New Orleans: Occupied Territory

Printed in Objector Magazine

By Walidah Imarisha

The streets of New Orleans’ lower 9th ward are eerily silent when I am there in early October. This part of the city is still closed and only my press pass got me in to shoot footage for a documentary on the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The only other people I see are National Guard who have taken over a barracks in the heart of the 9th ward as their headquarters. The oppressive quiet is broken only by the sound of their hummers and helicopters.

The streets are littered with overturned cars, uprooted trees and a white-foamed toxic mud everywhere. Doors stand ajar and contents of the houses that are not in the streets lay in complete chaos inside the darkened buildings. Black mold creeps up inside walls, coated baby pictures and diplomas, in some places an inch thick.

Outside one house I see a dead dog that has lain there so long in the hot Louisiana sun it has congealed in parts, and from the rancid stench in the air, it is clear there are human bodies in these houses (a sizeable percentage of which have still not been searched for corpses) that are in the same state.

As I am leaving the lower 9th, I pass four National Guardsmen hanging out by their truck, leaning and talking and laughing seemingly without a care in the world, right in front of a house that had completely collapsed from the flood. This is the image I take with me of the National Guards’ presence in New Orleans.

New Orleans was the most militarized environment I have been in since I lived on military bases growing up. Driving around the French Quarter and downtown it became impossible to count all the military vehicles and personnel you saw. In addition, there were law enforcement from all over the country, from New York to Texas to California, state police, troopers, DEA, ATF, Department of Forestry, all of them drafted into “keeping law and order,” which translated into creating a police state.  

New Orleans at that time was still mostly closed off, people were not allowed to return (supposedly, the city is back open but people, especially black folks who lived in working class areas, are still finding it difficult to return home). There were checkpoints set up even after the city re-opened. Curfew was in effect from sun down till sun up, and arrests were being made constantly.

I went to the jail (which was the Greyhound/Amtrak station, converted for us as a holding facility because the old jail flooded) and filmed there, and interviewed people being released. The vast majority of people were there for curfew violations, they were people of color, they were working class, and many of them alleged they were beaten and/or pepper sprayed, either by the arresting officers or in the prison. Many said they were denied their phone call, forced to sleep on concrete floors in the cold with only one blanket.

Court conditions were just as abysmal. I do work against the prison industrial complex system and I have been appalled about the kind of defense you receive when you are working class. I didn’t think it could get any worse. New Orleans showed me otherwise. Defendants were brought in in groups of twenty to thirty. The public defender addressed them as a group, and told them they could plead guilty to their misdemeanor charges and take 40 hours of community service, or they could plead not guilty and go to Hunts Prison to await their trial, which could take up to three weeks. Everyone I saw plead guilty.

This is the essence of a police state, where the system has ripped away its façade of fairness and equality. The floods and storms in the gulf created an opportunity for a complete reshaping of New Orleans, and it is clear that the government and corporations involved want to remake it for business and for the upper class, and wish to get rid of the poor and the people of color who made the city what it is. New Orleans, the south and this country was built on the theft of Native land, on the backs of black slaves, on the labor of Asian populations, on the exploitation of Latino and other immigrant hands. Poverty is intricately tied everywhere, but especially in the south, with a history of slavery and genocide. To talk about rebuilding New Orleans and eliminating poor people from that equation can only be a veiled way to talk about eliminating people of color from the city. The only way the city can do this is with the support of force, the militarization of the police and the presence of the National Guard.

As an anti-military and counter recruitment organizer, it was difficult interviewing person after person who said how much respect and props they give to the National Guard and other military personnel who were involved in relief and rescue efforts. Everyone acknowledged the culpability of the military and the government as a whole, because the funds that were earmarked for strengthening the levees instead were diverted to the war in Iraq. But still many of the organizers said the National Guard have acted as a buffer between residents and survivors, and the New Orleans Police Department, reknowned for their brutality and corruption. I did not know what to think or how to feel hearing an organizer with the group I was volunteering with, The Common Ground Collective, say the National Guard helped protect the collective from a gang of white vigilantes who used the flood as an excuse to terrorize the black neighborhood, with the unofficial approval of the NOPD.

Next to the rabidly racist New Orleans Police Department (who were captured on video tape two weeks after Rita beating a 64 year old black man until his blood ran in the streets), the National Guard often seemed like a walk in the park, though I did hear several reports of them being rude and rough with people. Whenever we went to the distribution centers for supplies, they would help load our vans up, they gave volunteers rides around town, they stopped the police from arrested a group of CGC volunteers for no reason.

But this is not the full story, these individuals acting human in spite of their uniform and circumstances. I know we have all heard the stories about rapes occurring down there in NOLA. Very frighteningly, the only story I heard from a woman while down there about being assaulted was about being assaulted by someone in the National Guard right after the flooding.

I met a brotha down there who was part of a group called the Soul Patrol, which was just a group of residents who came together and saved hundreds of people boats they either had or appropriated during the storm. He and others like him went out every day in the waters, exposing himself over and over again to the polluted contaminated water, wading chest deep, to get folks to safety. He said that after five days, the military transport helicopters dropped them hard rock candy. That was the assistance to their rescue efforts. He said they were repeatedly harassed and threatened by NOPD, who said they were looters.

While I was there, I did not see a single military personnel (or any government "official" personnel by the way) aiding in rebuilding NOLA: not one roof tarped, not one street cleaned, not one child fed (unless they were doing it without orders, and in sometimes in violation of their direct orders). What I did see was National Guard encouraging people who had stayed through the flood or come back afterwards to leave, to get out of NOLA, to abandon their homes so speculators can buy them up cheap. They were basically serving as an eviction force. Instead of going into those houses in the lower 9th, clearing out the bodies and trying to make it liveable for the people who could return, they were working to push out people who had weathered the hurricanes.

Having the National Guard’s presence creates the atmosphere that NOLA is occupied territory. Seeing people walking around with automatic weapons strapped to them, whether or not they have live ammo in the chamber, does not create an inviting scene. Having to through military checkpoints, barbed wire and pass the inspection of armed guards just to get some relief supplies is extremely frightening and discouraging, no matter how polite an individual guard may be once you get through, especially given the history of people of color and the military and armed guards in this country. It conjures memories and realities of night riders, lynch mobs, ropes and the sickening smell of burning flesh.

When I was in New Orleans, we went to the large distribution center in the Algiers neighborhood which was called Mardi Gras World (it was a sort of open air museum to Mardi Gras before the hurricanes). We would go there for water to redistribute. But you had to go through a military checkpoint basically to access it. Some of the soldiers are straight here from Iraq, some of them are headed to Iraq or Afghanistan or Colombia... They will see the destruction the government caused here and they will make that people get a little bit of aid and none of the power, and then they will go overseas to cause the destruction this government plans and make sure the people get nothing but bombs and land mines and rubble, and you have to deal with that reality just to get your supplies. Mardi Gras World moved tons of supplies there, but as Don another Common Grounder I went with pointed out, why do you need armed guards around free supplies?

More than raising questions about individuals or even the National Guard as a hole, we have to look at our military industrial complex and hold it accountable. We hold it accountable for spending money that should have been spent shoring up the levees on an imperialist war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We hold it accountable for being the only alternative to ending up in prison given to young people of color and poor youth. We hold it accountable for the environmental devestation wreaked around the globe that has created global warming and changed weather patterns. We hold it accountable for caring more about making sure communities are “policed” rather than that communities are empowered. We can not separate the occupation of New Orleans and the rest of the South from the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, and countless other points on the globe.