From the looks of things, tourism in New Orleans has nearly bounced back to its pre-Katrina levels. Most of the hotels have re-opened, restaurants are full, the Convention Center is bustling, and the line for a coffee and beignet at Cafe Du Monde in the French Quarter stretches around the corner by 11:00 on a Saturday morning.

But the truth is that most visitors to New Orleans never leave the tourist areas — the French Quarter, downtown, the Garden District. These are the oldest areas of the city, and as such, the ones built on highest ground and least affected by Katrina.

It’s a shame there isn’t more encouragement for visitors to get out and see the other 80 percent of the city that is still struggling to recover. A shame, because most visitors are likely to get the false impression that the city has bounced back nicely.

If you do have a chance to visit New Orleans, please take the time to get a sense of the big picture. All it takes is a couple of hours, really. One group, Tours BaYou, founded by seventh-generation New Orleanean Pamela Pipes, has made it remarkably easy to take a self-guided “Katrina Tour” covering 50 miles of Greater New Orleans in just a few hours.

I happened across the “Katrina Self-Guided Tour CD” at Cafe Beignet in the French Quarter, which turned out to be worth considerably more than the $19.95 I paid for it. (Click here to order your own copy, or here to download the tour on your computer. A portion of the proceeds go to groups helping rebuild the city.) The tour is easy to follow, and gives very clear driving directions, even for someone who has never been to New Orleans before. It also includes a printed map to help guide you if you have any trouble with the audio directions.

I completed most of the tour in just about two hours. It not only takes you to many important sites, but also gives excellent background informationi about the failure of the levees and what happened in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. The tour is narrated by a variety of well-known New Orleaneans, including singer Charmaine Neville and “Women of the Storm” founder Ann Milling.

My only criticism of the tour is that it is presented in very unemotional tones, and at times seems rather clinical. I assume this was intentional, as the material is devastating enough and doesn’t call for any overstatement. Still, I’d advise that you bring along a companion to share the experience with; it’s a lot to take in by oneself.

Here are some of the places you’ll see, along with pictures I took from my car. (The pictures are offered in the same order as the descriptions, from top to bottom):

• A home bearing four different sets of FEMA markings, ranging from Sept. 10 to Sept. 20, 2005. It wasn’t until the fourth visit that rescuers found three bodies in the attic, residents unable to break through their roofs to escape the floodwaters.
• One of the thousands of New Orleans homes awaiting repair while residents still live in a FEMA trailer parked out front.
• A model of the environmentally-friendly homes Brad Pitt’s “Make It Right NOLA” project plans to build in the Lower Ninth Ward.
• Fats Domino’s house in the Lower Ninth. It was widely rumored that Fats had died in the floodwaters, though it later turned out he had been rescued by boat by the Coast Guard.
• The colorful homes of the Musicians’ Village in the Lower Ninth, an oasis of restored homes subsidized by Habitat for Humanity and musicians Harry Connick, Jr., and Branford Marsalis.
• Five of the exact locations where the levees suffered their worst breaches; you’d never find these on your own, because they have been rebuilt.
• Newly-built drainage pumps designed to protect the Lakeview area, which sustained flood depths of over ten feet after Katrina.
• A house on which the FEMA markings were spray-painted almost at the roofline, because that was the only part of the home above water when rescuers came through the area.

My pictures don’t begin to do it justice, but a second-line parade in New Orleans is one of those things everyone should try to experience at some point in his or her life.

Whatever has happened in New Orleans since Katrina, it doesn’t seem to have had any impact on the vitality and life-affirming exuberance of these events. They’re not quite like any parades you’d experience in any other American city.

It turned out that our recent visit to New Orleans for the ASCD educational conference coincided with “Super Sunday,” the day the Mardi Gras Indians take center stage in a series of parades featuring their unique costumes and music (see post of January 18 to read more about the Indians, and click here to download our lesson plan about them).

But like so much of Mardi Gras, and in particular the Mardi Gras Indians’ observance of it, the festivities are steeped in local traditions and communities. Their purpose is not — as is, say, New York’s Thanksgiving Day Parade — to entertain tourists and visitors, but for local residents to engage in communal celebration.

