What's So Scary 'Bout New Orleans?: Masking Privilege and Power in the Big Easy

It's one am in the morning and I've just been released from my shift at the jazz club and restaurant where I work. After serving heaping dishes of Jambalaya and Crawfish Etoufee (etoufee, Brute?) and dubbing over in private the lines to the song being sung by tonight's musician, I am off to enjoy the fanfare in a city that practically invented costumes. In fact, the competition is so intense, I have decided to type cast myself as an overworked, trying-to-fit-in- newcomer to the city of New Orleans. I have my mask draped over my shoulder, my soiled apron in my backpack, and my red dress on. I am ready for my first night as more than a waitress, that is, as a human being.

Down past the French Quarter, swerving to avoid the revelers in matching provocation, dripping in sexuality. My crew sees quite a few priests and prostitutes, greasers and French maids and god knows what else. We careen around broken glass and rivers of beer. The frat party atmosphere leaves no one out, or alone for that matter. Musicians in masks push tip jars through the masses and their ethereal swaying in the nicotine haze feels dreamlike. Weeding through the garden gnomes and politically incorrect convicts and gangsters to find the more creative Halloween attire, I am catching my first glance of New Orleans at play.

Since I arrived in the city, I have had to do what most natives of the Crescent City do to survive: sell my soul to the restaurant devil. Yes, I wait hand and foot on New Orlean's wealthiest. Food on the left, drinks to the right, can I please kill myself for you for two dollars? Did you know I've waited my whole life just to clean up after you?

Yet, this is as real as it gets. I spent a long time thinking about coming to New Orleans, a culture and place so different from my home. While in Mississippi and Alabama I searched for clues about why I wanted to be a part of this masquerade. When activists from all over the country hopped on buses and planes after Katrina to be a part of the relief (and often, a part of the relieved), I did not feel compelled to leave my work in Maine. It felt like the work I was doing was a still a swirling, churning hurricane over our heads. Katrina only added to that disaster, and New Orleans felt so far away. Besides, the skills I had were better put to use elsewhere. Or so I thought.

And now, here I am, preparing for Mardi Gras in January in a distant city, singing with a band and making decisions about my life here for the next year. My own parade through the United States has never been as difficult as it has been for me in New Orleans. And Katrina is really only part of the equation.

I'm about to get really real, y'all. When I arrived in New Orleans, I still believed I could travel this country and not get really vulnerable. I thought I could balance my own poverty, work as a farmer and god knows what else and still be analytical. I still believed I could dance through the streets with my new freedom in cowgirl boots and not trip over the grooves left by power and privilege.

And I knew that what I would encounter in New Orleans would challenge and mold me. And not just because of Katrina- because of centuries of racism. I knew that the work I came to do- understand how to use my language privilege to provide health, safety and access to a new and growing group of Central American and Mexican day laborers- would have me questioning how I practice my politics.

I also learned very quickly- and got angry!- that the story of Katrina in New Orleans is not for the outsider to tell. I am not an expert, I was not here, moreover I stand humbled by the city and the resistance of its population. I refuse to tell it, except to ask, what is the Katrina in my homeland? With that message fixed to my heart like a nametag, I cry, "Hello, my name is Sarah and I'm starting with the story of my own privilege!"

So it was that I came to work in the blessed French Quarter, often riding my bike through a river of beads, fighting the urge not to scare off the tourists. I began to realize- and internalize- my place within this mafioso world of big money and big tradition. No matter what my background, my immediate financial situation saw me absorbed into a culture of racism and oppression. I was part of an all-white crew of servers, although I mostly hung out with the Black dishwasher and prep cook. I learned the ins and outs of the "back room" and the "front room" in the restaurant and even observed the separate relationships of wealth across race. I struggled with the decision to continue, because I knew I might have more freedom to choose. And then I didn't- my rich white male boss touched me inappropriately and then promptly stopped talking to me when I confronted him (we do things differently in the South) and I overdrew my bank account, made no money and had to leave the restaurant. I quickly became another desperate person in New Orleans- definitely with more privilege- but still, desperate.

As I waded through the restaurant and other options, my anxiety coursing through my veins like a bad trip, I experienced the other side of the Big Easy. Dripping with insecurity and inexperience here, I was not hired. It was as if they could taste my impoverished fear like a fine house wine. I was advised not to tell anyone I had left the first restaurant, as I would be marked for failure. When I finally was hired at a club, it was the worst possible situation I could have imagined, and I continued to face my failure.

The reason I am explaining my own story is because I want to be honest. I joined a group called the Anti-Racist Working Group here in New Orleans, a group of people who identify with having white privilege and want to do work with other white people. When I started to participate in this group, I struggled to explain my own intimate experience within this power structure. Whenever I applied to businesses in the Quarter, my race mattered. In fact, it entered first through the door. I wanted to talk about this, but I quickly realized that my current economic reality and bad luck distinguished me from other white people who were making it in the Big Easy. Why had I become afraid to just get out there and do what I had to do to survive while working for this really great free clinic intent on practicing health care with anti-racist principles? Didn't I know that most people in New Orleans had to do this type of work to survive? What made me so special?

I am still learning that the message of being in a Big Easy, turn-your-head kind of place is about access. Who has it, who doesn't. Even the message of Carnival has been about access for religious people unto days of free-spirited wildness. Some days I feel like I understand New Orleans, some days I just feel humbled by even riding my boat to the ferry. The beads are not the only things in my way; I have years of oppression caused by racist white people to ride through. (And ride through it I will...not around it or beside it).

The music, the heat off the bayous, riding decorated bicycles through neighborhoods crowded with multi-colored shutters...this is a culture so distinct from my own. I always imagine that while my own state lay dormant in winter, tons of plants and wildlife was springing into action on every little patch of earth in New Orleans. I am still asking myself if I can be a resource for anyone in this wonderful, difficult city, as she teaches me in so many ways to put down my masks of privilege and security to hear her tell her own story.