In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Katrina:Acting Black / Playing Blackness
  • Glenda Dickerson

There is mo' to being Black than meets the eye.

—Charles Gordone

Legend has it that Marie Laveau was last seen in the eye of a storm, flying in her little house over Lake Ponchartrain, partying with High John the Conqueror, Baron [End Page 614] Samedi, Frieda Erzulie, and a host of family, friends, and lovers. High John the Conqueror is the champion of displaced persons, of little people oppressed by power. He soared alongside the slave ships, reminding the people that once they could fly. Baron Samedi is lord of the cemetery. When he appears, Death is on the way. Frieda Erzulie sheds intoxicating odors from her person that seduce young men. She is a mulatta so Black devotees powder their faces with talcum when they impersonate her. Marie Laveau remains the tempestuous, mysterious, powerful, and wonderful emblem of New Orleans. Vibrant and alive. I wonder what Madam Laveau would have to say about Katrina.

Since Hurricane Katrina flew over the Gulf Coast dropping water from the trains of her skirt and forcing the poor into plain sight, the cable channels have given us an orgy of wall-to-wall coverage chronicling the catastrophe. Thousands upon thousands of displaced people become a media construct: the dirty, poor, inarticulate, faceless population too stupid to heed the dictates of the powerful. Like a blockbuster film, which uses the misery of the developing world as an exotic background for a story about the travails of white people, the rolling, roiling, repetitive pictures of Black suffering are used as mise-en-scène for the "real" human-interest stories. They are not the enterprising citizens who "found food in a grocery store." They are not the colorful Cajun character who grittily decided to "stick it out." They are not the good ol' boy who promised to shoot a looter and then "string him up by the neck." They are not certain New Orleans police who refused to enter the "powder keg." They are treated like animals but the dogs and cats were rescued before they were. They are the new homeless, stuck inside their own rescue; poor and plain Black people, descended from slave ships. No individual story emerges from this teeming mass, except that of the predatory looters, packing pistols and raping women.

Are these predators "acting black" (James Hatch's "bad nigga") as constructed by the American media machine? Hatch draws a distinction between the "bad nigga" and the "baaad nigga." The first is the stereotyped rapist born in Birth of a Nation. The latter is the mythic hero who loves his people and is not afraid of white men: "Shaft." When Richard Roundtree burst on the screen as the gun-toting hero of the hood, he became an instant folk hero, a baaaad nigga. But when Denzel Washington appeared in Training Day, he was playing the "bad nigga." He was as charismatic, as sexy, as compelling and hypnotic as Roundtree. He worked against "The Man," but he also worked against his own people. Consequently, unlike Shaft, he was not under the protection of High John. Alonzo's death reassured America that the "bad nigga" could still be controlled. Denzel got an Academy Award for his sacrifice and the brutal black buck stereotype stayed firmly in place. So the reign of the bad niggas becomes the constructed tale in New Orleans. They have to be "put down."

Let's see who these "bad niggas" are. Is it the young folk hero who, leaping into the bureaucratic vacuum, "liberated" an idle bus and drove the displaced people to safety, named "renegade" for his trouble? Or is it the real renegade in the crowd shooting at his own people? He may have been conned by the commercial media's glorification of Snoop Dogg and his ilk into believing that he is acting baaaaad, acting black. But in fact he is just acting "bad." And he is not under the protection of High John.

We all remember minstrelsy, when white men in black face poked vicious fun at Black men and Black men in black face poked fun at themselves. What are Wayne Brady, Cuba Gooding, Jr...

pdf

Share