We quickly learned that as we set off in search of the main parade, which was to begin near a park on Washington Avenue in Mid-City. There were crowds of people, but no parade, and when we asked someone where the parade was to be found, he pointed down Washington Avenue. We drove a few blocks, and were soon unable to drive any further; we had inadvertently found ourselves in the lineup for the parade. We were able to extract ourselves with the aid of two mounted police officers, who no doubt found the situation highly amusing.

After parking and mingling with the crowd for a few minutes, I noticed a young man with a trombone wearing a “Hot 8″ T-shirt. The Hot 8 Brass Band, one of many brass ensembles that perform regularly in second-line parades, is, of course, featured heavily in When The Levees Broke. I approached him and asked him where the parade would be heading; I was instructed to go inside the bar on the corner for a copy of the parade route.

It turned out this was not one of the main Mardi Gras Indian parades, but the annual parade of the Single Men Social and Pleasure Club, one of the dozens of social clubs that form an essential element of African-American communal life in New Orleans. (The Zulus and the Big Nine, which is centered in the Lower Ninth Ward, are among the better known clubs.)

A photocopied sheet inside the bar indicated the parade would start there, at Foxx’s Lounge, making stops at Daiquiri Island, the Purple Rain Bar, the Sportsman’s Bar, the Club Dreamers, the Mrs. Dolores House on Simon Bolivar, and, finally, the Go Getters Krewe Stop. Among other information, the sheet also instructed parade revelers to “Please leave your Troubles, Attitudes, Haten’, Guns and pets Home.”

A few minutes later, the Hot 8 lined up outside a building across the street from Foxx’s and began playing. A young boy, nattily dressed in a blue suit with matching hat, bedecked with light blue feathered ornaments, white gloves, a slim cigar, and festive shoes, emerged, and began dancing with the extravagantly acrobatic moves characteristic of second line parades. He had certainly put in plenty of time practicing for his big moment. Another boy emerged, then another, all kicking and jumping in similar fashion, and the parade was on its way.

A float bearing the parade queen joined in, and then came the Rebirth Brass Band. The police on horseback joined in at the tail end. Revelers followed and danced as the parade moved up Rocheblave St.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a video camera with me, but others evidently did: click here and here for a brief glimpse into this parade.

We never did make it to some of the larger Mardi Gras Indian parades, though it turns out we weren’t very far away. Click here , here, here, and here to see what we missed. Yes, these videos are a little rough around the edges, as are the celebrations they chronicle. But in a culture in which public spectacles have become so scripted, sanitized, and Disneyfied, New Orleans’ second-line parades have a freshness and vigor that is all too rare these days. Anyone who dares ask whether New Orleans is worth saving need only spend a few minutes at one of them before the answer becomes all too clear.

According to yesterday’s New York Times, Barack Obama’s recent address about race is now the number video on YouTube. That’s in addition to the four million people who saw it live. (If you haven’t seen it, click here to watch; or click here to read a transcript.)

The gist of the Times’ piece, “Groups Respond to Obama’s Call for National Discussion About Race,” by Larry Rohter and Michael Luo, is that for all the controversy surrounding Obama and the comments of his Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright, the end result might just be the kind of meaningful “national conversation” about race that has eluded this country for years.

“Religious groups and academic bodies, already receptive to Mr. Obama’s plea for such a dialogue,” the paper noted, “seemed especially enthusiastic. Universities were moving to incorporate the issues Mr. Obama raised into classroom discussions and course work, and churches were trying to find ways to do the same in sermons and Bible studies.”

All of which is, of course, a Good Thing. We at “Teaching The Levees” have worked hard to promote democratic dialogue about race (and class, and a host of related issues) in our nation’s classrooms. What is particularly encouraging about the events of the past few days is the degree to which Obama’s speech actually elevated the tenor of the debate, something all too rare in American politics. When was the last time a candidate for anything gave a speech that really made us think?

