Posted on 08/29/2010 11:57:14 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Poet Sunni Patterson is one of New Orleans’ most beloved artists. She has performed in nearly every venue in the city, toured the US, and frequently appears on television and radio, from Democracy Now to Def Poetry Jam. When she performs her poems in local venues, half the crowd recites the words along with her. But, like many who grew up here, she was forced to move away from the city she loves. She left as part of a wave of displacement that began with Katrina and still continues to this day. While hers is just one story, it is emblematic of the situation of many African Americans from New Orleanians, who no longer feel welcomed in the city they were born in.
Patterson comes from New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Her family’s house was cut in half by the floodwaters and has since been demolished. Despite the loss of her home, she was soon back in the city, living in the Treme neighborhood. She spent much of the following years traveling the country, performing poetry and trying to raise awareness about the plight of New Orleans. But her income was not enough–her post-Katrina rent was twice what she had paid before the storm, and she was also putting up money to help her family rebuild as well as preparing for the birth of her son Jibril. “I wound up getting evicted from my apartment because we were still working on the house,” she said. “In the midst of it, you realize that you are not generating the amount of money you need to sustain a living.”
Patterson’s family had difficulty presenting the proper paperwork to receive federal rebuilding dollars–a problem shared by many New Orleanians. “We’re dealing with properties that have been passed down from generation to generation,” says Patterson. “The paperwork is not always available. A lot of elders are tired, they don’t know what to do.”
Just as the storm revealed racial inequalities, the recovery has also been shaped by systemic racism. According to a recent survey of New Orleanians by the Kaiser Family Foundation, forty-two percent of African Americans - versus just sixteen percent of whites - said they still have not recovered from Katrina. Thirty-one percent of African-American residents - versus eight percent of white respondents - said they had trouble paying for food or housing in the last year. Housing prices in New Orleans have gone up sixty-three percent just since 2009.
Eleven billion federal dollars went into Louisiana’s Road Home program, which was meant to help the city rebuild. The payouts from this program went exclusively to homeowners, which cut out renters from the primary source of federal aid.
Even among homeowners, the program treated different populations in different ways. US District Judge Henry Kennedy recently found that the program was racially discriminatory in the formula it used to disperse funds. By partially basing payouts on home values instead of on damage to homes, the program favored properties in wealthier - often whiter - neighborhoods. However, the same judge found that nothing in the law obligated the state to correct this discrimination for the 98% of applicants whose cases have been closed.
At approximately 355,000, the city’s population remains more than 100,000 lower than it’s pre-Katrina number, and many counted in the current population are among the tens of thousands who moved here post-Katrina. This puts the number of New Orleanians still displaced at well over 100,000 - perhaps 150,000 or more. A survey by the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps found that seventy-five percent of African Americans who were displaced wanted to return but were being kept out. Like Patterson, most of those surveyed said economic forces kept them from returning.
A Changed City
As New Orleans approaches the fifth anniversary of Katrina and begins a long recovery from the BP drilling disaster, the media has been searching for an uplifting angle. Stories of the city’s rebirth are everywhere, and there are reasons to feel good about New Orleans. The Saints’ Superbowl victory was a turning point for the city, and the HBO series Treme has gone a long way towards helping the story of the city’s vibrant culture and struggle for recovery get out to a wider audience. Music festivals like Jazz Fest and Essence Fest, which are so central to the city’s tourism-based economy, have brought in some of their largest crowds in recent years. Because of a combination of grassroots pressure, independent media, and federal investigations, the city’s corrupt police department seems to be on the cusp of real reform.
But despite positive developments in the city’s recovery, more than 100,000 New Orleanians received a one-way ticket out of town and still have received no help in coming back, and these voices are left out of most stories of the city. Many from this silenced population complain of post-Katrina decisions that placed obstacles in their path, such as the firing of 7,000 public school employees and canceling of their union contract shortly after the storm, or the tearing down of nearly 5,000 public housing units - two post-Katrina decisions that disproportionately affected Black residents.
