Charlotte Allen of the Independent Womens’ Forum, you’ll remember, shook her finger at “liberal-elite puritans” (read: one guy at the Washington Post) for not unreservedly embracing this year’s Mardi Gras even though many of its black and poor residents are unable to participate and the city still lies in ruins.
I guess Ms. Allen didn’t want to be reminded that not everyone is able to indulge in the “simple pleasures” of Mardi Gras. Here’s an example of what she doesn’t want to think about because, well, beads! While white society dances the night away at the Comus and Rex balls, there are no cotillions for the black Carnival societies in New Orleans.
Just before midnight on Tuesday, the young women of this city’s most prominent white families waltzed and waved in flowing gowns and tiaras at the formal galas held by the oldest and most glittering krewes of the Carnival season, Comus and Rex.
Usually, there are parallel Mardi Gras balls held by the city’s large, historically black Carnival organizations.
Amanda Williams and Amirah Jackson, in fact, were supposed to be among the young women whose accomplishments and dreams for the future were announced to society at largely black cotillions here this year.
But unlike the mostly white families of Comus and Rex who were able to continue their traditions in the face of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction, Ms. Williams and Ms. Jackson could only daydream about what might have been in the ball gowns they never got to wear.
They were to have been presented by the oldest black Carnival society in New Orleans, the Original Illinois Club, which has been holding a tableau ball on the Saturday night before Mardi Gras since 1895. But for the first time in two generations, there was no Original Illinois Club ball, or any other debutante soiree given by the large historically black Carnival organizations. They simply are not here anymore.
It may seem a bit silly to talk about debutante balls, which have their own issues of class even when race is taken out of the picture (you may remember the passage in “Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil” in which the Lady Chablis crashes a debutante ball), but these balls and the krewes that put them on have been effective means of keeping black New Orleanians out of the upper echelons of power.
Like so many other aspects of New Orleans, Mardi Gras has long been rigidly polarized along racial lines, with its black and white adherents celebrating equally enthusiastically but almost totally separately in krewes, which are private, nonprofit clubs.
Rather than open its membership to blacks, for instance, Comus simply stopped parading in 1991 when a city ordinance banned discrimination within organizations that hold Mardi Gras parades, which rely on public money for crowd control and sanitation, among other things.
Like other krewes that stopped parading, Comus, made up almost exclusively of white men, continued to hold balls. Other krewes, like Rex, opened their membership and have held integrated parades, but the debutantes at their balls are almost exclusively white.
And make no mistake, these things are about social and professional contacts and keeping those concentrated in the “right” hands. In my first couple of years of practice, a huge bone of contention in the office was the Favorite Sons of Ireland dinner, an all-male St. Patrick’s Day event that is attended by all the (male) power brokers in the City, from the Mayor to the Cardinal (I’d love to see what they do this year with Christine Quinn, the new City Council Speaker, who’s female, Irish and a lesbian to boot). All the men in my office went, and the women were always pissed off about it because we were shut out of the access. But the male partners had a point when they said they couldn’t very well stop going, since the access was good for the firm. How good a point that was is up for debate.
Back to the debutante balls. Having been shut out of the white balls and krewes, black New Orleanians formed their own social clubs to encourage their own upward mobility. For instance, the Original Illinois Club is so named because its members were largely Pullman porters for the Illinois Central Railroad, considered a prestigious job at the time. Now its members are businesspeople and professionals. In keeping with the theme of upward mobility, the focus of the debutante balls in the black Carnival clubs is on the young women’s accomplishments, goals and character rather than on family connections:
Unlike the white clubs that have traditionally emphasized family names and lineage, the black clubs focused on accomplishment above all else, local historians say, putting emphasis on a young woman’s education and suitability for higher learning and the work force.
And they’re a huge deal in New Orleans, with the debutantes being profiled by the Times-Picayune, which also extensively covers the balls. So the cancellation of the black debutante balls is a huge blow, and only serves to highlight how much more vulnerable black New Orleans is than white New Orleans, and how much more devastated:
Many of the black clubs are hoping to hold traditional debutante balls next year and plan to invite the young women who missed their turn. But the future is uncertain.
“A lot of the organizations are struggling financially because of the storm,” said Gerard Johnson, a member of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, of which he was king in 2004.
Zulu, the largest black Carnival krewe, paraded this Mardi Gras but did not hold a debutante ball.
