[ printable version ] [ email this article ] [ Share on Facebook ] New Orleans: No Lifeguard on Duty

by Slingshot Sunday, Jan. 23, 2011 at 9:58 PM

Lately people have been dying horribly here in New Orleans. Actually, that's a lie; it's not recent. We've been the U.S. #1 for homicide per capita years running, and the only North American city in Foreign Policy magazine's list of the world's murder capitals. But there must be something different happening just now, because why else would Slingshot, out in California, write the Rail and ask about all the "intense shit" going down in New Orleans? New Orleans: No Lifeguard on Duty





intro:



Lately people have been dying horribly here in New Orleans. Actually,

that's a lie; it's not recent. We've been the U.S. #1 for homicide per

capita years running, and the only North American city in Foreign

Policy magazine's list of the world's murder capitals. But there must

be something different happening just now, because why else would

Slingshot, out in California, write the Rail and ask about all the

"intense shit" going down in New Orleans?



Why? Because in December some white kids died. I could say it

differently, but differently would be less honest. Apparently the 165+

black folks killed in New Orleans in 2010-- several by cops-- and the

six Latin Americans who were murdered just in the two-week period

between Dec 7 & 21st aren't on Slingshot's radar. Those horrors in no

way reduce the horrors that have happened to white people, but they

might provide context to make for an interesting avenue of enquiry.



Suddenly this fall there were a million white kids in the St. Roch

neighborhood, a neighborhood so notoriously, phantasmagorically

dangerous that some cabbies won't visit it, a neighborhood where I've

had more friends robbed at gunpoint than in the rest of the city

combined. For whatever reason, there are a lot of punx in St. Roch

this year, more than anyone can remember. They aren't just visiting

the punk bar that's been there for ages; they're squatting, and some

(most objectionably) panhandling in St. Roch. It's very upsetting to a

lot of New Orleanians that anyone would come to one of the poorest

cities of america, into one of its poorer neighborhoods, and ask for

money. It's apparently so upsetting that when a horrible St. Roch

squat fire killed eight human beings, a lot of my friends expressed

anger and disgust towards the dead rather than sympathy. "Fuck those

fucking kids," said people who should know better, many of whom were

born and raised here but some who were themselves those kids, and not

so long ago.



How did things come to this?



Meanwhile, a wave of hysteria erupted over a reported series of

shootings, rapes, kidnappings, robberies, and home invasions, again

centering around (and percieved as targeting) white people in and near

the St. Roch neighborhood of New Orleans. The victims weren't

necessarily travelers, punks or even white, but rumor metastisized;

panic hovered close, its wings fanning mistrust. Some of the more

alarmist of us smelled a race war brewing... and some of us cleaned

and loaded our guns. When a black sixteen-year-old kid confessed under

NOPD interrogation to having committed almost all the crimes

single-handedly, supposed white radicals celebrated and wished him

jailhouse rape, crowing in triumph over this teenager being tried as

an adult. Those who have spent enough time here to know something

about the NOPD & those who are prison abolitionists looked on in

disgust at this celebrating Facebook lynch mob.



How did things come to this?





i.



For centuries, New Orleans has been a town people visit to have a good

time. People come here to behave in ways they don't feel comfortable

behaving in the places they're from, doing things they wouldn't do

back home, whether that means dancing unselfconsciously, smoking

cigarettes and eating unhealthy food, getting silly drunk, shouting

and singing loudly at night, peeing in public, hiring a sex worker,

sleeping outdoors, slapping a waitress' ass, vocally advocating

insurrection, taking over a house with no regard for the neighbors, or

affecting a tough new don't-give-a-fuck persona that wouldn't wash

back where everybody knows you from high school.



People come here to cut loose, and they bring their expectations with

them, expectations which often occlude the actuality. People visit New

Orleans because it's cooler than Disneyland, but they come here for

the same reason, to live out fantasies. Sometimes they come with good

intentions and feel they should be greeted as liberators. Sometimes

they come without good intentions but nevertheless feel themselves

exempt from the mind-blowing material disparities present in this, a

city where children and adults are losing teeth to malnutrition, a

place where dark skin is still shorthand for poverty.



