes (Jerry Ward) Big Easy Blues (Amin Sharif) Can You Quilt a Life, Now Dead? (Rudolph Lewis) George Bush Doesn't Care  (Legendary KO lyrics) George Bush Don't Like Black People (Audio) I Gave My Heart to That Woman (Rudolph Lewis) I'm in the Eye of Katrina (Joe Williams) It Ain't About Race (Claire Carew) Katrina  (Caroline Maun) Neighbors and Invaders (Mackie Blanton) NOLA SPEAKS No Woman to Be Rollin (Rudolph Lewis) Portrait of a Suicide/Death in Yellow Flooding A Prayer for Our Enemies Sitting ducks at the superdome (Claire Carew) A Survivor's Poem  (Denay Fields) There's No Way Out This Sadness?   (Rudolph Lewis) What Does It Mean to Survive N'awlins (Rudolph Lewis) What Shall It Be, Stick or Broom? (Rudolph Lewis) Where's Fats Domino? (Marvin X)   *   *   *   *   * Reports Christmas in New Orleans Governor says everyone must leave New Orleans HBCUs & Black Educators Organize Flood Relief for Refugees Letter in Support of the Movement in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast:  Notes on Strategy & Tactics by Eric Mann New Orleans Flood Relief Bulletin Board  (8/ 31- 9/ 1)   (9/ 2)   9/ 3  9/ 4  9/ 5/2005  New Orleans People's Committee  (C. Muhammad) Parts of New Orleans to open next week  Plan Designed to Take Treme for the Benefit of Rich People? (Jarvis Q. DeBerry ) Potential to Double Black Entrepreneurship (John William Templeton, Editor) Saint Augustine Closed The Storyteller of New Orleans  by Elizabeth D *   *   *   *   * Reviews K-Ville Cop TV Show Raymond Miles, “Heaven is the Place” (Gospel music) We Want Freedom: Life in the Black Party *   *   *   *   * Scholarly Studies http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/200512_katrinaindex.htm *   *   *   *   * Survivor Stories Alive in Truth: We've recorded fifty full-length oral history interviews with New Orleans narrators. These explore the narrator's life before, during, and after the flooding of New Orleans.  / Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History and Memory Project / PMB 188 / 603 West 13th St. Suite 1A / Austin, TX 78701/ (512) 653-6539 / neworleanstestimony@yahoo.com Denise Moore's Story Eh, La Bas, Cherie!  (Mackie Blanton) God Bless Robert and Jason  ( Karen Kossie-Chernyshev) (Life in evacuee shelter) I am Alive (Niyi Osundare) from New Orleans Shelters ( Bill Quigley and Debbie Dupre Quigley) Katrina killed those already dying! ( Joe Williams III) Larry Bradshaw & Lorrie Beth Slonsky Story Return to Pontchartrain Park Survivors Say, "It’s Not Working for Us" – A Slideshow "They treated us like dogs . . . wristbands" Transcript of Charmaine Neville's Story Who's Helping the Helpers--Mass Victimology  (Life in evacuee shelter) *   *   *   *   *   Did a Racist Coup in a Northern Louisiana Town Overthrow its Black Mayor and Police Chief? By Jordan Flaherty                                                                                                                                                  District Attorney James Paxton *   *   *   *   *   Related files Nooses and a legal lynching in Jena, Louisiana Update News Reports Judge in Danziger case sickened by 'raw brutality of the shooting and the craven lawlessness of the cover-up' NOLA Crime Index Investigations: Law and Disorder in New Orleans Police shootings in the week after Hurricane Katrina New Orleans Police Department shootings after Katrina under scrutiny: NOLA Crime, Law and Disorder Police shootings after Katrina: Was a gun inside a bag a threat to 5 officers?: NOLA Crime Law, and Disorder Police shootings after Katrina: How does a man waving down a police car die from a shotgun blast to his back?  SWAT team sees armed man, shoots him three times, but where's the gun?: NOLA Crime Law and Disorder

Kalamu Travel Update--LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE: The Neo-Griot New Orleans Project -- Building A Database

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September 14, 2004: Whipping winds and walloping waves, strengthened to a Category 5 storm, lashed godless Cuba. It was Hurricane Ivan. It was the biggest storm in living memory. No casualties. Not one single causality.

August 29, 2005: A category 5 storm, assigned the name Hurricane Katrina, hits god-fearing USA and sinks a whole city. Why this discrepancy?The reason is simple. With military logistics, Cuba evacuated 1.3 million people, 10 per cent of its population, in the tobacco-growing province of Pinar del Rio in western Cuba. --Farooq Sulehria A tale of two hurricanes     Katrina New Orleans Flood Index

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We Are No Longer the Refugees & Immigrants

Blacks in Need of Katrina Refugee Housing  & Other People of Color (Charles Chea) Read Newsweek's The Other America (9/28)

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Hurricane Katrina: Did the Chinese Help  the Bush Administration Oppress African Americans? By Kam Hei Tsuei Chinatown Blues

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Questioning the Bones (Rudy)   Everybody's got to sew, sew, sew . . . -- Big Chief Monk Boudreaux  

