Q&A with Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Written by Joe Longo
Tuesday, 14 July 2009 19:54

Dr. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African-American Studies at Princeton University, emerged as a nationally renowned political commentator in 2004, as a little known Chicago politician named Barack Obama was beginning to take his place on the national stage. She has embraced her public role in ways that demonstrate both her intellect and her keen understanding for how social media plays a role in 21st Century politics. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Lacewell found herself in a position to be an analyst of and an advocate for New Orleans. She is currenlty spending as much time as possible in the city, both to pursue her research and to assist, for reasons personal as well as political, James Perry's campaign for mayor of New Orleans. Dr. Lacewell took some time to talk with NOLAFugees about the past and future of the city.

NOLAFugees: You were on the ground in New Orleans shortly after Katrina in November of 2005. Can you explain a bit what you were doing?

Melissa Harris-Lacewell: I'd loved New Orleans before the storm. I had a best girlfriend in graduate school who is a native of New Orleans and she introduced the city to me. And so when the storm hit, like everyone in the country I was riveted by it and appalled by it. And I think also like many non-New Orleanians in the rest of the country I wanted to do something, but I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a doctor. I don't have any "usable skills." I'm a teacher and a researcher, so I came to New Orleans to do that. I was here during the same time that the Urban Land Institute was here developing their plan. I had a colleague who was part of the ULI board, so I came and stayed for a couple of weeks. I talked to dozens of survivors who were returning to the city at that point. I spent a lot of time just in the neighborhoods, did a lot of documenting of the destruction, and I also spent a lot of time at the ULI hearings, watching their process, watching how they were thinking about their role as mostly outsiders, and then ultimately watching the community's reaction to the initial ULI plan.

NF: What was their reaction?

MHL: For me, probably the most memorable moment was when a woman in the community stood up and put a root on everyone on the ULI board. It was clear that these, honestly, good spirited people--architects, planners, people who had been engaged in post 9/11 recovery--what they did was they came down and they holed up in the hotel, they took bus tours of the Lower 9th, they looked at the city with an eagle eye, and they made a bureaucrat's plan that didn't take into account the heart that is New Orleans. The community's reaction, at a time when we had still not recovered the bodies of the dead, peoples' family members were still trapped in their homes, to hear that those final resting places should become green space...painful is the only word I can use to describe it. My father was a community organizer and an urban planner. I've been in a lot of urban planning meetings in my lifetime, many of them intense, but this one had the most raw emotion and pain behind it.

NF: Your subsequent report cited a racial gap in perceptions about Katrina. Do you think that gap still exists, not only nationally but in the city itself?

MHL: Sure. I mean, this is the core of my work. Even just this morning, in the confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, she at one point said something like, "my race and ethnicity will impact the facts that I see." And so many of the Senators were jumping on her and saying, "what do you mean?" I think they were taking it as a normative statement as though she were saying, "I will purposely pick and choose what I see." I think instead what she was really saying was something more empirical. It is empirically true that there is an enormous perceptual divide between blacks and whites. It is not absolute, and in fact there are several social and economic indicators that allow white people to see the world more the way black people do and for black people to see the world more the way white people do. But on average, it's not just a matter of different opinions. We actually perceive the world differently. So is it true in the city of New Orleans? Absolutely. Is it true of the world's perception of the city of New Orleans? Of course. But it doesn't mean that it can't be bridged, and difference is not always bad, because with that kind of gap there's probably some truth in both perceptions. The thing that bridges it is common vocabulary, and that we don't have. I am still enough of an observer in New Orleans to not yet know whether or not New Orleans has a more common vocabulary for bridging it. I know we don't have it at the national level.

NF: This fall there'll be a whole new crop of college kids coming to the city for the first time. Could you give them a reading list to sort of give them an understanding of what they're moving into?

MHL: There are many terrific things to read, many of them directly about New Orleans and some of them about what it might mean to live in New Orleans post-Katrina. One of my favorite New Orleans texts is a little tiny history book called Carnival of Fury by William Ivy Hair. It's about the New Orleans race riot at the turn of the 20th century. It's a fascinating book in part because you'll see elements of contemporary 21st century New Orleans reflected in the early 20th century. And also you can really get a sense of how residential patterns, questions of crime, questions of race, all of those things that you feel in this story at the turn of the 20th century, still exist. There are also some great books on the geography of New Orleans and trying to understand it. Susan Cutter has a series of terrific books. College kids interested in environmental and green issues, which are central here in the city, should be reading [LSU professor Craig] Colten's book about the geography of New Orleans, as well as Robert Bullard's Dumping In Dixie, which is very much about the relationship between the American north and the American south relative to the siteing of locally undesirable land uses. I think it might be important for students who are not from New Orleans to read Mindy Fullilove's Root Shock. Her book is not about the city. It's actually about urban redevelopment in northern cities, Philadelphia and New York, but it's about how the destruction of communities and neighborhoods has a deep psychological impact on people. It's a terrific book to try to think about how a city, even years after the kind of displacement that happened with Katrina, would be coping.
NF: You're in New Orleans now for an extended period of time?