One of the reasons people find it easier to ignore New Orleans in

favor of their fantasy of New Orleans is that much of New Orleans is

not obvious to the casual eye, nor even available. Many of the city's

problems and almost all of its rewards are simply not accessible to a

visitor, outrageous as that may be to someone who's been conditioned

by life in the era of google search. New Orleans is unindexed,

untweeted and deeply layered. Many places are layered, but New Orleans

much more & more deeply than most. Among newcomers' frustrations is

often a sense of being trapped 'outside,' outside of shared histories

and unflyered shows, stuck on the surface while the city's 'real life'

bubbles away beneath. New Orleans is indeed comprised of innumerable

sub-rosa groups and communities that exist in relative secrecy, de

facto or otherwise. Some groups are highly formalized-- underground

carnival krewes, tribes of Mardi Gras Indians-- most are informal but

still as closed.



Some newcomers remain cheerfully unaware of the layers. To them, their

(also) newly-arrived friends and an only recently trendy neighborhood

are what New Orleans is. To them, the culture of New Orleans is

whatever musical trend is being written up in national media, and the

heart of the city is whatever fun new social spot their pals just

showed them. Many newcomers bring their own groups and networks,

settling into a transitory, ready-made milieu of those who dress

similarly. They develop their own 'scenes,' pick new favorite bars and

claim, columbus-like, new neighborhoods.





ii.



What are these layers of new orleans? Aside from a place to come piss

in the steets, there are more profound aspects of New Orleans that

attract visitors, and are also why people move here and stay here and

build community here. In New Orleans there is still culture-- multiple

cultures-- created outside the context of capitalism, traditions that

exist outside of efficiency, cost-effectiveness and "common sense." As

the port city at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans was key to

the expansion of American capitalism into the American west, but New

Orleans itself has always stood a little apart and outside that; its

heredity is old-world catholic, carribbean, african, vietnamese. In a

nutshell, in contrast to the rest of the country, we ducked the bloody

protestants.



This is part of New Orleans' majesty and mysticism, the sense of

"otherness" and exoticism, the different way our air tastes. It's not

incompatible with being Party City USA... in fact, the dynamic of

compatibility is key. The celebration of Mardi Gras is a perfect

example: while many know New Orleans Mardi Gras simply as a day of

titties and beer, a single evening of brewery-sponsored bachannal

under the watchful eye of mounted police, Mardi Gras as experienced

off Bourbon St. is a day of community and togetherness (as well as a

day of dionysian excess). It's a day when no banks are open and no

schools are in session, when the government offices close, when the

entire city shuts down while everyone does what she wants to. New

Orleanians fill the streets and mingle celebratorily with friends,

neighborhood and strangers, an orgiastic orgasm concluding a long--

sometimes frustratingly long-- carnival season of parades and lesser

parties.



Mardi Gras would be impossible in the malls and toll roads of

commodified space; it would be impossible if people were still trying

to go about their business. Mardi Gras is a sense of joy that can't be

bought, a profound if exhausting tribal experience. It is a free

interchange of generous delight, a flowering of uncategorizable love.



The amateur bingers vomiting on bourbon st. are not incompatible with

or antithetical to the courtyard parties or the rarified soirees; the

almost unbearable grandeur of the Indians (they burn your eyes like

the sun) is not more Mardi Gras than the elaborately costumed revelers

packing the Marigny or the largely uncostumed families barbecuing in

uptown backyards or beneath the overpass on the Zulu parade route.

Following a Skull & Bones gang door-to-door isn't more Mardi Gras than

riding a float in Rex and attending a masked ball, or getting

piss-the-bed drunk, having an air-clearing shouting match with your

romantic partner and passing out at 3 pm.



There is no better or more correct way to celebrate. There is no

definitive way, and the different ways are not in mock-Darwinist

competition to determine a sole survivor. In an America driven by

"innovation" and a determinist notion of progress, where time,

technology and life moves "forward," everything the newest and next,

New Orleans remains a place of seasonal cycles and blown deadlines, a

place where cyclical traditions are cherished and embellished,

re-embroiderered more elaborately every year.



That's Mardi Gras, a single day in a year packed with occasions. In

fact, an average weekday in New Orleans is more fun than the biggest

party of the year anywhere else.





iii.