Zulu’s annual ball usually draws 16,000 people to the New Orleans convention center. In lieu of the ball, Zulu held a smaller party for its members last Friday night.
Earl Jackson, a former king of the Original Illinois Club and its financial secretary, said only one of 50 members lived in New Orleans now.
“It was probably one of the saddest moments we’ve ever had, canceling the ball,” he said, vowing that it will be back next year. “We will not let it die.”
Why was it a choice between housing or Mardi Gras? Shouldn’t it be housing and Mardi Gras? Once again, the media pits the wrong people against each other – one group of residents of the city against other group of residents of the city – instead of laying the blame at the feet of the real problem: the shocking neglect of the current government.
I’m so tired of the broad brush of the media, painting the city as full of rich whites and poor blacks, Uptown mansions and 9th ward ghettos. There are Uptown ghettos that survived the flood and 9th ward mansions that were swept away, rich blacks and poor whites, and even a generous swath of working middle class, who were all devastated by this flood. Neighborhoods like Lakeview, Gentilly, Chalmette, Mid-City: All damaged.
No one knows what the city will look like in 5 years. No one knows who will come back.
But I do know that come Mardi Gras time, people will parade whether the city pays out money or not. People will costume, dance, drink, and celebrate on Mardi Gras Day without any permission from the outside powers-that-be. Will these people be white? black? both? I don’t know. New Orleans isn’t fucking Disneyland, and Mardi Gras is not just a bunch of drunk college students and dolled-up queens. As this article about the Original Illinois Club points out, Mardi Gras is about a surprising history of rich, poor, black, white, priviledged and proletariat people making life worth living. It ain’t nice, or fair, or clean, or rational, or simple. But its worth keeping, all the same.
I live here in New Orleans and I am really tired of out-of-town media and other people who know nothing about us or our culture presenting a ridiculously over-simplified view of our lives. I have never posted to a blog before but have to de-lurk to make a few points here:
1. Our primary industry is tourism. Mardi Gras drew tourists here, it brought money to this city and to our local business owners. It brings tax revenue into the city. No tourism = no economy = no jobs = no New Orleans revival. Therefore, this is clearly not a choice between housing and mardi gras. Quite the contrary, reviving our economy is our best hope for rebuilding. Destroying our tourism industry and thus keeping the city poor sure isn’t going to help. This seems so blindingly obvious to me, I don’t understand how some people are missing it.
2. All floats, balls, costumes, beads and other throws, etc. are paid for by the participants in those activites. I have ridden in a parade (one of the small, not-very-expensive ones), I paid dues to cover costs of floats, costumes, and permits, and I spent my own money on all the stuff I threw. Every single parade here is like that; it is put on by the people in it. The city provides nothing for mardi gras except for police and sanitation. And yes, that does cost something and the city is strapped for cash right now, but the hope is that the long-term economic boost of mardi gras will more than even out the expenditure, as is usually the case.
3. Racial dynamics here are not as simple as outsiders like to portray. First of all, we are indeed a “chocolate city”, with most of our poor being black, and also most of our leaders are black as well. We live in an extremely integrated environment. Our Mardi Gras was hardly a whites-only event. Blacks as well as whites were out on the parade routes, side by side and intermingled, enjoying the holiday together. The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure club, a black krewe, paraded this year accompanied (for the first time) by real Zulu warriors from Africa!!! Everyone was so excited about that! The black Mardi Gras Indian tribes stomped through the neighborhoods, even the ruined ones, determined to maintain that tradition despite the fact that many of them lost the elaborate costumes they had been working on all year in the floodwaters. Mardi gras is for everybody, and everybody participated.
4. These fancy balls you linked to an article about are utterly irrelevant to 99% of the residents of the city. That’s focusing on the wealthiest 1% of our poulation and acting like the rest of us don’t exist. The vast majority of white people here are not remotely well-heeled or connected enough to have done any of those things. Furthermore, do you actually think that the black people who are participating in the fancy african-american balls for were the same people stuck in the superdome for days? No, the really poor black folks from here aren’t attending debutante balls either. And again, the city does not pay for these balls or sponsor them –they are private events, held in private places, by private clubs, and I’m not sure how trying to stop them from having their ball would help out anyone else.