(Nicholas Kristof noted on the op-ed page of yesterday’s Times that Obama’s speech “derived power from something most unusual in modern politics: an acknowledgment of complexity, nuance and legitimate grievances on many sides. It was not a sound bite, but a symphony.” The paper’s editorial board chimed in with “Mr. Obama’s Profile in Courage,” which praised Obama for putting the whole Wright affair “into the larger context of race relations with an honesty seldom heard in public life” and effectively “raised the discussion to a higher plane.”)

Educators have a particular responsibility to keep this discussion on a “higher plane,” because as the media coverage of the past few days has clearly demonstrated, we can’t rely on television and the other major media to do so. (There’s already been a flap about Obama referring to his grandmother as a “typical white person” during an on-air interview and in the minds of some people implying that all whites are racist. So much for raising the debate to a higher plane.) Last night on CNN, Anderson Cooper, while making a noble effort to keep a responsible conversation going, noted that the kind of nuanced discussion Obama is talking about is hardly consistent with the sound bite culture we live in, a culture that never seems to miss an opportunity to drag the debate du jour down to the lowest common denominator.

So our classrooms must become the places where this elevated debate takes place. The Levees curriculum might just be the perfect place to start. We ask open-ended questions — for example, Are there two Americas? — in which views of all perspectives can be aired in a thoughtful manner. This website includes professional development tools that can help teachers begin this difficult work (click here to see the piece on “Talking About Race and Racism in the Classroom” by Prof. Jane Bolgatz).

Obama has provided us with that elusive “teachable moment” in which we may be able to make some progress toward getting past the “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years,” as he put it in his speech, past the “politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism.” We have an obligation not to let the moment pass.

“Teaching The Levees” can be downloaded free of charge at this website; if you prefer a bound book copy, it can be ordered directly from Teachers College Press for $13.95. As always, if you do use any part of the curriculum, we’d love to hear from you on our Discussion Board, and encourage you to share your lesson plans with fellow educators.

It’s true, what everyone says: you have to see it for yourself to really understand.

I have been working on the “Teaching The Levees” curriculum for a year and a half now. I have read countless articles about Katrina and watched When The Levees Broke in its entirety half a dozen times. I get daily Google Alerts on all sorts of Katrina-related terms and scan the website of the New Orleans Times-Picayune every morning.

And for all that, I felt totally unprepared when I stepped out onto the desolate streets of the Lower Ninth Ward this weekend. I was not prepared for the vast emptiness, the silence, the monotonous repetition of block after block of overgrown lots punctuated by the shells of empty houses and only every once in a while, the site of a Tyvek-covered frame of a home suggesting that — perhaps — one day this neighborhood will rise again.

Yes, it’s the unfathomable scale of Katrina’s devastation that no text and no digital medium can explain. No matter how many times I’ve heard it, I simply didn’t comprehend how much space and how many lives were affected by the failure of the levees until I got in a car and drove through its aftermath, mile after mile after mile.

But it’s also the intimacy of standing in the doorway of what used to be someone’s home and inhaling the totality of the destruction that came in Katrina’s wake. As a small group of us drove through the Lower Ninth this past Sunday morning, we were attracted by the sound of hammering that intruded on the near-total silence, knowing it meant that at least someone was working to rebuild. But as we approached the home under construction on Gordon Street, we were quickly drawn to the home next door, where the ubiquitous Katrina markings — the spray-painted “X” with telltale numbers and letters in each quadrant — remained on the broken window at the front of the home.

We peered into the window, the lace curtains still hanging. A dented satellite dish still stood mounted on the roof. Inside, everything remained exactly as it had when Katrina’s waters receded. A floral sofa and chairs were covered with every manner of debris. A stereo unit lay on its side. Wood beams hung from the ceiling. A beaded chandelier hung, caked in dust, one of its arms twisted and pointing in the wrong direction.

