A Plea for Sensitive, Non-Partisan Journalism

THIRD IN A SERIES: (Click here to read Part I and Part II)

Jermol Stinson

“I think about how cut off we were from Africa — how our culture, our language, our God was taken away from us. So I think about New Orleans and it’s like, ‘Well, this is where I come from. This is where my family comes from.’ … As a young man, one thing that really struck me when I walked down streets like Esplanade [Avenue] with the brick streets and the brick sidewalks: I’d say to myself that somewhere in my ancestors’ history, I’m taking the exact same footsteps that they took. I took great pride in the fact that I had a large family and that I was from New Orleans. … That filled me with so much pride.” – Jermol Stinson

There has been, of course, some excellent reporting on post-Katrina New Orleans from the very beginning. Who can forget the Robert Siegel interview of Michael Chertoff on Sept. 1, 2005? Recently, hard-won correctives to the mainstream story are being published with increasing frequency: A.C. Thompson’s investigative work documenting the vigilante murders of young black men in Algiers, Samuel Freedman’s piece on churches in the Lower 9th Ward, and Laura Sheeter’s BBC interview of Deacon Harold Toussaint’s experience with the military in Mid-City the week after the storm. Collectively, these efforts five years after the fact bring some relief and help to puncture, if not shatter, the feeling of living in an unending Twilight-Zone episode.

From the point of view of almost all of the black survivors I interviewed, the worst “anniversary” journalistic treatments echo the unabashedly white power narrative, which can be summed up thus: “Historical” New Orleans (read Uptown, the French Quarter, Lakeview and parts of Gentilly) is New Orleans. We’ve been back for years now. New Orleans is better than ever. Our schools and our medical facilities are flourishing like never before. Hurricane Katrina was a blessing in disguise.

Doubtless there are many white people for whom this narrative summary aptly captures their experiences and feelings. It should be one component of the grand meta-narrative. But when it is allowed to stand for the whole, when it is propagated as if it is the only narrative that matters, then it effaces other equally important, arguably more interesting, narratives and it insults nonwhite people, displaced or otherwise.

“Our job is to document, as meticulously and as honestly as we can, the complex workings of a vast machinery rooted in a political economy that only a romantic would term fragile. What is fragile is rather our enterprise of creating a more truthful accounting and fighting amnesia.” – Paul Farmer

Slightly more than 12 hours after an NBC anchorman read from the script of the transcendent narrative about how much better post-Katrina medical care is in New Orleans, I observe that half of the church is missing this emotionally fraught Sunday morning. The answer, it seems, lies in a volunteer-run, dental-care and eye-examination program in a nearby public park. One 72-year-old woman in fragile health got up at 4 a.m. to stand in line to have her teeth cleaned, according to her daughter, Kim. All around them were men, women, and children of varying ages and class backgrounds waiting for tooth extractions because they no longer had any other viable options. Where is the investigative journalist who will explore this challenge to the mainstream narrative?

One way to make disaster reporting less traumatizing would be to make sure that all of the major groups are represented in the narrative. It is offensive to middle-class and upper-class African-Americans that the black diaspora is mistaken as overwhelmingly poor. The empty houses in New Orleans East testify to the substantial loss of middle-class professionals. The triumphant narrative leaves many people feeling particularly isolated. Even when the cameras move to the Lower 9th Ward and an African-American focus, the 100,000 displaced people continue to feel neglected and forgotten. They too worked two or three jobs, paid taxes, taught our students, delivered first-rate medical care to all their patients, and supported the Saints loyally as others were going to the games with paper bags over their heads. Exploring the conundrums would make the news feel less surreal. Why would people who loved a city so passionately not be able to move home five years after the storm?

Audiences need to be reminded of the complicated histories preceding contemporary events because very few people bring with them an accurate sense of history, especially of a group other than their own, to the reading of any isolated text. For example, it is easy to blame elderly homeowners who have been strong-armed into giving up their land for being under-educated, if, that is, one forgets the realities of their childhoods: segregation, low wages for blacks, and the desire many young men felt to abandon an education that seemed pointless in their world in order to financially support their overworked, exhausted mothers. If we don’t know the history of Hurricane Betsy and the Lower 9th Ward, then we don’t understand that the original homeowners who risked their lives in at least one major war — in exchange for the dream of homeownership away from the reaches of an unwelcoming dominant society — already rebuilt their homes, lives, and families from scratch once. And we don’t know to ask what is so different about 2010. Who were the builders who made it possible to stretch the SBA loans of the mid-1960s enough to rebuild? And to which cities were they relocated in 2005?

Similarly, too many of us come to each new story with our belief in equal opportunities for all intact. We need to have our memories refreshed routinely. We forget that the damage to New Orleans was a product of the Army Corps of Engineer’s negligence and not Hurricane Katrina. We need to be reminded of how the deportations from New Orleans after the storm were organized, how much choice deportees had over their destination points, and what category of people was transported furthest from home. Perhaps we never knew that the homeowners of the Lower 9th Ward were prevented from refurbishing their furniture and rebuilding their houses for over four months, while other homeowners from different neighborhoods were allowed to start after two or three weeks. Maybe we have not read that the average difference between the amount of money given to white and black homeowners for rebuilding was approximately $10,000, irrespective of the cost of repairs for actual damages. Probably we need help imagining what it is like to work a full-time, low-paying job in Houston or Dallas, raise a family, and commute back to New Orleans to wrangle with insurance adjusters, Road Home bureaucrats, and the contractors rebuilding one’s home. If we have never dealt with FEMA or Road Home, it may not be readily apparent the extent to which we will have to file the same paperwork multiple times because of bureaucratic ineptitude.

Cynthia Banks

Cynthia Delores Banks has been overcoming adversity since she was five years old and her family’s house burnt down because of faulty wiring. She credits the Desire Project to which they were moved by the Red Cross with teaching her resourcefulness. When her husband died during open heart surgery and left her with four children under the age of 14, she moved from New York back to New Orleans, made a down payment on a house in Lake Carmel, and kept the note paid by working two, full-time, professional jobs. When her oldest son, Jermol Stinson, was shot in the neck, she orchestrated around-the-clock volunteer homecare for him. After Katrina, Banks fixed up a rundown house near Dallas, Texas, and began working and driving 60 hours a week as an uninsured, home health nurse. On weekends, she commuted to New Orleans to oversee the rebuilding of her house. Stress and chronic exhaustion led to a heart attack and strokes in the fall of 2008. If this story stood as a metaphor for the resilience of the people in the diaspora and the breadth and width of the obstacles they are facing, then perhaps political leaders would begin to expend energy thinking of ways to lessen the obstacles to returning, while simultaneously implementing a plan to woo our people back home where they are needed and wanted.

D’Ann Penner, Ph.D., is the co-editor, with Keith C. Ferdinand, M.D., of “Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond,” which in 2009 won the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust Leadership in Journalism Award. She is at work updating the counter-narratives of Overcoming Katrina to release them more directly into a public sphere visited primarily by journalists who cover trauma and racism on a daily basis. Currently the Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, Penner is a second-year law student at Loyola University New Orleans and works at the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans.

Her article, “Assault Rifles, Separated Families, and Murder in Their Eyes: Unasked Questions after Hurricane Katrina,” was recently published by Cambridge University’s Journal of American Studies.