Many visitors in St. Roch and elsewhere downtown are "tourist punx"

who come to have fun, the same as any conventioneer would. They come

to New Orleans for a reason people across all social classes have, for

centuries: because it is exciting, because it is beautiful, and

because they feel its 'wildness' permits them to cut loose.



Some people visit here determined to use their leisure for a good

cause. "Activists," church groups, idealistic travelers who poop

digested revolutionary ideologies, fertilizing the ground for a few

days or weeks before moving on... all seek to contribute aid to New

Orleans, for whatever reason. They bring ideas and approaches tested

elsewhere, eager to improve our city during the weeks or perhaps even

months they will reside in it.



Those who visit to party and those who visit to "do good" have

something important in common: in fact they have everything in common.

They are visitors. They are visitors to a dangerous city whose poor

are not content to be passive, a dangerous city of extreme inequities

where intentions count for nothing, and a city of dangerous

difficulties which even the locals surmount only by means of sharing

resources and reliance on longstanding community networks.



One aspect of the incalculable damage done to New Orleans by the flood

and subsequent diaspora five years ago was the shattering of New

Orleans' communities and neighborhood networks. These vital alliances

of extended family and neighbor and cousin from the next block over

were a key to how many poor New Orleanians survived. When your cousin

from the next block got a little windfall, you found out about it, and

everyone shared. These networks are not exclusive to New Orleanians,

nor exclusive to our city's poor; they can be seen in members of

old-line carnival krewes finding each others' children good jobs in a

city where there are hardly any. All these extended tribes exist in

contrast to the limits of the atomized, alienated "nuclear families"

promulgated as the building block of american society the last 5

decades or so. Let's be fair: the nuclear family is a nightmare that

works for no-one, a cellular deathcamp of anomie and abuse, and the

only proof anyone would ever need that the prescribed american social

order must be not merely altered but entirely laid waste.



The death & diaspora caused by the Army Corps of Engineers' criminally

shitty levees back in '05 flung New Orleanians to the wind; many still

have not returned and are in fact unlikely ever to. Thus, houses still

stand empty in neighborhoods the police don't care about. Buildings

stand empty, and people looking for ways to live outside of the system

of private property, who are attracted by all New Orleans has to

offer, move in and squat.



Many of these wanderers come from dysfunctional backgrounds: you can

tell because they don't greet you on the street. Their life

experiences or simply the defective acculturation they were subjected

to in the alienating dystopia of millenial america have made them

afraid; they affect aloofness as a defense mechanism, but it comes

across here as a snub, and a fairly ugly, pointed insult to the

snubbed. They don't greet their neighbors, they don't introduce

themselves, they don't say hello to strangers on the street and aren't

willing to pause and pass the time. They don't accept that having

their bicycles stolen constantly is as natural as a midday rainfall,

not a personal attack but merely a cosmic warning against materialist

attachment. There are bad visitors who make noise late at night in

working-class neighborhoods, who piss on others' lawns; they feel that

because only poor people live nearby, they can do what they like.

Small nicks deepen into bloody social rifts.



These visitors come knowing very little of New Orleans, as all who

come to New Orleans do, because here only direct experience can

inform. Sometimes they trust the wrong people and are violently

exploited, whether because they're naive or because they wilfully

ignore just how poor and desparate New Orleans' poor really are. These

visitors literally know no better, but whose job is it to educate

them? They struggle to survive, because they are not hooked into

community, because they don't have the support networks necessary to

survival, but how can they participate in these networks when they

don't live here, when they're only passing through?



The flipside to New Orleans not being an industrialized, efficient

modern city is that New Orleans still operates under the plantation

model. Just as the subtlety and complexity of New Orleans life

conceals beauty, it also conceals hardship and horror. This is a city

that has exploited black people to death from the date of its

inception. Now in 2011, slavery is alive and well thanks to the

"justice" system, providing the prison labor that underwrites our

tourist economy and swaths of our regional agriculture.



