Alan Gutierrez

From a recent thread in the New Orleans bloggers listserv called Historic Artifact, two known remaining references to Jim Crow in New Orleans. The door of a one time hardware store in the Quarter by Derick. Above a doorway on Commerce St by Bart. Is it so common to find in other Southern cities or is this because our paint likes to peel?

“That’s why I don’t read comments. Because of the things that people say about people who look like me. Half of the comments are people saying things about people that look like me. The other half are people defending people who look like me poorly. Only 10% sound reasonable when they talk about people that look like me. At least I hope it’s 10%.”

We were talking about the release of the murderer of Dinneral Shavers. I was proposing the creation of a website that would chronicle the lack of progress of criminals through our court system. People would comment on the reports.

I was showing a friend of mine, who is African-American, the lucid and constructive dialog in the Road Home Questions post of Think New Orleans. I wanted to make that point that you could have a productive conversation about a contentious subject on the web.

Unfortunately, we’d followed a series of links that brought us to a NOLA.com blog post. The comments were ugly.

She then explained why she does not read comments on the web.

The Promise of Social Media

I beseech people to publish their recovery research and recovery experiences on the web. I am a professional beseecher. If you post it on the web, the magic of search will connect you with people near and far, who can help you with insight and information. It just like email, but you put “To Whom It May Concern” in the recipient field, and the search engines deliver. If you post it, when people search for information, there will be an alternative to the punditry and opinions; your own honest New Orleans voice, your experience.

It’s called social media.

With this exchange, I finally felt the long overdue embarrassment at having advocated communication on the web, when it is so obviously associated with racism in the minds of my fellow citizens.

Which is where I’ll start my series on anti-social media.

The Forum of Last Resort

Social media is at a stand still in New Orleans. People equate online dialog with the racist bile that courses through the comments sections of NOLA.com, the affiliate website of the The New Orleans Times-Picayune.

That website is in a difficult position, because they are affiliated with the one major newspaper in our city. If they were to apply strict moderation they would be accused of censorship. They would offend their potential customers.

They do not moderate much. Only the most blatantly offensive comments are pruned. The ordinary offensive comments stay, and ward off anyone who might have something intelligent to say. It does not serve as a model of public dialog.

In fact, it ends up serving as dumping ground. A forum of a last resort.

The Internet is only place in New Orleans where these horrible can be said publicly, therefore people who harbor horrible sentiments make full use of their only public outlet. NOLA.com becomes the voice of racism. New Orleanians think of the Internet as a place where these true colors fly.

The Promise of Moderation

After a year in New Orleans, the people who I beseech have come to understand that there is a value to web publishing. People see my web publishing efforts as worthwhile, but for what reasons exactly, I’m not yet certain. After a year in New Orleans, I have come to understand that the people I beseech have every reason to avoid web publishing.

I counter their objections with a promise of moderation. Since this conversation, I moderate more than ever.

Racism is just the obvious example of unsavory dialog that keeps people from opening their web browser. There are other many reasons to avoid anonymous unmoderated web conversations. If it is a subject you hold dear, such as the recovery of your school or neighborhood, an unmoderated web forum is no place to present your information. It is pointless. No one of consequence reads those comments. All you’ll get in response to your contribution will be either dismissive or vindictive or somewhere in between.

For Your Eyes Only

New Orleans is a blur of information and Internet communication. It takes place in email. The Internet protocol of choice for New Orleans SMTP, not HTTP. The address on the email message assures you that the recipient will be of one of those 10% who has something reasonable to contribute to issues you hold dear.

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.

Our new City Council Member, Stacy Head, has asked Erace New Orleans to particpate in easing racial tension in the City of New Orleans. Erace New Orleans is an organization that was formed in 1992 to foster open discussions about race issues in our city. It’s wonderful that the city recognizes this effective, indigenous effort..