Advocates have also noted that among those who are not counted in the statistics on displacement are the New Orleanians who are in the city, but not home. They fall into the category that international human rights organizations call internally displaced. The guiding principles of internal displacement call for more than return. UN principles number 28 and 29 call for, in part, “the full participation of internally displaced persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and reintegration.” They also state that, “They shall have the right to participate fully and equally in public affairs at all levels and have equal access to public services,” as well as to have their property and possessions replaced, or receive “appropriate compensation or another form of just reparation.”
In other words, these principles call for a return that includes restoration and reparations. As civil rights attorney Tracie Washington has said, “I’m still displaced, until the conditions that caused my displacement have been alleviated. I’m still displaced as long as Charity Hospital remains closed. I’m still displaced as long as rents remain unaffordable. I’m still displaced as long as schools are in such bad shape.” In the US, Katrina recovery has fallen under the Stafford Act, a law that specifically excludes many of these rights that international law guarantees.
Among those who are back in New Orleans but still displaced are members of the city’s large homeless population. In a report this week, UNITY of Greater New Orleans estimated from 3,000 to 6,000 persons are living in the city’s abandoned buildings. Seventy-five percent of these undercounted residents are Katrina survivors, most of whom had stable housing before the storm. Eighty-seven percent are disabled, and a disproportionate share are elderly.
Cultural Resistance
Sunni Patterson can’t remember a time when she wasn’t a poet. The words flow naturally and seemingly effortlessly from her. When she performs, it is like a divine presence speaking though her body. Her frame is small but she fills the room. Her voice conveys passion and love and pain and loss. Her words illuminate current events and history lessons - her topics ranging from the Black Panthers organizing in the Desire housing projects to domestic violence to injustice in Africa and war in the Middle East.
You can hear Sunni Patterson’s influence in the performances of many young poets in New Orleans. And in the work of Patterson, you can hear the history of community elders passed along, the chants of Mardi Gras Indians, and the knowledge and embrace of neighbors and family and friends. And Patterson is part of a large and thriving community of socially conscious culture workers. Since the late ’90s, you could find spoken word poetry being performed somewhere in New Orleans almost any night of the week. And many of these poets are also teachers, activists, and community organizers.
Now, like so many other former New Orleanians, she cannot afford to live in the city she loves. “I’m in Houston,” she says, seemingly stunned by her own words. “Houston. Houston. I can’t say that and make it sound right. It hurts me to my heart that my child’s birth certificate says Houston, Texas.”
One of the hardest aspects of leaving New Orleans has been the loss of her community. “In that same house that I grew up, my great grandmother and grandfather lived,” she says. “Everybody that lived around there, you knew. It was family. In New Orleans, even if you don’t know someone, you still speak and wave and say hello. In other cities, there’s something wrong with you if you speak to someone you don’t know.”
New Orleanians were displaced after the storm to 5,500 cities, spread across every US state. Although the vast majority of former New Orleanians are in nearby cities like Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta, many are still living in further locales from Utah to Maine. While she is sad to be gone from the city, Patterson wants to see the positive in the loss. “The good part is that New Orleans energy and culture is now dispersed all over the world,” she says. “You can’t kill it. Ain’t that something? That’s what I love about it. So we still gotta give thanks, even in the midst of the atrocity, that poetry is still being created.”
*******
Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute.
The MSM means that Leftists were the hardest hit group of people. What a surprise.
Oh dear, Miss Def-Jam-Poetry-Slam and her formerly “thriving community of socially conscious culture workers” can’t cadge enough public grant money to live in the style to which they (and their immaculately-conceived offspring) are accustomed.
The city’s homeless AND civil rights attorneys are both still “internally displaced”. The old publik skool system, it’s union contract and thousands of employees are SOL, vast tracts of Section 8 crack houses were torn down and not replaced. Oh, for shame.
Meanwhile, the Saints are back in the running, the tourist industry is going strong and the artistes that ordinary people actually pay to hear are making a living once again. Alas, there is just no place in the new New Orleans for the people who formerly lived off the fat of the land. It’s as much the economy as Katrina I’d say.
