Alan Gutierrez

My invitation Storm Bridge workshop, a project of the Southern Institute of Tulane University, came to me through Michael Kane, whom I’ve come to know through my research on the Unified New Orleans Plan.

It was a non-confrontational workshop. Not one of those where they approach you like an addict in denial.

It discussed the human agency of the failure of Katrina. It presented ethnic conflict resolution strategies. There was a rational discussion of the social injustices of Katrina.

I was prepared for this discussion. In the year since the storm, when so much injustice has been presented as mere incompetence, when so much suffering has been presented as a grand opportunity to rebuild New Orleans, it has been a rapid disillusionment. I work with neighborhoods that are recovering as strongly as Mid-City and find that for all their hard work, they are handed a hard-line so that East New Orleans can be handed a line that is that much harder.

The gist of Storm Bridge, is that we can use the common suffering of Katrina to expand our caring for the welfare of others who suffered in other ways. We recognize that elderly persons experienced the storm differently, that a retiree who is rebuilding is experiencing the recovery differently than myself. Through my understanding of my Katrina year, I’m asked to imagine the additional challenges of a single mother with small children. I might be able to expand my understanding of the challenges faced by single parents as a matter of course.

What occurred to me, during Storm Bridge, was that I’d come to learn about racism through television.

There was an agenda in television programming in the 70’s. I was weaned on Seasame Street, the non-Muppet residents of which, looked an awful lot like the residents of Briarcliff.

There was message of tolerance in this children’s television was not so overt as it is today. It was simply the notion that in the street, you’re going to spend your time with different people. That checked with my reality. This was probably the most intelligent televised statement on race.

In Detroit, Michigan and again in the Detroit suburb of Huntington Woods, where I began to attend a private school in Detroit proper, there was enough of a mixture of race and religion in my upbrining that differences were the norm. I was never accutely aware of being in the majority. I never felt it necessary to dig in as hispanic, assert minority status.

There was no overt racism that I had to consider.

The only overt racism I saw took place on television.

All In The Family, where bigoty was characterized as immaturity, and that it would never stand to reason. When reason was rejected, then when faced with the humanity of the subject of bigotry, the bigot was bound to repent.

There were programs that would hit you over the head with the immorality of bigotry, often times from one episode to the next, the unrepentant bigot showdown was a staple of the 80’s sitcom with a moral.

This relentless string of straw man bigots, did little to prepare. In the face of true bigotry, I’m never quite certian how to react without the backing of a studio audience.

In Ann Arbor a discussion about race was a predictable parlor game.

The conversation would not be about race, actually, because that in itself is too selective. It would be about minorities. Such a conversation will climax like an episode of the Jeffersons, with the lighter skined or more trationally sexualy oriented person, the bigot, put firmly in their place. The participants would grasp for minority status, perhaps evoking their Irish heritage, on their grand-mothers side, or the Chippewa that manages to compose 1/16 of most Michganders.

A pantomime of this televised racial tension.

I’ve spent my weekend thinking of 1976. The sense that I had that racism was fading fast, that it was embodied by hapless bigots, does little to explain the lock-down on public housing, the one-way tickets to nowhere, or the barricade at the GNO bridge.

The year 1976 comes to mind, because it was the year we moved from 8 Mile in Detroit to 10 Mile in Oakland County, Royal Oak and/or Huntington Woods.

It has been a 11 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It had been 9 years since the City of Detroit burned and the 82nd Airborne were deployed to stem an unyielding civil disturbance. Coleman Young was elected Mayor in 1974 and disbanded Operation STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Our Streets), a plain-clothes police task force that had killed 17 African-Americans in 4 years. In 1975 the Livernois-Fenkell riot was quelled and subsequently forgotten, but speaks to the proximity of this otherworldly racial tension.