Sneak Preview Screening of "Race" This Tuesday Night

RACE, A documentary film by Katherine Cecil, will have a sneak preview screening this Tuesday, February 23, at 6:00pm, at the Lawless Memorial Chapel, at Dillard University, 2600 Gentilly Blvd. The screening is hosted by the Political Science Department at Dillard.

From the film publicity:

The Saints have just won the Super Bowl, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu is Mayor-elect of New Orleans, and a prominent local journalist has suggested that New Orleans could now be on the cusp of post-racial politics.

But while 45% of registered white voters turned out to vote in the 2010 election, only 28% of registered African-American voters cast ballots, a sharp contrast to the election of 2006 in which many more voters turned out despite unprecedented obstacles.

'RACE' is a documentary film about the first election held in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The film examines the intersection of race and politics post-disaster and explores how Ray Nagin was re-elected from a completely different base than had previously supported him in 2002. This Sneak Preview is generously hosted by the Dillard Political Science Department, and will be followed by a panel discussion. Please come and give your feedback!

For information about the screening, contact Dr. Gary Clark (504)-816-4094. For information about the documentary, contact Katherine Cecil (504)-584-9028, or visit the film's website: http://racethedocumentary.com.

Analysis of Race in the 2006 Mayoral Election, Part Three, By Katherine Cecil

As we enter the final days before New Orleans' historic municipal elections, Louisiana Justice Institute presents excerpts from Race, Representation, and Recovery: Documenting the 2006 New Orleans Mayoral Elections, by Katherine Cecil. We believe her analysis of the 2006 elections forms an important basis for understanding the current election.

In 2006, twenty-nine years after Moon Landrieu had left office, the pattern of coalition building looked as if it might radically change. The 2006 Primary election involved an inordinate number of challengers to Nagin’s re-election bid, and these twenty-three challengers reinforced the idea that to many white election observers, this election would be a referendum on the incumbent’s leadership skills as tested during hurricane Katrina. However to many African-American election observers and to Nagin’s chief campaign manager, the veteran political strategist Jim Carvin, the large number of white candidates running constituted a continuation of a re-assertion of narrow racial interests first signaled by the moneyed class within the white community in the early days following Katrina. Concerning this economically influential group that had backed Nagin in 2002, Carvin said, “They were delusional. They thought that they could re-capture City Hall, and I’m really talking about the moneyed class in New Orleans. They felt that Nagin was so crippled that he could not win.”

In the months following the storm, numerous articles and essays began to appear on the Internet referencing conspiracies to whiten New Orleans, and many attested to these as “real and substantial fears.” National print and online media reported talk of a “new” New Orleans which had began to surface within conversations amongst the largely white, wealthy, and Uptown populations that had returned to the city for the most part unscathed. Combined with the stark shift in New Orleans demographics, it was therefore little wonder that within the months following the storm locals would also witness the fracturing of a more inclusive rebuilding rhetoric, and this had fundamental implications upon how the 2006 elections played out. These less than inclusive interests at the hands of a hitherto white minority had been voiced in the early days after Hurricane Katrina, within a series of closed-door meetings in Dallas and Houston in which the meetings’ organizers had done little to reach out to prominent African-American officials in exile, and one of these meetings was widely publicized by print and online media outlets after the fact.

The most written about example of these sentiments was Christopher Cooper’s Wall Street Journal article titled “Old-Line Families Escape Worst of Flood And Plot the Future,” where Cooper quotes former Nagin supporter and Regional Transit Authority head James Reiss:

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

Reiss was Chairman of the majority white New Orleans Business Council and before moving into the world of money management and real estate he ran a lucrative automation and control systems manufacturer called TANO Corp for thirty years, and is defined by many sources as the archetypal old-line Uptown New Orleanian with downtown business interests; successful, well-connected, influential, and powerful behind the scenes of several mayoral campaigns, including Mayor Nagin’s 2002 election run.

The sentiments reported by Cooper in the WSJ article were in some shape or form shared by a significant number of prominent white citizens. Whether due to the dramatic alterations in racial demographics resulting from Hurricane Katrina, the outrage felt by vocal white citizens following the ineptitude of early disaster recovery, or as a mark of outright opportunism, the 2006 Mayoral Election involved an unprecedented number of white candidates qualifying. This factor had particularly interesting significance due to a trend noted by political scientists that “the historic pattern among New Orleans mayoral elections [is that] black mayoral candidates receive a majority of the vote cast by whites only in the absence of a viable white contender.”

Taking little account of the concerns of the predominantly African-American Diaspora, such opinions were first vocalized by prominent men within the white business community, and were then further voiced by the early rebuilding plans of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC), a body primarily made up of citizens appointed by Mayor Nagin before it had become apparent that he had lost support from within the white conservative community. Nagin had established the BNOBC following Katrina, and its purpose was to “finalize a master plan to advise, assist and plan the direct funding on the rebuilding of New Orleans.” The BNOBC’s mission statement specified its goal as directed “uniquely for every citizen;” however, the most controversial aspects of the plan did not represent the interests of those who had suffered most during the flooding.

(You can read the complete essay online here.)

