New Orleans Suite. Lewis Watts

or society events, but there is a much more communally focused tradition of second lining in black neighborhoods that is sponsored by social aid and pleasure clubs, some of which have also been around since the late nineteenth century. There are approximately forty active clubs at present, although many club members are still displaced by Hurricane Katrina and the policies that defined its aftermath. Each typically sponsors a yearly Sunday parade—some of which drew as many as five thousand people before the storm—but the clubs also hold dances and other functions and may parade for other reasons, such as jazz funerals.

      These continually evolving, community-based second line events have long played important social roles in black New Orleans. Although diverse interests and orientations inform these participatory rituals, collectively they may be understood as facilitating a sense of connection to place, affirming members’ neighborhoods and their histories, constituting alternative forms of community and civil society, reclaiming urban space for the community in the face of material and symbolic marginalization as well as police and drug trade violence, and engaging in implicit and occasionally explicit political protest against police brutality, gentrification, and other issues facing black working-class and poor people.³¹

      As noted, second line clubs and Mardi Gras Indian performers have been featured onstage since the first Jazz Fest and continue to be central to its identity. They provide a kind of anchoring authenticity, as Helen Regis and Shanna Walton point out, that legitimizes the festival as remaining true to its roots and committed to its community, even with all the corporate sponsorship and big-name pop acts. Second line parades that snake across the Jazz Fest grounds create a sense of spontaneous community, again reproducing the aura of the early years and enabling fans to become performers in a sense. Mardi Gras Indian parades not only “infuse the atmosphere with the sacred mystery of their masquerade,” but they also evoke a legacy of “maroonage,” interracial (i.e., black/indigenous) collaboration, and diasporic cultural memory and pride.³²

      And given that at least some members of these social aid and pleasure clubs and Indian groups see it as their mission to share and generate respect for their musical traditions and their communities by making these rituals more public and by reaching out across racial and class lines, we may see in these Jazz Fest performances and exhibitions after the storm a kind of grassroots attempt, with official support, to cash in these cultural resources as a means of generating wider respect for and knowledge about New Orleans's working-class black communities that could go hand in hand with an equitable reconstruction of the city.³³

      Equitable reconstruction, of course, has not been the dominant trend since the storm. The suddenly apparent social conditions of poor (primarily black) people in New Orleans brought to light, for many, not only the white supremacist legacies of slavery and Jim Crow but also the continuing effects of a generation of deindustrialization, urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and neoliberal social and economic policies (cuts in education, health care, and welfare), often enacted against and justified through the lives of the black urban poor. So did the subsequent horrors many people experienced because of the government's slow and limited response to the crisis; officials’ failure to improvise around bureaucratic roadblocks; the “passive indifference” and outright hostility toward poor black New Orleanians expressed by local, state, and federal officials; and the privileging of corporate profits rather than workers’ or residents’ rights through no-bid contracts, tax relief, and the relaxation of labor and environmental laws during the initial phases of rebuilding.³⁴

      

      Yet the fact that others read the government's failures as proof that the state should play a smaller role in society (outside of the military and criminal justice system, that is) illustrated the effectiveness of the power elite's cultural work around neoliberalism. Also serving the project of neoliberalism was the media hysteria surrounding black people's behavior during and after the event, which began with reports that they were irresponsibly slow to evacuate, continued through racially differentiated descriptions of removing food from shuttered grocery stores, and culminated with hysteria over a perceived return to savagery in the Superdome. Such media coverage played a functional role, justifying the state's neglect after the fact and reproducing the idea that black people represent a continuing threat to civil society.

      In the wake of such devastation and representation, discussions about how New Orleans will be rebuilt and just who will populate the city in the future have been paramount. Local residents and activists across the country have argued eloquently for a right of return for all New Orleanians, regardless of race, class, or status as homeowners, as well as for their visions for the city to be realized when reconstructing the city. Yet, from the very beginning, the reconstruction of New Orleans, whether by design, indifference, or incompetence, has seemed geared toward excluding at least some of its lower-income population, especially poor black residents receiving some form of public assistance. Many New Orleanians are still displaced seven years after the storm. According to the 2010 census, the city's population is only 70 percent of its 2000 level. The number of displaced people, who are disproportionately black and poor, is no doubt greater than that represented by a 30 percent population loss, as there has also been an in-migration of Latino/a workers, young white professionals, and others. Mayor Ray Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB) defined the terms of reconstruction for the first several months after Katrina. While the commission included Wynton Marsalis—the trumpeter/composer and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who was born and raised in New Orleans—and allies who publicly argued that all neighborhoods should be restored, others on the commission, primarily local business elites, voiced an exclusionist agenda. The BNOB report, released several months after the storm, suggested that it might not be economically or environmentally feasible to bring back certain neighborhoods, like the Lower Ninth Ward, giving validation instead to efforts to downsize the city, focusing redevelopment on its wealthier, higher grounded, and generally whiter areas, and making the city more amenable to corporate investment.