Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Black Rome and the Chocolate City: The Race of Place

2007; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.2008.0000

1080-6512

Christopher Dunn,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Black Rome and the Chocolate City:The Race of Place Christopher Dunn (bio) The horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which for thousands of former and current residents of New Orleans is still ongoing, cast a spotlight on the inequalities of racial formations in the United States. No other event since the civil rights era has generated more outrage and debate on the state of race relations in the United States, but these discussions rarely note the specificity of New Orleans in relation to the rest of the country, nor to its place in the larger context of the Afro-Atlantic world. As a resident of the city, I have thought about the profound racial implications of the Katrina catastrophe for New Orleans. As a scholar of Latin American, specifically Brazilian culture and society, I couldn't help but to understand the ongoing crisis, and the debates it has generated, in comparative terms. After four months of exile following the storm, I moved back to New Orleans during a contentious mayoral race involving the African American incumbent, Ray Nagin, and a slate of mostly white candidates, including prominent Democrats like Mitch Landrieu, the son of New Orleans's last white mayor to date and the brother of Senator Mary Landrieu. There were several Republican candidates, representing tony Uptown neighborhoods, who wouldn't have even considered running before Hurricane Katrina displaced tens of thousands of black working-class residents. The mayoral race cast a spotlight on the "place of race" in the reconfiguration of the city: How would the displacement of so many people, most of whom were black, impact racial politics in the city? What were the racial implications of calls for the city to have a smaller "footprint" as recommended by Uptown politicians, real estate developers, architects, urban planners, and environmentalists alike? How would the influx of thousands of workers, mostly from Latin America, impact the culture and politics of the city? The mayoral contest also raised the question of the "race of place," which is perhaps more difficult to define and determine, yet seems to be the subtext for so many of the political debates in the city. How does race figure into the fragmented and contested "imagined community" of New Orleans? What does it mean to define a place in terms of race, a suspect yet persistent category of social identification and categorization? This question was foregrounded on January 16, 2006, as Ray Nagin addressed a small group of supporters on the steps of the federal courthouse following a Martin Luther King [End Page 847] Day parade: "It's time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don't care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day." As critic Ned Sublette remarked later in an editorial for The Nation, "political campaigns are built on hooks much the way pop songs are," and Nagin's "chocolate city" speech would be the defining moment of his reelection. It was all the more resonant because he in fact referenced a pop song, the title track of Parliament's 1975 album Chocolate City, written by George Clinton. Chocolate city was originally the nickname for Washington, D.C., but Clinton's song expanded the term to include those cities, like New Orleans, that achieved black majorities in the sixties and seventies in the wake of white flight: "There's a lot of chocolate cities around / We got Newark, we got Gary/ Someone told me we got L.A. / And we're working on Atlanta / But you're the capital, C.C." There was much in the speech that I found regrettable; namely, his suggestion that hurricane Katrina was God's way of punishing black America for its social problems. Yet I was also dismayed to find that most of the opposition to Nagin's speech had nothing to do with his reference to God's hand in destroying New Orleans. Instead, white middle-class New Orleanians and the mainstream press focused their outrage on the idea that New Orleans was a "black" or "chocolate" city, an idea that seemed...