Many of the homes in the Lower Ninth and other neighborhoods most heavily affected by Katrina have been razed by now, and most of those still standing have been cleared out into empty shells. But this home appeared to have barely been touched, two and a half years after the storm, an enduring monument to what had happened in those final moments of August, 2005. Had its owners simply fled and never come back? Had they been in the house as the waters from the nearby Industrial Canal rose higher and higher? How had they escaped? Where were they now? There were, of course, no answers. But the violence with which their lives had been overturned had suddenly become palpable in this pile of incongruent rubble. It was almost impossible to imagine that a day before Katrina, this had been an unremarkable living room filled with the prosaic objects of every day life.

A block away I saw another home where nothing remained except the steps and the front porch. A shed behind the home stood tilted to one side, the contents inside undisturbed. A baby carrier lay quietly in the grass. A rusted mailbox and twisted front gate stood out front. This was all that was left of someone’s life.

Perhaps what made these scenes bearable was the fact that next to both of them stood homes under renovation. But the reality is that even now, empty lots and empty shells vastly outnumber construction sites in the Lower Ninth. There is so much work to be done here, and much necessary debate to be had about whether or not the recovery is proceeding at an acceptable pace and in an appropriate manner.

But as I stood on Gordon Street, I realized that we haven’t yet as a nation come close to comprehending what really happened here. Most of us, even those of us who’ve tried, still have no idea what the people of New Orleans endured after Katrina. I have no illusion that I will ever truly get it. We can talk about recovery and moving forward, but the truth is we will never recover as a nation — and never be able to rebuild in any meaningful way — until we make the effort to understand exactly what happened when the levees broke.

In a report that has received virtually no attention in the popular media, Notre Dame sociologist Jorge Bustamante has concluded that migrant workers in post-Katrina New Orleans are facing “discrimination and exploitation amounting to inhuman and degrading treatment,” constituting nothing short of a “national human rights crisis.”

This might not mean anything, except that Bustamante is the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Migrants. In his report of March 7, Bustamante concluded that the thousands of migrants, many of them undocumented, who have come to New Orleans to find work in rebuilding the city, “are experiencing an unprecedented level of exploitation.”  Noting that most of these migrant workers are recent arrivals from Latin America and Asia, he cites a situation in which “the dramatically increased presence of migrant workers in the region has fuelled local tensions over language barriers, education and health-care needs in a public services system strained by Katrina.”

In short, the report concludes, “New Orleans is being rebuilt on the backs of underpaid and unpaid workers perpetuating cycles of poverty that existed pre-Katrina.” The government has done little to protect these workers from the whims of their employers, the report adds, with many living on the streets or in abandoned homes and cars, or “packed in motels, sometimes 10 to a room.”   

This is the second time in recent weeks that the United Nations has been highly critical of government policies regarding New Orleans. In late February, two UN officials called the city’s plan to demolish four public housing projects (see posts of 12/128/07 and 12/21/07) a discriminatory act that could lead to “increasing poverty and homelessness” among the city’s African American residents.  The statement was roundly condemned by many, including the editorial board of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which stated flatly that the two analysts “really have no idea what they’re talking about,” particularly since neither had actually visited New Orleans before issuing the statement.

While the UN committee looking into the matter did not adopt that language in its final report, it did state that “the committee, while noting the efforts undertaken by the (U.S. government) and civil society organisations to assist the persons displaced by Hurricane Katrina of 2005, remains concerned about the disparate impact that this natural disaster continues to have on low-income African American residents, many of whom continue to be displaced after more than two years after the hurricane.”

Do the folks at the UN have it in for New Orleans, or are they the only people paying any attention to what’s really happening?  We’d love to know what you think.

This week marked the launch of another exciting educational project that included contributions from a number of us here at Teachers College, many of the same people who helped create “Teaching The Levees.” MAAP — an acronym for “Mapping the African American Past” — uses interactive maps, photos, videos and other materials to breathe life into 52 historic sites that illustrate the broad range of historical experience of black New York.

Some of the sites are well known (Harlem, the site of the 1863 Draft Riots), but most have gone relatively unnoticed while standing in our midst, telling stories that have all too often been overlooked in the official recounting of the city’s history. There’s Downing’s Oyster House, a restaurant owned by an enterprising African-American who hosted the city’s most influential power-brokers at the foot of Wall Street by day and shielded travelers on the Underground Railroad in his basement by night. There’s the African Grove Theater, where all-black casts performed Shakespeare even while slavery was still legal in the state. And then there’s the city’s first Slave Market, on the edge of the East River, which became the official site of the city’s human trade in 1711.