MHL: I am.

NF: I don't think it's a vacation because you emailed me this morning at 6am. What are you here for? What are you working on?

MHL: There are lots of reasons why I'm here. The center of my intellectual work, my advocacy work, and my teaching for the past four years has been the city of New Orleans. I've been here as much as I can be over that time, often bringing big groups of students with me. This time, though, it is both more personal and more political. I am here in large part to be an advocate for James Perry's mayoral campaign. I am also doing research while I'm in the city and I'm doing all of my normal press stuff, but those personal and intellectual endeavors are the second thing I'm doing. The number one thing I'm doing is being an advocate for James' campaign. And James is my beloved, so it is a personal trip in the sense that it's also an opportunity to spend extended time together.

NF: Can you name drop or endorse any places you've been to?

MHL: I go to as many places as I can. Where we are right now, here in Mid-City at CC's, I spend a lot of time when I'm Twittering or blogging. It's a really nice place to write, so this has been a center of action for me. James has a past in New Orleans music so he's definitely been introducing me to lots of music. We literally made ourselves disabled for a short period of time because we went to hear DJ Jazzy Jeff at the House of Blues last week. It was incredible, but it was also very loud, and we spent the next three days screaming at each other and at everyone else.

NF: Back to the mayor's race. How closely did you follow the 2006 mayoral elections?

MHL: Very closely. At that point my Katrina research had started, but also I had the privilege of beginning to develop a public voice by 2006. Part of what I was being called on to do was to have commentary about the mayor's race, particularly about the racial dynamics, and what it meant that national civil rights leaders and organizations had taken a position that the future of black New Orleans rested on the reelection of Mayor Ray Nagin, and what I perceived as a deeply misguided understanding about what race is, that it was about having a black body in the mayor's office, and a black body that would make particular kinds of racial statements on the national stage, that that constituted racial interest.

So what happened was, on the one hand this incredibly important work on the part of civil rights organizations to make sure that dislocated people were not disenfranchised, and to make sure that the people of New Orleans had a right to vote even though they'd been displaced and that they had a say in the future of their city even if they had not yet had the capacity to return. But that basic democratic right got mashed up in a very uncomfortable and inappropriate way with the reelection of Ray Nagin, because although I'm 100% supportive of that enfranchisement, this was a man who didn't even win with the majority of the black vote in his first race and who had never demonstrated a policy agenda interested in either racial or class equality. So it was an appalling and very difficult thing to watch.

NF: Is it too harsh of an accusation to say that Nagin co-opted that groundswell and used it?

MHL: I don't think that's too harsh at all. I think it's an absolutely accurate representation. As the Senators like to say, we can't know what's in a man's heart. I don't know whether the devastation that was Katrina changed Ray Nagin's perception about the position of blacks in New Orleans.

NF: What it did do was it changed his base. The 86% of white folk he could count on in '02 were looking somewhere else.

MHL: That would be the most ungracious reading, that it was simply politics, which I think is possible. It's also possible that he was deeply affected by what he saw and that it changed his understanding of what his role was as mayor. What I think would be a mistake, as deeply critical as I am of Ray Nagin, is to say that he did nothing right and accomplished nothing.

NF: Which has been the tack people have taken.

MHL: I actually think that's too far. But I don't think it's too far too say that he absolutely took advantage of the changing racial dynamic and of course the flood of money and national interest towards New Orleans.

NF: An interest that probably won't be replicated in 2010.

MHL: I do hope that we develop national interest in the campaign. I hope that people will not believe that these four years were the end, and that they'll recognize that there's still another chance, and that people across the country will get interested in the campaign.

NF: What are your intentions for the 2010 race in terms of your on-the-ground level of engagement. I know you've been pivotal in fundraising efforts, but what do you intend to do in the city itself?