It appears there just isn’t the market there used to be for:
“An Aborisha (Omo Oshun) and advocate of Holistic Health, Sunni has trained under such greats as Oluwo Afolabi Epega, Dr. Ndugu Khan (Babalawo Ifa Kayode,) Queen Malikah Sabah (Iyanifa Faadisi Olaolu Olabisi,) Dr.Morris F.X.Jeff,Jr., Nana Anoa Nantambo, Mama Jean Taiwo, Nana Kwabena Faheem Ashanti, Ph.D, and several others. She is a certified instructor of Chi Kung (Qi Gong) and Tai Chi for Health.”
I’m half-white so half of me is wracked with guilt.
There's just no words...
Take a look at her web page. She does look good. Perhaps her New Age holistic health practice might pull in more customers if she, y’know, offered extra services.
Then she could write a book about it and parley that into a stellar screenwriting career like that Diablo Cody chick.
Some cable news show did give some airtime to Biloxi MS and how they managed to recover. They were mostly 75% back up and running within a year of Katrina.
But Ol’ Miss was being run by the eevil Republican Guv Haley Barbour so the Great and Good didn’t care about the plight of Crackas’.
Which is just as well for them. That sort of attention is unhealthy.
A cane loader? As in a tractor-type machine with a claw in front for loading stalks of sugar cane? That sure is a regional piece of hardware!
Kind of like a Bobcat claw loader on steroids. Pretty common in south Louisiana.
GIVE THEM THE MONEY...GIVE THEM THE MONEY...NOBODY COULD GET THEIR BUTTS OUT OF HARMS WAY BUT GIVE THEM THE MONEY. THEIR LOCAL LEADERS DIDNT USE THE BUSSES TO GET THEM OUT OF HARMS WAY BUT GIVE THEM THE MONEY. OOPS! WE ALREADY GAVE THEM THE MONEY.
Same here Cajun. When Charlie blew through here we and family members were shaken. Homes were destroyed, power was out for hundreds of thousands and the highways were closed. Swamp buggy drivers were delivering water to folks who looked like war survivors.
I hadn’t seen the kind of can do attitude in all of my life. Months passed before some got their power. Meanwhile people cleaned and loaded tons of materials before the real movers could come in. Men and women shook each others hands. I made coffee out of my garage and made iced tea for the volunteers if they could find ice. We cleaned it up period! Oh yeah, it was July and in the mid 90’s! We hooked up a shower head out back so people could rinse off the sweat and dirt. My commercial First Aid Kit came in real handy from all the cuts and scrapes.
The next storm that blew in (there were four that year) took out power in the South East. Rather than help each other out, they sued Florida Power. Florida Power repaired the poles and raised rates 30%. Oh, well.
This is a big crock of male bovine excrement.
The minorities have been conditioned through the decades to sit on their thumbs and take stuff from others. Thus, they are conditioned to not do for themselves and expect others to do everything for them.
The rest of the population still has the old way of doing things: Pick yourself up and fix it yourself. No one is required to help you and you are responsible for yourself.
People who get things done are those who do things, not those who sit around and wait for others to do them or support them.
Help is frequently nothing more than getting out of the way and letting people take care of things the best way they can. Government has yet to learn, or practice, that. I was in New Orleans and Pascagoula and and all along the coast in the days immediately after Katrina. The rules and regulations and limits the feds put on getting things done, things that REALLY needed to be done, were as much of a problem for the residents as the storm itself.
If the billions and billions of dollars that were poured into the area in the decades before the storm, ostensibly to make sure they were prepared for such an event, had been used as intended, instead of to feather the nests of corrupt leaders, the area would have been much better served.
But that's water over the damn, spilled milk, etc. Even a cursory investigation, if done honestly, would quickly and clearly reveal the critical difference in how the areas involved prepared and reacted determined which ones did better.
Concur notice how the MSM covers Hurricane Katrina more than the 9-11 event.
Unfortunately there are inequalities. Not all of us got the gift of get-up-and-go.
And I'll say it again ... go to the Gulf Coast of Alabama that was hit even harder than NOLA ... it is "over" there, fixed!! Why can the folks in Alabama "fix it" and the people in NOLA are still "struggling". Some people like to struggle, wallow in it and the feds gladly feel sorry for them and keep pouring the money in to "save them."
True, but I would classify that as individual inequality rather than racial.
Who said anything about racial? Folks in Mississippi and Alabama seem to have recovered. Why is NOLA different? Something in the water? Democrats?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.