All of us at “Teaching The Levees” want to wish our friends a peaceful holiday season and a happy new year — we’ll be back with more commentary in 2008.

In the meantime, you can peruse any of the more than 30 blogs we’ve posted since going online in September. It’s not too late to post a comment on any topic, so feel free to let us know what you think.

We end 2007 on a slightly sad note (depending on how you feel about the series): it looks as though K-Ville will not be returning to Fox television, even if the writers’ strike is settled. After only ten episodes, the show has not yet officially been canceled, but its prospects for return seem even worse than the Saints’ chances of making the NFL playoffs. (Click here for commentary from the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s TV columnist, Dave Walker.)

Personally, I thought the show was visually exciting and gave viewers a captivating view of New Orleans, and both the soundtrack and performances were great. But the writing was, in a word, horrendous. (In the final episode, for example, a reporter from a newspaper resembling The New York Times takes a flash picture while a police unit hides outside a house on a very dark street on a stakeout. Sorry, but no one is that stupid, not even a newspaper reporter.) If they hire some new writers and give the show the kind of edge it needs (as a show about a very edgy city), it might find its second wind. But that appears unlikely to happen.

Nothing in post-Katrina New Orleans, it seems, is easy.

The open wound that is New Orleans post-Katrina showed the world exactly how raw it still is yesterday. For the first time since I can remember, a network nightly news broadcast led with a story from that city, highlighting the violent encounter between police and protesters outside City Hall as the City Council inside voted unanimously to proceed with plans to raze four public housing projects and replace them with mixed-use, mixed-income developments. (For coverage of Thursday’s events, click here, here, and here.)

Viewers who witnessed the news footage saw the anger and desperation of the protesters, who are convinced that the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s plans for the sites are a thinly-veiled plan to rid New Orleans of its poor African-American population.

“It is beyond callous, and can only be seen as malicious discrimination,” Kali Akuno of the Coalition to Stop the Demolition, told the BBC. “It is an unabashed attempt to eliminate the black population of New Orleans.”

Whether or not one agrees with Akuna is really beside the point. What matters is that a considerable throng of protesters at Thursday’s hearing, and numerous social action groups — such as Katrinaaction.org, which has labeled HUD’s redevelopment plan “an act of racial cleansing” — believe it wholeheartedly. As educators, we have an obligation to provide our students with a context in which they can begin to understand where these activists are coming from and why their passions have been so aroused by HUD’s redevelopment plans.

Why, for example, can’t these protesters accept that there are people of good faith who genuinely want to help poor residents of the city and sincerely believe the redevelopment plans are in their best interests? (Council Member Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, who is featured in When The Levees Broke and spoke at the launch of the “Teaching The Levees” curriculum in September, voted to raze the projects; the plan was also supported by several tenant groups from those same projects, who believe they provide sub-standard housing and should be replaced.)

Might it have something to do with the general attitude of New Orleans’ poor African American residents toward the government after their experience with Katrina?

As Pamela Mahogany, a former resident of the St. Bernard project, told reporters Thursday, “I lived in it all my life. I have no trust in the federal government, I have no trust in the city council and I have no trust in HUD.”

(Then again, when a member of the City Council (Shelley Midura) calls the protesters “demagogues and terrorists,” one can see how it might be a bit difficult for them to believe their concerns are being taken seriously.)

What was not visible at Thursday’s hearing, but what is clearly visible to anyone who has waded through the mass of online commentary about the New Orleans housing debate, is the number of residents of the city who view the poor African-American residents of the projects as “criminals,” and “animals,” and “too lazy to get a job” and are, indeed, very happy to see those projects excised from the city’s landscape.

“Now it’s time to tear those projects down and sweep the trash out of New Orleans. Then replace the old housing with something for people that have the means to afford a house so they can move in and contribute to the City’s continued rebirth,” read one comment.

“This wasn’t about race. This was about destroying cancerous infections that destroyed neighborhoods and lives,” said another.

Once again, whether or not one agrees with these viewpoints is not the point. The point is that they exist. And they exist — the whole range of them — in every classroom in the nation. We all have students in our classrooms who harbor attitudes of intolerance without even being aware of the racism inherent in them. Do we simply shut them up?

We have an obligation to force our students to confront their own biases and perceptions and tackle a whole range of nagging, persistent questions: Why do so many Americans blame the poor for their situation and think of them as “criminals” and “animals”? Why do so many African Americans mistrust the motives of the federal government? How much of an obligation does the government truly have to provide decent housing for the poor? Who gets to decide what is in the best interest of a city, or state, or town, or country?

The sad reality is that the way things work too often in this country these days is that perspectives on all sides of an issue spend far too much time shouting past each other and far too little time trying to speak meaningfully to each other and find the common ground a democratic society needs to survive. The last thing we as educators should be doing is allowing those attitudes to harden while students sit silently in our classrooms, denied the opportunity to explore and deconstruct them.

None of us can afford a country in which “everything falls apart,” to borrow Yeats’ phrase, a society in which “the center cannot hold” and the “widening gyre” leads to chaos and despair.

That is why we created “Teaching The Levees.” We know that creating the kind of meaningful democratic dialogue in which students can share different, even opposing, perspectives is often a mind-bogglingly difficult enterprise. But it is far too important to ignore just because it is so difficult. (Take a look at Diana Hess’ brief article on Fostering Effective Discussions on this website for some tips on how to make it work.)

Because macing and pepper-spraying demonstrators or calling them “terrorists” is not democratic dialogue. (Neither, for that matter, is trying to storm the gates of City Hall to try and disrupt a hearing, which is what some of the protesters did Thursday). And if we can’t get kids to engage in meaningful discussion in our classrooms, there’s little reason to expect it of our citizens out in the real world.

UPDATE: A day before the New Orleans City Council votes on whether to proceed with demolition of three public housing projects, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff — a stanch critic of the proposed redevelopment plans — weighs in on “High Noon in New Orleans.” Click here to read Ouroussoff’s latest commentary, which argues that the federal plan to raze and redevelop the housing sites “reflects a ruthless indifference to local realities.” You can read more of Ouroussoff’s observations below.

Until this past weekend, the controversy over public housing in New Orleans had scarcely raised an eyebrow outside the Crescent City. But massive protests over the impending demolition of thousands of housing units finally got this critically-important issue at least some of the public exposure it deserves.

Unless you regularly read the New Orleans newspapers and websites, you probably didn’t know that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (i.e., the federal government) has developed ambitious plans to remake public housing in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. Those plans call for the replacement of four large public housing complexes with new, privately-owned mixed-income, mixed-use projects. Demolition at three of the complexes — Lafitte, B.J. Cooper, and St. Bernard — was slated to begin last weekend, until public outcry forced the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) to postpone its plans and turn the matter over the to New Orleans City Council. (Demolition at the fourth complex, B.W. Cooper, was approved before Katrina and is already underway.)

The problem, in a nutshell, is that most observers agree that the bulk of these 4,500 housing units were not destroyed by Katrina and, with minimal repair work, would be quite habitable. Yet they have remained empty since the storm to make way for the new privately-owned developments. To many of the city’s poor, who have been unable to return to New Orleans because of a lack of affordable housing, the whole project represents a not-too-subtle effort of the Bush administration to rid the city of its poorest residents. (HUD took over management of HANO in 2002.)

While some former residents of the projects are more than happy to see them go, there has been widespread opposition to the redevlopment plans. Chief among the critics has been a group called The Advancement Project, which has produced a series of videos called “This Is My Home” to highlight the issue. (You can watch the videos by clicking here to watch Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) Their website also provides a wide range of background materials. Other advocacy groups, such as Color of Change, have launched petition drives to urge public officials to oppose the redevelopment plans. A federal lawsuit against the HUD plan is also pending.

But they are not alone. Chief among the critics has been The New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, who has called what is going on in New Orleans “one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of 1950s.” In a column that appeared over a year ago, Ouroussoff called the four housing complexes slated for demolition “some of the best public housing built in the United States” that could, with simple modifications, be transformed “into model housing” that would be significantly better than anything new that would be built in their place. (Click here to read the full text of Ourousoff’s critique, “All Fall Down.”) Ouroussoff argued that most of the problems that plagued the city’s public housing — and there have been many — were largely due to mismanagement and maintenance, not design.

More recently, Ouroussoff wrote that:

The bluntness of HUD’s solution reflects a degree of historical amnesia that this wounded city cannot afford. In its rush to demolish the apartment complexes — and replace them with the kind of generic mixed-income suburban community so favored by Washington bureaucrats — the agency demonstrates great insensitivity to both the displaced tenants and the urban fabric of this city. (Click here to read all of “History vs. Homogeneity in New Orleans Housing Fight.”)

Most observers know that these public housing units are inhabited almost entirely by people of color. What is less commonly known is that roughly 90% of the units were occuped by housholds headed by women.

That is why many protestors, as The New York Times put it in its coverage last week, “accused the government of a darker motive behind the demolition plan. They contend that athe government’ s real aim was to keep the poor, mostly female, almost entirely black residents of public housing from returning to their city, to their homes.”

The New Orleans City Council is expected to vote on the demolition of these housing projects at a hearing on Thursday, in one what observer has called a “day of reckoning.” Anyone who cares about New Orleans’ future should watch closely at what the council decides, and whether or not final decisions about public housing will be left to the public — or to the bureaucrats.

