Carpetbagging Through the 10 Year Anniversary of the Federal Flood

It is the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and most locals I've met have turned off their televisions, and avoided the internet for weeks. The Federal Flood, they call it. Since the hurricane didn't actually do this to the city.

The news cycle is too triggering for them. They are tired of hearing how resilient they are, in a city still fighting against blight, gentrification, income inequality, joblessness, the world's highest incarceration rates, racism, and capitalism-induced-environmental-devastation, to name a few.

Stop Calling Me Resilient, posters in the city

I have already learned, having not lived through that storm, I will never be a local. This city used to have the highest nativity rate in the country; people didn't leave New Orleans. Not for generations.

That's different now. Especially for the black population.

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/02/new_orleans_officials_2010_pop.html

New, and foreign, I have only had a glimpse of how much of this city is open to me by invitation only.

The feeling of it is more extreme here than when I lived blocks from the palace in Madrid, or on the island of Manhattan. I walk my dog among mansions, knowing I am not going to be invited in.

And for someone like me, or even people who have been here six, seven, ten years... I keep hearing: we are carpetbaggers (now known as "Social Entrepreneurs"), among our other inclinations.
 
Meanwhile, at work, I am learning how to transition how I teach sociology from all white students to all black students. I suspect I will not stop learning.

The complexities of my position at an HBCU, and the only Catholic one in the nation, and at a SLAC, and in NOLA, and the thousand other acronyms that plague us are still unfolding for me.

Some things about this place remind me of my time in Spain.

But the richness of the food here is not served in tapas-sized portions.

The richness of this city can come up quickly, like the smell from the sun-warmed dumpsters at my neighboring grocery. 

Bandit clings to new rituals. And I see his compensations as a hint that I've likely adopted my own. A particular bone. Just one, that he must have in order to sleep at night. He cries until one of us can locate it. And then he curls up next to its fossilized, uneaten, familiarity.

I wonder if he can be happy like this.

I wonder if I can.

My big, grand, plan is to wait and see.

There are no shortage of adventures to be had in the meantime.

Tonight, a full moon, marsh walk at sunset with a group of (new to me) women at the Jean Lafitte National Park.



They told me to bring my bug spray.

Namaste.