This I Believe

Thoughts on Katrina and Reflections on Our Nation- USA

I believe that this nation can do better than what we saw in the aftermath of Katrina. These are my thoughts to my friends following Hurricane Katrina which left my home city and the ancestral land of my mother’s and grandmother’s people devastated- New Orleans, Louisiana.

My childhood friends from New Orleans made me who I am. I chose my friends because of who they really were inside, their goodness and because of their kindness to me. These childhood friends taught me, along with my teachers at that segregated elementary school- James Weldon Johnson ( named after a black early 20th century composer) not to look down on people. This was the greatest thing I learnt there.

Why is New Orleans my home when I have lived in so many places and have not physically lived there for over 35 years? We all remember well those places where we grew up that shaped us. And for me, that is New Orleans and I carry with me that New Orleans accent, my mother’s and grandmother’s legacy and heritage of living there- six blocks from the levee of the Mississippi River- Uptown where a few like me lived, part Creole (French/Spanish and African ancestry), part just black and Anglo and part foreigner too because in my unique situation, my father was from the Philippines. I follow the “Sankofa” Adinkra, Asante, symbol of Ghana which means one must know their past in order to understand themselves or where they are going.

When I first left home, I wanted to do as my sisters did, just get away. Many Creoles left and started a little New Orleans in Los Angeles. Integration in the late 1960’s made it possible for many who were already middle class to leave and many thought that now they were main stream. This left New Orleans to become like many cities in this country- a place for many black poor people.

For me, I left New Orleans to try to understand things from a distance. I was drawn to the Peace Corps because I was working with educational art programs (during my studies at Xavier University) which helped poor children, a kind of Upward Bound and also because of my working with a Catholic student group which took me to Carvel, Louisiana and the leper colony there, which was located in one of the most scenic, peaceful and beautiful places I have ever seen, and also near the Mississippi. I guess I was idealistic about the world back then. But after seeing so many things in this world like what happened in New Orleans, I am no longer idealistic.

One wonders why many people did not evacuate New Orleans. Well one reason is because of a lack of transportation. Public transportation- that is all I knew as a child- the bus, the street car even though my grandmother was the first black woman or woman period to own a model T-Ford. She was also a small scale business woman; she had a small store once, she owned and almost built her own house too. I have gotten my Africanisms and/or African Americanisms from my memories of living with her. I have gone to that Charity Hospital by bus as a child with a bleeding leg. The public has seen on TV- those sick patients at the Charity Hospital were left behind the longest during the Katrina evacuation when those of Tulane Hospital were first evacuated.

Aaron Brown of cable TV asked a Black Congress woman was it class or race that mattered with those who were forgotten in the Super Dome and Convention Center (the class/race issue is an argument that has been going on in our History Dept. at NC A&T State University for sometime now). The Congress woman answered- “it is class mainly but race is such an important part of that” – the faces are always black or brown.

My trips to Africa which are educational for me and also keeps my soul free- for in Africa I can dance alone or in a group like those Mardi Gras days growing up in New Orleans- a free soul, expressing myself to the music in dance (the other side of Conchita). It is my mother’s people that gave me my identity which is just plain old “African American”. These were some of the people that everyone, our nation mainly left behind for Katrina to savage and of that population it was the poorest of the poor, the sick and the invalid, the old and young mothers who could not run.

Finally, as John Edwards from N. Carolina has talked about, the two societies of this nation are being seen on the small screen if not the big screen- now Katrina has showed us this face, which we have tried to hide and the world is embarrassed for us if not we for ourselves.

But the simple truth is- that the faces we saw on TV could be any of our own faces! My father’s and mother’s illness forced my sister and I to go to my mom’s home and to live with my grandmother in New Orleans who was already taking care of my half sister. Even though my father was a lawyer and my mom had three years of college, they could not support or take care of us.

Welfare- I know about that as that is what my grand mother got for raising us. I was on welfare for one year when I first came back from Africa because of my son who was two years old. I had to leave Uganda because of civil war. I had joined the Peace Corps and got married there and then continued living and teaching there for ten years. I have seen the third world up close but did not think that the third world was also my childhood back yard until reflecting about it years later. But when I came back from Africa to go to graduate school at Howard University I was helped a little while by a mother who was still living and struggling in Washington, DC. Education has always been the only way out for poor people and people of color in America .

I am glad too that I am helping in other ways- designing a course called- The Impact of Energy and the Environment on Development in Non-Industrialized Countries at N. Carolina Agricultural& technical state University where I am a Professor. But Louisiana and parts of New Orleans are still third world. But yet historically — it has been one of the leading states to produce oil and gas but yet so many people are poor there.

Our poor people in New Orleans have historically been dock workers and then found work at gambling casinos as employees and now after Katrina, they are jobless. We have not invested in our infrastructure, our highways and levees, our wetlands and the environment. Now the costs for Katrina is 100 times more than the investment would have been. New Orleans has given us so much- pipelines for our energy our oil and gas, docks or ports where our food comes into, good jazz, good food, good culture, unique architecture.

If I can teach our young about the world and understand their own world by bringing in Fulbright scholars or helping young people to study abroad to open their eyes then this is my contribution. This nation has helped others around the world and now people in our own nation are desperately in need of help. New Orleans needs the whole nation to help in its reconstruction. Those faces at the Super Dome could have been our own. I also realize that I can do more at home as Ghandi said-“think globally but act locally”. Now I am thinking of what I can do more for my New Orleans.