Back in October, when someone placed a noose on a professor’s door here at Teachers College, I lamented the lack of attention the American media focus on substantive issues of race. When the campus was inundated with news trucks, microphones and campus-wide demonstrations, I wondered in this blog:

Why do the media (and general public) only seem to respond to the most egregious, outrageous, over-the-top demonstrations of racism? Where are CNN and Fox News when the subtler, more entrenched and institutionalized aspects of racism are plaguing our society? The press and the public react to the symbols of racism, but their record on reacting the realities of racism leaves a lot to be desired. (See blog of Oct. 10)

I was reminded of this utter abdication of their responsibility to talk meaningfully about racism earlier this week, when the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 to allow judges to deviate from the draconian sentencing guidelines for people convicted of offenses involving crack cocaine. Those guidelines date back to the 1980s, when Congress imposed them under the ostensible belief that crack was more addictive than powder cocaine, and that trade in crack was particularly violent.  A day later, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to make the decision retroactive, meaning that as many as 19,500 inmates could soon have their sentences reduced.

What many observers knew right from the start was that crack cocaine is far more often used by African Americans and poor people, while powder cocaine is generally used by whites and the more affluent. The result is that roughly 85% of those sentenced under the tougher crack cocaine guidelines are black, while those getting lighter sentences for using or dealing in powder cocaine are predominantly white. In plain English, it was abundantly clear that a black person involved with cocaine had been far more likely to get a longer sentence than a white person committing essentially the same crime.

Yet one had to make an effort to find this important piece of information in the sketchy coverage the ruling received. Certainly the more reputable media — The New York Times, NPR, and so on — highlighted the centrality of race in this issue. But as I was driving home Tuesday, I heard three separate reports on the Sentencing Commission’s ruling on an all-news radio station, and not one of them mentioned race. They discussed the disparity in sentencing, how judges will now have more leeway, how 2,500 drug dealers may soon be let out of prison, and how the Justice Department opposed the decision on the grounds that it will create chaos.  But that the Supreme Court had actually done something to lessen a racial disparity in the justice system?  Not a peep.

One doesn’t have to dig all that deeply into this story to see the racial implications, but it seems that too often the mainstream media just can’t be bothered digging at all. (This, of course, assumes that they even covered the story to begin with; the network nightly news broadcast I watched Tuesday didn’t even mention the ruling.)

The Supreme Court’s ruling is a critically important one in terms of how people of color are treated by our justice system, but unless one is already interested in the subject, she’d never know it from the mainstream media coverage of the event. Even after the ruling, an important national discussion should be taking place about why these disparate sentencing guidelines were put into effect in the first place. The reality is that many people still use the guise of “violence” to defend tougher sentencing for crack-related crimes.  The question our media should be asking is how often is “violent” used as code for “black”? In an interview with the News Hour, Gretchen Shappert, the U.S. Attorney for North Carolina, defended the disparate sentences for crack offenses, arguing “Our concern is that this is a group of individuals who are associated with violence. Crack is a drug that’s associated with violence.” (For a fascinating look at the association of blacks as criminals in the larger society and how this has led to the explosion in the prison population, see Brown University economist Glenn Loury’s “Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?: Race and the Transformation of Criminal Justice,” published in July in the Boston Review.)

And remember that powerful scene in When the Levees Broke, when Katrina evacuees were stopped at gunpoint from crossing the Gretna Bridge. In the film, NAACP laywer Verneta Gupta notes they were stopped that because they were believed to be “thugs” and “looters,” what she calls code words for African Americans.

More than half a century ago, Ralph Ellison lamented the invisibility of African Americans in his award-winning novel, Invisible Man. Race — save for such obvious offenses as noose-hangings and lynchings — still seems to still be the Invisible Issue for the American media.

While Brad Pitt has been getting the lion’s share of the famous-people-doing-good-in-New-Orleans quota of late (see blog of Dec. 4), we’d like to make viewers aware of at least one other celebrity who has worked tirelessly to help the Crescent City rebuild since Katrina.

Harry Shearer, probably best known for his voices on The Simpsons (he does Mr. Burns, Ned Flanders, and Principal Skinner, among others), has been on the front lines, most notably through his highly intelligent and entertaining blog on The Huffington Post. Shearer, who lives in the Faubourg-Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans with his wife (at least some of the time), has also done a public service announcement for levees.org, the group that helped produce the student video criticizing the Army Corps of Engineers and subsequently shut down by the American Society of Civil Engineers (see blogs of 11/13, 11/19, and 11/21).

