New Orleans, race, White voters: Or why ex-mayor Marc Morial is NOT Louisiana Governor

I should've posted this weeks ago but here goes. If anyone believes there's a "level playing field" in competing for leadership in the US, you need to remove your head from whatever hole in which it's stuck. Just because it's the 21st century and currently 2006 and some of us have high-speed Internet is no reason to deliberately subscribe to delusion. In New Orleans the son of former mayor "Moon" Landrieu (and sister of current Louisiana US senator Mary L.) and member of one of Louisiana's traditional - read 'white' - political family dynasties challenges a Black guy whose father, no disrespect intended, definitely never was elected to any Louisiana statewide office. New Orleans' ex-mayor Marc Morial's late father, Ernest "Dutch" Morial, was the first-ever Black (or Creole) mayor of New Orleans when he succeeded Mitch's dad as New Orleans mayor in April 1978. This was almost yesterday - the late 1970s - not the 1870s. Marc Morial himself, now head of the New York-based National Urban League, was a successful multi-term mayor of his hometown. Yet when it came time for him and his backers to look around for what he could do next they realised he was not going to be elected the next governor of the Bayou State. I guess Marc couldn't even seriously consider lieutenant governor - the post currently held by dynastic N.O. mayoral contender Mitch Landrieu. Landrieu could, and did, get that job. In Louisiana with his name and colour it could be handed to him - and probably was. But not Marc Morial and not Ray Nagin. Before Katrina drove out over half its majority-Black population, New Orleans - and only since the '70s - had become an oasis within a statewide political wilderness, giving at least some (albeit local rather than statewide) chance to a relative handful of Black Louisianians aspiring to exercise political leadership in their own society. Is Black American political leadership in our own country and in our home communities still too ambitious in 21st century USA? This gaping disparity (between defacto exclusion of Blacks from leadership in most of Louisiana versus a chance for Blacks to compete locally and successfully in pre-Katrina New Orleans politics) exists because like all over the USA - including the "non-racist" (?!) American North and West - millions of white Americans still refuse to support and vote for Black candidates. Even if their lives and true democracy depend on it. Another case, another state. Illinois. Barack Obama, with a Kenyan father and white American mother, reportedly depended on Black Americans as the faithful, decisive and visionary voter base that made him Illinois' first Black US senator, though he is not an ethnic Black American. (And ethnic Black Americans aren't Kenyan or White American.) Even being 'half white' did not convince a majority of Illinois' white voters to vote for Obama. That fact is deep but it is not new. If anybody ever asked us we Black Americans always have known about and felt the stab from the "'flakiness' factor" of our white kin/fellow US citizens. (Like white abolitionist John Brown there are exceptions; they deserve the attention they almost never get from the MSM.) In some circles such irrational social-political behaviour would at best be construed as a public mental health problem. Just as importantly, it's blatantly anti-democratic. At the end of the day, whoever is elected in N.O. today, the whole world needs to be aware of Katrina's unintentional yet very real impact in undermining at least four decades of work and achievements and civil and political rights organising and social behaviour change on behalf of everyone eligible to vote - in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in the South and across the USA. When the cards are on the table this playing field remains far from being level and the ceiling is so low Black Americans still can't stand up. You just have to wonder why most US pollsters and public opinion researchers do not ask Americans about this and do not seem to care.

Comments

[Mark [email protected]]

The book "White Male Privilege" might be of help in understanding perspective and help fight against racism. Amazon.co.uk has a synopsis.

[brian]

well said. an interesting conversation between myself and a white person i know... I've started calling it the "Dilemma of the Metaphorical Mulatto"

LINK:
http://cybermessageboard.fatcow.com/mplsli/viewtopic.php?t=319