Born in the UK, and living in New Orleans since 2001, Katherine Cecil began her film career as a researcher and field producer. She formed her small company CecilFilm Productions shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and is currently working as a co-producer on a documentary looking into recent changes to the New Orleans public school system.

Race, Representation, and Recovery in the New Orleans Mayor's Race, by Katherine Cecil

As we enter the final week before New Orleans' historic municipal elections, Louisiana Justice Institute presents excerpts from Race, Representation, and Recovery: Documenting the 2006 New Orleans Mayoral Elections, by Katherine Cecil. This important paper formed the basis of much of Cecil’s research in completing her soon-to-released documentary RACE, on the same subject. We believe her analysis of the 2006 elections forms an important basis for understanding the current election.

In 2002, Ray Nagin was elected mayor of New Orleans with 86 percent of the white vote, and 38% of the African-American vote. In 2006, Mayor Nagin was re-elected with 83.3 percent of the African-American vote and just 20 percent of the white vote.

Race, Representation and Recovery explores the rhetorical and visual manifestations of race as they figured in the months prior to and within the 2006 New Orleans mayoral election discourses.

INTRODUCTION, PART ONE

Since the end of Maurice “Moon” Landrieu’s term in May 1978, New Orleans had seen black leadership in City Hall, but suddenly, this pattern looked set to change. In the run up to the qualifying period for the 2006 mayoral elections, it had become apparent that the city's 484,674 population had been reduced to perhaps a third of this with citizens displaced all over the United States. The pre-Katrina racial demographic percentages of 66.6% African-American and 26.6% white, had now changed to a more even balance between the races. In the 2006 primary election there was a 15.8 percent decline in black registered voters since the 2002 mayoral runoff in contrast to a 5.1 percent decline in the number of white registered voters. Academic studies have shown that in cities where the racial makeup of voters is “racially competitive,” or at more even levels, racially divided or “block voting” is at its most pronounced. New Orleans mayoral election observers witnessed this factor in 2006, but other dynamics came into play to make this election more complex.

A large number of displaced and returned residents thought that a mayoral election should not even take place until enough people could return home, and that holding one at this time violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which stated that no practice or procedure could deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race or color. To these concerned citizens, the election was therefore illegal. Other factors arose in 2006 that were to draw historical comparisons with direct disenfranchisement techniques such as the poll tax or literacy tests that were used in the past by white officials to minimize African-American voter participation in the South. There was also convincing evidence that the lack of sufficient government funding to assist the Secretary of State in reaching out to displaced voters violated the international Convention on Civil and Political Rights. In a historically racially polarized environment made worse by the horrors of Katrina, how would the rhetorical and visual manifestations of race factor into these historic elections?

As a result of the Federal levee failures, hundreds of thousands of citizens had become evacuees scattered throughout nearly every state of the Union, and as the re-manned pumping stations drained the water from within Orleans Parish, Americans witnessed bickering and finger pointing between leaders at city, state, federal, and presidential levels. To add to this, the deplorable situation so many citizens found themselves in during the immediate aftermath of the storm exacerbated an already racially polarized city, opening up old wounds of suspicion and distrust. After the evacuation of many flood survivors, New Orleanians were then stranded outside of Louisiana in the hundreds of thousands, many separated from their jobs, identification, mailboxes, or permanent addresses.

Furthermore, prior to Hurricane Katrina, a vast number of New Orleans citizens had been living well below the national poverty line, which meant that a significant number of evacuees did not have the benefit of a savings account, transportation, e-mail, or internet access, and many slept on air mattresses waiting for FEMA hurricane relief checks in order to secure a rental for themselves and their children. These citizens, who were the worst off after the storm, were overwhelmingly African-American.

The post-disaster difficulties experienced by those in involuntary exile during the early months following the storm and their struggles in recreating the necessities vital to the recreation of a healthy environment for themselves and their loved ones cannot be overstated. The extensive flooding that resulted from the levee failures had devastated hundreds of thousands of lives and homes. It disrupted the basic functions of the city from the rule of law to the normal school day. It had also destroyed hundreds of polling stations and voting machines, and less than six months after the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the Hurricane, and just over two months following the presentation of a controversial plan advocating the shrinking of the city’s geographical footprint, New Orleans entered into the 2006 Mayoral election cycle. Numerous national and international news outlets maintained the correspondents they had put in place following Katrina, and this local election captured national and even international audiences.

(A second excerpt from this essay will be posted tomorrow. You can read the complete essay online here.)

Born in the UK, and living in New Orleans since 2001, Katherine Cecil began her film career as a researcher and field producer. Cecil has worked on programs and news shows for PBS, Louisiana Public Broadcasting, National Geographic, Associated Press, Greek public television, and Democracy Now!, and was Field Producer and Associate Producer on the documentary “LINDY BOGGS: STEEL & VELVET.” She formed her small company CecilFilm Productions shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and is currently working as a co-producer on a documentary looking into recent changes to the New Orleans public school system. Cecil is a member of the National Press Photographers Association, the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters, and the Press Club of New Orleans, and holds degrees from City and Guilds of London Art School, University College London, Tulane University, and the University of New Orleans.