Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?: Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues

Katrina tragedy was a blues moment. The legitimacy of the United States is dependent upon multiethnic and multiracial cooperation at home and abroad, yet it affirms its status as the architect of a new world order by denying the existence of racism. Katrina has exposed both the absence of social justice and the futility of this "plausible deniability" dance. The blues tradition of explanation and development provides both a way out of the inner workings of inequity and a way into the Third Reconstruction. The picture of twenty thousand slowly dying African Americans chanting "we want help" outside of New Orleans s Convention Center was a blues moment. It disrupted the molecular structure of a wide array of carefully constructed social relations and narratives on race, class, progress, competency, and humanity. In the blink of an eye, African Americans, an identity fraught with ambiguity, were transformed back into black people, a highly politicized identity. Mass suffering simultaneously killed the dream and "learnt" the blues to the hip-hop generation. Katrina's message was unmistakable. For example, on September 9, in an essay written for The Monitor of Kampala, Uganda, Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga summarizes the message sent to the African diaspora and the world at large: