New Orleans: The Struggle Continues

By the logic of the anecdote, one quarter of New Orleans Blacks could be viewed as having Tomish tendencies, while two-thirds want four more years of Uncle Tomism at city hall. Although the battle over who will become the next mayor of the devastated city cannot be encapsulated in a cute quip, one political fact emerged from last Saturday’s tortured election: neither of the two men who made it into the May 20 runoff are proper vessels for the aspirations of New Orleans’ 67 percent pre-Katrina Black majority.

With more than half of New Orleanians still in exile, most of them African American, the results of the April 21 vote could only have been bizarre, a twisted exercise unworthy of a Third World country. Incumbent Ray Nagin, the Black Republican-turned-conveniently-Democrat who was the successful Great White Hope in 2002, garnering 85 percent of the white vote and only a minority of Black support, became the default African American candidate after nature and the Bush regime combined to empty New Orleans of most of its Black population. Whites discovered they no longer needed their Black surrogate, who quickly scrambled to establish racial credentials that he previously neither possessed nor wanted.

Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, brother of Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu and son of the city's last white mayor, Moon Landrieu (1970-1978), is considered “liberal” by white southern standards, as was his father. Residual Black affection for the father combined with widespread Black disgust at Mayor Nagin, to create a degree of ambivalence among Black voters that is unusual in a Black-on-white contest. On Saturday, Landrieu won 24 percent African American support, to Nagin’s 66 percent. Nagin got 38 percent of the general vote, Landrieu 29 percent, white business candidate Ron Forman 17 percent, with the other 19 candidates trailing far behind, including the only progressive Black hopeful, Rev. Tom Watson. Of 300 majority Black precincts, Nagin carried 281 of them.

“The vote had nothing to do with Ray Nagin,” said Mtangulizi Sanyika, spokesman for the African American Leadership Project (AALP). “When the media tried to define the election, the Black electorate turned the race into a protest. This was an election about a Return to Protest.”

Almost from the moment it became evident that a return to white rule was mathematically possible in a “new” New Orleans, local and national corporate media began using coded language to frame the anticipated election – terms like “historic opportunity for renewal.” African Americans understand racial code, too. Despite Ray Nagin’s abysmal and maddeningly confused Katrina performance, despite his previous role as the White Man’s Candidate and Mayor, majorities of African Americans believed it necessary to coalesce around a common point: Nagin’s bald head. Thus, his two-thirds share of the Black vote.

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