Shearer may not be quite as famous as Pitt, but he is a thinking person’s celebrity who brings the kind of insight and humor to the subject that few others can match. Remember, this is the guy who co-wrote This is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind and hosts a show on NPR.In recent weeks, Shearer’s blog has tackled such topics as FEMA’s continuing inability to complete testing for formaldehyde in trailers (click here) and how the Army Corps of Engineers accidentally used a minus sign instead of a plus sign to announce that New Orleans now has an additional four to five feet of flood protection from its levees when in reality it only has gained a few inches (click here).

Shearer has also been at the forefront of the criticism of the political parties for failing to schedule a single presidential debate in New Orleans, despite the city’s repeated attempts to make that happen. In “The NBA Gets It, The Pols Don’t,” Shearer excoriated the Democrats and Republicans for claiming the city isn’t “ready” for such an event, even though NBA Commissioner David Stern long ago decided to hold the league’s All-Star Game there next February. Here’s a taste:

Wasn’t it a few years ago when, after New York had experienced 9/11, one of our major political parties decided to hold its 2004 convention in the Big Apple as a sign of national solidarity with the wounded city? Flash forward to today, when the Presidential Debate Commission informs New Orleans it isn’t “ready” to hold a Presidential Debate next year. Yes, the two parties have already decided the city doesn’t deserve a convention, but that may just be down to how much money the winning cities ponied up for the privilege… What is it the Presidential Debate Commission, and its associated pols, don’t get about expressing solidarity with a city critically wounded by the malfeasance of the federal government?

In a subsequent post on Nov. 27, Shearer got Anne Milling, of “Women of the Storm” (the group promoting a New Orleans debate) to respond to the charge that the city wasn’t ready for a debate. (It makes for very interesting reading; click here to read.)

Writing a regular blog takes time and effort, and Shearer is to be commended for keeping up the effort even though Katrina happened more than two years ago. And it’s always nice to have a reminder that there are some celebrities out there who not only can think, but are willing to take the time and effort to try and make us all thing. Thanks, Harry.

We live in an insanely celebrity-obsessed society, so the level of media attention focused on Brad Pitt’s charitable efforts in New Orleans should probably come as no surprise. Pitt’s star-power is so compelling that CNN found it necessary to cover his press conference on the “Make It Right” project live yesterday afternoon. Pitt made numerous stops at other networks, all of which seemed quite thrilled to have a piece of him. Larry King will give Pitt a full hour to plug the project, which is sponsoring the rebuilding of 150 low-cost homes in the Lower Ninth Ward, Wednesday night at 9 pm ET. 

Celebrities like Pitt who take on humanitarian causes say they do so because they know the cameras will follow them wherever they lead. (One can hardly blame him: if I were Brad Pitt I’d certainly rather have the cameras follow me into the Lower Ninth than into my bedroom.) George Clooney has used his star power to promote awareness of the genocide in Darfur, Bono to combat poverty in Africa, and so on.

So those who care about the rebuilding of New Orleans should be grateful that Pitt has chosen this effort as his latest cause, because I certainly can’t remember the last time CNN covered anything live out of New Orleans, or devoted a full hour of Larry King Live to any aspect of the post-Katrina Gulf Coast (other than their two-year anniversary coverage). Whether or not it reflects well on our society, the reality is that New Orleans needs people like Pitt to get the word out, and Pitt has certainly been doing all he can of late to make sure anyone who gets near him hears the message.

Make It Right is an effort organized by Pitt a year ago to encourage a significant effort to build affordable housing in Post-Katrina New Orleans. A group of experts convened for the project decided to focus their efforts on constructing 150 homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. According to the group’s website, the primary goal is to create a replicable design that can lead to a much larger rebuilding effort. To bring further attention, the group has launched “The Pink Project,” in which 150 bright pink fabric “homes” have been erected to symbolize the soon-to-be-built residences. As each home is “adopted” by donors, a roof is added. Pitt has already donated $5 million of his own money toward the effort (that’s on top of the money he paid for a French Quarter mansion he bought with Angelina Jolie after Katrina).

Given all the causes the couple has supported in the recent past, we should probably be thankful that they’ve decided to include the rebuilding of New Orleans on their list. I have no idea how big a draw Pitt is among today’s adolescents – he is in his mid-forties and is hardly the teen heartthrob he once was – but I’m guessing there are still plenty of high school students who are more likely to pay attention to a teacher who says, “now let’s talk about Brad Pitt” than to one who says, “now let’s talk about New Orleans.”

So keep it up, Brad. New Orleans needs you. And for those who want to find out more about Make It Right, the group’s website includes lots of resources, including information about the project and the Lower Ninth Ward, a place to buy t-shirts and other merchandise, and, perhaps most importantly a place to make a donation to help get the Make It Right houses built.