MHL: I will do whatever is asked of me, but I'll also try to be very careful about my position as a Yankee and an outsider and a carpetbagger and all of those kinds of things. I'm trying to be completely honest about my position relative to the campaign, which is: I fell in love with New Orleans first, I fell in love with James Perry later, and now I’m in love with James' love for New Orleans. I think he is the best candidate regardless. I am convinced by who he is both personally and in terms of his policy advocacy. That said, I have to be really careful about the fact that even as a researcher, even as someone who in certain ways has professionally profited from the suffering of the people of New Orleans, out of respect for the people of New Orleans, part of my job will be to shut up and to listen.

NF: How is the fundraising going?

MHL: I think it's going well. The biggest challenge that James Perry faces is convincing people that he is going to be Mayor of New Orleans. I think the money will come as people begin to feel that. I watched Barack Obama from 1997 forward, so I'm not even a little bit anxious about it. I have no anxiety.

NF: Because there's a blueprint?

MHL: Not only is there a blueprint, but I see James win people over every time he talks to them. The effort is about being out there and meeting everybody. I really have no worries that the money will come. Also, I already know the stories that will be written about this race, about how somebody with nothing in terms of personal wealth is going to beat a bunch of people with all the money in the world to throw at the problem. What I think is that in the city of New Orleans in 2010, post-Katrina, post a second term of Ray Nagin, you cannot buy this election.

NF: You're obviously somebody who uses new media, social media, to do what it is you do. Is that something that you naturally gravitated toward, or is it something that like a lot of academics you were reluctant to embrace?

MHL: I love it. I was thinking about it this morning as I was Tweeting Sotomayor's confirmation hearings. I was like, for a little black girl who grew up talking to the movie screen, live Tweeting is the same thing. Just yelling at the TV screen, but for thousands of people. So, yeah, I really love new media. I appreciate social networks and their power, but I also find them very exhausting. Because I don't live in the hometown I grew up in and worked in during my 20s, because I'm a mobile person, social networking via new media has been very powerful. The other reason that I find new media powerful is it doesn't require or rely on traditional organizations to bless you. In certain ways that's more democratic and more merit-based. You don't become a heavily-followed Twitterer, for example, because you're important. There are, certainly, those kinds of people, but you can become heavily followed just by being a good Twitterer, by saying interesting things about interesting topics on a regular basis. I find the democracy and the flatness and the meritocracy of it all good.

NF: Do you sense a wide generational gap among public intellectuals? Do you find the previous generation is having a hard time adapting?

MHL: It's probably true that an older generation thinks about social networking in a different way. If you take, say, Cornel West...

NF: Does Cornel West Twitter?

MHL: Cornel West doesn't even answer his email, but he is an amazing social networker. He remembers everyone he meets. He looks people very carefully in the eye. And he smokes a hell of a lot of cigars all over the country with people. And that's how he builds it, and he's incredibly effective at it. I don't want to smoke nobody's cigar, and I really am very bad with names. But I am comfortable with a level of personal transparency that I do think an older generation, particularly of African-Americans, is not comfortable with. I talk about my daughter. I talk about going to see Jazzy Jeff with James.

NF: Does that come naturally or do you feel that's part of making a connection with people?

MHL: That's very natural for me, and it's also part of my intellectual commitment. A lot of my research is on psychology, and particularly on shame, and I'm a very strong advocate that we have a variety of political problems in this country that are the result of shame, both on the part of citizens and on the part of leaders, and that personal transparency is the single best antidote to shame. So it's both a political commitment and a personal preference on my part to be very transparent. But I think it's something that many are not comfortable with.

NF: You used to do a blog for The Root called "Down From the Tower." Do you envision at some point in your life receding from public life and going sort of back up the tower?

MHL: I have to say, I envision it all the time. There is not one thing in the world that I agree with Sarah Palin on, relative to politics, but I felt something for her in her insane departure from the governor's office. Whatever else she is, she is the mother of young children, as am I. I have a 7 1/2 year old daughter, and I pretty regularly recognize that there is a one-to-one trade off in the hour that I spend with my daughter versus the hour that I spend writing an op-ed. It's one thing to be doing the part of my job that pays me, my professional life as a professor. I don't have any guilt about that because I've got to feed my family. But I don't really make any money for the public part. I don't get paid to be on television. I don't get paid to write blogs. So that part definitely feels like a one-to-one tradeoff between the life that I'm trying to build, particularly with my daughter and my family, and the public stuff.

But it's just so good right now. I mean, you study African-American politics, you invest in a Ph.D, then your State Senator becomes President, and he nominates a Latina to the Supreme Court and then a black woman from Xavier to be Surgeon General. It's like every time I wanted to slow down...

NF: You don't want to get off the wave now?

MHL: No, it's too good right now. And my daughter, she's just become a little political wonk with me, and I hope she'll forgive me someday.