That's a literal plantation system: guards on horses with guns while

black men in chains hoe fields. That's egregiously bad-- and again,

not always visible to the visitor-- but New Orleanians of color are

also exploited for their culture, a culture which is repackaged for

sale to visitors. There is plenty of agency involved in this, and the

system's not nearly as simple as black & white-- nothing is, here--

but New Orleans is nevertheless a modern-day plantation in a number of

complex ways, and a town where your skin color determines when you're

allowed to be in what part of town & under what circumstances. This

mostly means people of color getting arrested e.g. for entering

Lakeview, but it does cut the other way too.



Seeing visitors flaunt the social rules of New Orleans, those complex

unspoken understandings, is angering to many New Orleanians, and not

necessarily for noble reasons. It's also annoying when people who

haven't lived here for some time come here wanting to effect change.

It takes a lifetime to understand New Orleans; how dare anyone try to

take a wrench to it without a grasp of how it operates? All change in

New Orleans needs to come from New Orleanians, or else it's

imperialist and should be violently resisted. LIkewise, all

"improvements" to New Orleans need to originate with New Orleanians

and be for the benefit of New Orleanians, or else they're just

normalization and homogenization... an attempt to impose square pegs

on round holes.



I bet wherever you are now, reading this, there are problems. I bet

those are problems that you, as someone who is from that place or at

least calls it home, are uniquely suited to address, understand, and

perhaps redress.



Are white people being "targeted" in New Orleans' black neighborhoods?

Is that a special New Orleans thing? Is it maybe a form of resistance

to gentrification? Well, people are robbed here constantly. People are

killed here all the time. That isn't cool or commendable but it's

unmistakeably part of how New Orleans is, and reflects the low value

of individual human life. It reflects desperation, disparity and

disobedience. A sudden, unprecedented influx of self-segregating

newcomers into a poor neighborhood already traumatized by the flood

only means new prey for the neighborhood's pre-existing predators; it

means those who steal for a living don't have to cross dangerous

neighborhood boundaries to find targets who have stuff. Don't lie, you

own a laptop. You can't tell the dudes who hang out on the corner

apart, because you didn't grow up with them. Punks are less likely to

call the cops, and less likely to be taken seriously when they do.



Efforts to make New Orleans "safer" almost always arise from white

people being victimized, and are annoying because they don't seem to

acknowledge how wildly unsafe New Orleans has always been for

everyone. The oft-actualized threat of violent death is part of life

here. Making New Orleans "safer," in practice, means one of two

things: Either so thoroughly, terminally and permanently subjugating

my city's poor that it becomes safe for anyone to walk anywhere at any

time shouting drunkenly on their iPhone without someone who has

neither an iPhone nor the money to get drunk doing anything about it,

or (less likely) addressing the extraordinary hardships and poverty

that underlie New Orleans' impossibly high crime rate. That crime rate

is a complex expression of complex problems that I would assert no

visitor, no matter his or her education or intentions, can do anything

about.



In almost all cases, making New Orleans "safer" means making New

Orleans more "civilized"... and so-called civilization comes at a

price. May I suggest visitors stay the fuck out of dangerous

neighborhoods? May I suggest visitors understand their role as

visitors, and please try to be careful, and have fun in ways that

don't imperil themselves or piss off the locals? I hope that's not too

much to ask, or an infringement on your sacrosanct right as an

American to do absolutely whatever you want to all the time heedless

of context, history or surroundings. Please don't become a statistic;

please don't be a martyr, please don't be an excuse for sinister

forces with power and wealth to intervene and fuck things up even

more. Don't be a poster child for those in the suburbs who say poor

new orleanians victimize visitors and who call for the further

destruction of affordable housing. Don't be a poster child. There's

already enough wrong.



But by all means, please do come visit. Come do what makes you feel

good, whether that's drinking alcohol or working in a community garden

or walking around chanting prayers. New Orleans originated every

worthwhile musical genre of the 20th century; enjoy some. Dance your

angst off. The food here's great too, if tough for vegans. Come visit,

and if it seems like all the locals care about is getting your money

from you, don't think about it too hard. You can always make more

later, somewhere else. Visit New Orleans and scoff at the "rich"

"tourists" you see in the French Quarter. As long you keep tipping, no

bartender will ever tell you you're wrong. Visit, and if you spend

enough money, New Orleans may limp onwards another little while,

thanks to the generosity of visitors such as yourself.