MAAP is an invaluable teaching resource that can be used by classroom teachers in a multiplicity of ways. The site includes detailed lesson plans for many of the locales, and several have been adapted for use in elementary classrooms. While the lessons focus on sites within New York City, they certainly can be used by teachers elsewhere, because the stories they tell have had a great impact far beyond the boundaries of the city. There are lessons on several important historic figures (Duke Ellington, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes) and about sites that tell the largely overlooked story of slavery in the Northern United States (the African Burial Ground and the Slave Market). There are also lessons on important African American cultural institutions (The African Grove Theater and the African Free School).

Perhaps the most inspiring thing about this project is the idea that it can serve as a model for educators around the country. Every city holds the untold history of a particular group — African Americans in many places, but also Latinos, immigrants from a wide range of countries, religious minorities, women. Ask students to create their own “MAAP” for a particular group in their city. The final product need not be as polished and high-tech as the original MAAP project, which, after all, had grant money from the JP Morgan Chase Foundation behind it. But the product is far less important than the process through which students will come to uncover these untold stories and rewrite the maps of their home towns.

Even as I’m writing this post, I am searching the Internet for resources on a “MAAP” of New Orleans, a city with as rich an African American past as any in the nation. Maybe something like this exists, but I can’t find it. Wouldn’t it be great if some enterprising students created their own MAAP of New Orleans? Such a map could identify important sites, such as Congo Square, the birthplace of jazz; the City Exchange Hotel, whose rotunda hosted the city’s infamous slave auctions; the Home for Colored Waifs, where Louis Armstrong learned to play the trumpet; the home of Homer Plessy, whose name became forever synonymous with “Separate But Equal” in U.S. history. (A good place to start in this effort is a fascinating online article called Black New Orleans, by Keith Weldon Medley.)

But even more importantly, such a map would help students redefine the history of New Orleans at a time when the city’s very identity is on the line. Ensuring that the rich history of black New Orleans is not forgotten could have a lasting impact on how the city is rebuilt.

Helping teachers face the challenging topic of race in America is one of the important aims of the “Teaching The Levees” curriculum. Fortunately, we’re not alone in this endeavor, and a fascinating traveling exhibit called, simply, “Race,” will be making its way around the country for the next several years.

Created by the American Anthropological Association in conjunction with the Science Museum of Minnesota, “Race” (the exhibit is subtitled: Are We So Different?) attempts to unravel the very complex topic from the perspectives of science, history, and culture. At the moment, it is housed at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey, where it will remain until April 27. Click here for a complete tour schedule, which includes stops in Cleveland, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Boston, and several other cities. “Race” includes interactive exhibits, photos, artifacts and multimedia displays.

The really good news is that even if you can’t visit one of the museums or take your class on a field trip, the creators of this presentation have produced a detailed and highly user-friendly website, understandingrace.org that provides a wide array of instructional materials and interactive learning tools. There’s an interactive time line, a 3-D animation that explores the intricacies of the human genome, a sports quiz challenging some commonly-held beliefs about race and athletics (hint: not all of them are entirely false), an online board game in which students explore how personal experiences may vary depending on their race, and many more.

One of the most valuable resources is an extensive set of first-rate lesson plans (click here to download the 68-page middle school guide; click here for the 73-page high school guide). In one lesson, students are asked to analyze historical census data and evaluate how concepts of race in the U.S. have changed over time. In another, they explore the cultural biases of intelligence and standardized tests.

The exhibit and the materials present the subject of race in all its complexity and tackle many of the most sensitive and difficult issues head-on. They are invaluable to educators who may be reluctant to take on these issues precisely because they are so difficult. For many of us, they may just be the thing we need to get the conversation started — the creators of these materials have done much of the hard work for us, and make it relatively easy to get started addressing an important topic that is avoided all too often.