Educating the Displaced on Military Bases, is it legal, is it good?: A number of states, including Utah and Texas, want to teach some of the dispersed Gulf Coast students in shelters instead of in local public schools, a stance supported by the Bush administration and some private education providers. But advocates for homeless families and civil rights oppose that approach. -- Separate but Equal? Schooling Of Evacuees Provokes Debate THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Can wealthy whites change the racial composition of New Orleans? One of the great concerns right now in New Orleans is businessmen talking openly of wanting to see New Orleans change . . . . You have an overt agenda to change the racial makeup of the city, the economic makeup of the city, and you have these very wealthy people hiring private mercenary types to guard their property and their interests. . . . .  very wealthy, powerful people backed up by men with guns that they are not welcome in the city that they have lived in their whole life. We have a potential, I think, for serious, overt conflict, hot conflict here in New Orleans as people start coming back in.-- The Militarization of New Orleans: Jeremy Scahill Reports from Louisiana

Message to Black Leaders: "When  you go down on the battlefield / You better not kneel, you better not run."  (The Bones Have Spoken)

 

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In the case of a mandatory evacuation order during a disaster, 33% of Latinos, 27% of African Americans, and 23% of whites say that lack of transportation would be an obstacle preventing them from evacuating, according to the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.

Evacuation planning tends to focus on traffic management for those with cars and on institutionalized people, not on non-institutionalized people without vehicles. New Orleans had only one-quarter the number of buses that would have been needed to evacuate all carless residents.

In the counties affected by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, only 7% of white households have no car, compared with 24% of black, 12% of Native American and 14% of Latino households. People of Color Owning Cars

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Rootsblog -- Katrina Commentary: The Players & Complexities of  The Game   Magical Negro: The Root Where’s the Afrospiritual Practitioners? "effective instruments of empowerment" Rootwork By Patricia R. Schroeder   Rootwork and the Prophetic Impulse

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Anyway, Al ain't leaving.  Neither is his friend Jim "Lucky" Osborne or the other man who didn't say a word the whole time I stood there.  When I asked about the Backstreet Cultural Museum, which houses some suits from big chiefs of the past, he said that he was keeping watch over it.  "I'm the security for the Backstreet and 'OZ," he said.  He was referring to WWOZ, the public radio station in adjacent Armstrong Park.  There wasn't anybody in Treme I knew or had heard of that Al didn't.  

Kalamu (who used to work out of there, both with NOMMO and 'OZ), both Lolis Elies (the civil rights attorney and the columnist for The Times-Picayune), Father Jerome Ledoux of St. Augustine Catholic Church and Jerome Smith of Tambourine and Fan.  I knew the Elies were okay because I'd seen Lolis Eric, his mother and his sister.  Chief Al told me that Jerome Smith was fine and that Father Ledoux was packing up because he'd been sufficiently frightened by the armed people saying that everybody had to clear out.

"This not communism," he told me.  "I don't know where in the hell (Mayor) Nagin gets off thinking he can do that," i.e. make people leave.  He believes the evacuation plan is designed to take Treme for the benefit of rich people.  Plan Designed to Take Treme

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A thousand voices / agonizing in deep / water with no / relief in sight -- "Exodus"   Artwork by Charles Siler, N'awlins Survivor

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Specifically, I find that the actual number of white deaths in each of the three parishes is lower than would be expected based on the size and age of the white population in the affected areas; by contrast, the actual number of black deaths is larger than would be expected. 

Thus, the impression that this storm took the largest toll on New Orleans’ black population appears to be validated empirically.  And while race is clearly not the only story here, these findings confirm that it is deeply implicated in this and every aspect of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.  When Katrina swept through New Orleans, it exposed the hidden racial inequalities that characterize urban America.  Americans saw with their own eyes what urban scholars have long known: relative to whites of similar socio-economic status, racial and ethnic minorities live in communities that are severely disadvantaged.  These communities have fewer economic opportunities and less political influence, they are poorer and more violent, and they are more vulnerable to a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina. 

By recognizing Katrina as both a social and a natural disaster, we reinforce the role that public policy can play before a disaster occurs.  In particular, policies designed to de-concentrate poverty and create viable, safe communities have the potential to mitigate the vulnerability of any single population to the dangers of a tragedy such as Katrina.  Race and the Casualties of Hurricane Katrina

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"New Orleans: Second Line -- Walking in Water" Artwork by Charles Siler, N'awlins Survivor

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U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to tear down more than 4,600 public housing units in four complexes across the city -- while replacing them with private, mixed-income developments that will set aside only 744 apartments for low-income people. The decision to demolish these public complexes, which suffered only relatively minor damage during Hurricane Katrina, comes as rents across the city have doubled since the storm -- as has the homeless population. The activists are asking concerned citizens across the country to join the actions in New Orleans or to take action at home. According to a statement from Kali Akuno, director of the Stop the Demolition Coalition: What is at stake with the demolition of public housing in New Orleans is more than just the loss of housing units: it destroys any possibility for affordable housing in New Orleans for the foreseeable future. Without access to affordable housing, thousands of working class New Orleanians will be denied their human right to return.— Southern Studies

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