5. I suppose I also need to point out here that all those idiots you see on bourbon street flashing their breasts and pissing in the street and being generally obnoxious are not locals. That’s the tourist mardi gras: folks from elsewhere, you’re looking at a reflection of yourselves there, not us. We don’t really go to bourbon street. We’ve generally been content, in the past, to let the tourists & media have their bourbon-street caricature of mardi gras, and we’d just ignore it and go on with the real, local party elsewhere. But this year it kind of matters what people think of us, and so I suppose we can’t afford to do that anymore. So, please, try to understant, it really is true: Our mardi gras is actually a FAMILY celebration throughout the rest of the city. I saw so many children out at the parades, thrilled to be catching beads and stuffed animals, people cooking out and joining up with family and friends they hadn’t seen since before the storm. We NEEDED this psychologically. We needed to be able to make fun of our troubles with clever costumes and satirical floats. The children needed a bit of fun and something that gives them hope that life will someday be normal again. Those who didn’t want a mardi gras are the tiniest minority of the population.
6. Finally, the whole question of “should there be mardi gras?” is kind of silly, as if mardi gras were some centrally organized event that could be cancelled with the stroke of a pen. It is a thousand different ways of celebrating rising organically from a thousand small traditions. Even if the city had issued no parade permits, people would have still costumed and gathered and tossed beads and eaten king cakes and listened to jazz music and so on. No one would be able to stop us. And I just can’t believe the gall of of people who would say that we who have been through SO much don’t deserve a little fun. I no longer have a job, my house still needs a lot of work, and I’m still fighting with insurance companies to try to get the money I need for repairs. The reason I stay here is because I love this place, I don’t ever want to be from anywhere else, and so I’m going to stay and do my part to put this city back together. But it’s hard. It’s really really hard, and some days I do wonder if I can stick it out. I so badly needed this mardi gras to feel a little bit of what I love about this city, to remember why I’m slogging through this, to remind myself of what we cannot possibly let die.
Beth, I think you’ve missed a lot of the points I’ve made and are reacting to things I never said. I’ve never once, said that there’s a choice between housing or Mardi Gras, and neither has anyone I’ve linked to except for Charlotte Allen — and that’s a misstatement of Eugene Robinson’s positon. Allen chose to ignore the points that Robinson made to score some kind of South Park conservative points against liberals for spoiling everyone’s fun. I’ve certainly never come out and said that Mardi Gras shouldn’t be held this year, because I neither feel that way nor believe that it’s my place to tell anyone else what they should celebrate. I’m not sure why you seem to feel that I’m making that sort of pronouncement.
Robinson, you may remember, questioned the wisdom of holding lavish parades this year, but conceded the importance of it to ordinary people, a point that, again, Charlotte Allen chose to miss in order to score political points.
And, no, I don’t think that the black elite at the debutante balls were the same people in the Superdome — and again, I don’t know where you got that — but the fact remains that even the most prestigious black social clubs are hard-enough hit that their futures are uncertain, while the rich white krewes have hardly missed a step, which only points out the power disparity in the parallel systems. Like I said, debutante balls have their own issues of class, but they’re also an event that’s important to the power elite. If you can’t get into the events important to the power elite, you’re never going to be able to fully break into that elite — just as in the example I gave with the Favorite Sons of Ireland dinner, where women are shut out of a private event that nonetheless draws public power figures and reinforces their power and influence.
I hope you get your life back in order and your house repaired soon.
Hell yeah on above post, especially #4, #5 and #6.
lived in NOLA for 3 years and I went to Bourbon street a total of 3 times (once during Mardi Gras to make money off the tourists-only reason to be there. Also, the idea of cancelling Mardi Gras is completely ridiculous as I remember being a part of impromptu parades with the 9th Ward marching band during the week of Mardi Gras. It’s a celebration and I don’t know on person who cares if you have a permit of not.
Sorry, yeah, I’m definitely reacting to more than just this post. I read news from all over, and I’ve just been seeing so many reports and commentaries about us that have an undertone (or even a prominent theme) of: “look at the drunken morons partying while the city lies in ruins” and/or “the white folks are partying while the poor black folks have no place to live”. I think I just hit a tipping point here, and all the things I’ve been wanting to say for the past week or so just came pouring out…
And now, some good news: The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that early projections put this mardi gras’ economic impact on the city at +$200 million! We can certainly use it!
Where are you getting this? All I see is that the upper class blacks haven’t returned to the city yet, no cause is apparent to me.