Married as I am to a Brown Man, potential threats are always near. When we went to New Orleans for my 50th birthday, I had to call the hotel and ask if our mixed races would be a problem. I told her to please be honest. I wanted a vacation, not an “incident.” She finally said we would be fine if we stayed in the city, but don’t go into the countryside.
I have no pictures from New Orlean. For the one and only time in my life, I dropped my camera. It was in a building with a cement floor. When the camera hit the floor, it exploded. I thought of buying a new one, but I got distracted by art galleries, the incredible food, music, Riverwalk and the beauty of old architecture.
There’s plenty to do in New Orleans without leaving town. Most of the really interesting stuff is in city limits. The only time we left the city (we didn’t rent a car because we could walk everywhere) was on an “alligator tour” during which I learned a ton of stuff about how damaging the construction was in the bayou. That was the beginning of my getting serious about ecology and the environment. The man really knew what he was talking about. Who expected a guide to bayou alligators would know so much about the environment, what awful things had been done to it, were still being done and how dangerous it could be? This was years before Katrina when everything he predicted came true — only it was so much worse than even is most dire predictions.
That I had to call to ask if it was safe for us to be there at all should have been telling. We often feel endangered. A mixed race couple with mixed religions has to be careful. My Jewishishness, his skin color. Not to mention his being a TV reporter which was (is) not well received regardless of race in many areas of the country — and still isn’t. This country has become dangerous in exactly the ways my mother predicted 65 years ago. I thought she was being too cynical. I was wrong.
If I could call her up from the spirit world, I would tell her how right she had been about so many things I questioned. She warned me: anti-Semitism was not going away. It had been around for a couple of thousand years and even if it wasn’t obvious, it was lurking. Waiting. All it would take is the right political mix to bring it boiling to the surface.
This was something my Native and darker skinned friends already knew. I just didn’t want to believe it. Amazingly, I actually thought we’d made progress.
Share this:
Categories: #Photography, Ecology, Nature, Racism and Bigotry, story, Travel, Vacation
SERENDIPITY - SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
It is dreadfully sad that we haven’t made progress, Marilyn. It feels like humanity never learns anything at all. Hugs to you and Garry.
LikeLike
It is demoralizing. Sometimes, it looks like we ARE making progress, but then it disappears. I shouldn’t need to call a resort to find out if it’s safe to go there. I think — right now — I wouldn’t even bother to try. Everything seems dangerous.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It is sad 😢
LikeLike
I keep looking for rays of hope and I don’t see them. So, I keep my head down, avoid perilous conversations with neighbors and hope for the best when things seem so difficult.
LikeLiked by 1 person
💕🤗
LikeLike
I was in New Orleans twice, both before Katrina. Both times we went for football. For the Super Bowl, we stayed a long way out of town and across the bayou. Even white boys from the North have a fear of certain small towns in the South. I can not imagine the concern that people of color or non-Christian religions would have even now.
Last year when the Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust was airing on PBS, we went to the Illinois Holocaust Museum for a panel discussion with a local PBS host and two of the authors of the work. You see them interviewed throughout the 6-hour, 3-episode series. Not only did they talk about immigration policies then (and now) but also about the prejudices that still exist. Questions from the audience moved the panel in many directions. There was a Holocaust survivor there and I thought she had to be saddened to hear how some things never seem to change. We have made little progress… very little.
I should have written about our visit to the museum and our good fortune to receive tickets to be in the audience. Only the first episode had aired at that point but they showed highlights from the others for the purpose of discussion. We were early so we got to tour the museum also. There were so many emotions and so much to say afterward I really did not know where to begin.
LikeLike
Living in Jerusalem, I went to ONE Holocaust museum (there are a handful of them — not surprising I suppose). It was the most unsettling and emotionally painful experience I’d had in a long time. Bad enough that two of my neighbors were survivors, but the images were … I don’t even have the words. After that, when visitors wanted to go, I would take them there and wait for them in the car. I couldn’t go back inside. I could sit in the garden, but couldn’t go into the building.
Jews may not be the most hated group on earth (though it would be hard to prove that right now), but for sheer duration of hatred, I think we get the big prize. How many thousands of years before they give it up? Ever? It’s just as well we aren’t doing much traveling anymore. There are a lot of places I would be unwilling to go.
I wouldn’t watch the Holocaust show. I flatly refused just as Garry has refused to watch “Mississippi Burning.” Some things are just too much.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think everyone should go to a museum so they understand. It would be hard to go back. A writer of the book that inspired the series and a historian interviewed extensively in the PBS series did talk about the duration of hate and why they thought that was. They also talked about the US’s long history of rejecting immigrants in times of need.
LikeLike
My mother made us — my brother and I — watch every single movie made about the Holocaust most of which, while I was growing up, were relatively recent and were taken on the scene at the end of the war when they broke open the concentration camps. Trust me. I had plenty of background. Many others have not. Most people who aren’t Jewish have none at all. They really don’t understand.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I‘m not even surprised…. I was in New Orleans with my 1st husband and it was just one gigantic huge fun to be there, to listen to the wonderful jazz music which seemed to be played everywhere and it makes me sad to read your experience.
On the other hand, we were also in Mexico where MY white skin and head full of wild locks got me into untold trouble. I was told to never go anywhere without a scarf over my hair and never expose too much skin – I was 23 and of an unbelievable naiveté. Now I understand ‚that‘ time much better but it shouldn‘t have been ‚like that‘ then nor now.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Why do so many people seem to thrive on hatred? I have never understood it. I was thinking about it this morning. I knew quite a few Arabs in or near Jerusalem and for years we were friendly — and then, one day, they asked me not to come because it was too dangerous. For them AND for me. I LIKED them. I enjoyed their company. There is no reason for all this hate.
LikeLiked by 2 people
My son had a school friend whose mother cried at my place because her heart was broken by the exactly same reason over the breakup of former Yugoslavia. She had family on both sides of the fronts to the ‚new‘ countries and wasn‘t allowed from one day to the other to be ‚family‘ any longer. They HAD TO HATE each other and one member got killed in front of their door…. Horrible and unimaginable.
LikeLike
Why is humanity so full of hate? What’s the point? What do we gain? Anything? I don’t understand it and never have. Maybe it’s just as well that I don’t.
LikeLike
So awful that you should have to even ask that question 🤗 New Orleans sounds amazing, but again, so sad that everything that guide told you should have come to pass.
LikeLike
The city was fine and fun, but knowing we dared not go outside into the countryside was depressing. Mind you we had fun in New Orleans without leaving the city, but knowing we could not safely leave was — to say the least — most unsettling.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Progress seems to have become a dirty word, I think we would be better off without it…
LikeLike
Real progress would be great, but we seem to get a lot of fake progress. We get laws — never enforced of course — and anyway, you can’t fix bigotry with laws. Maybe you can prevent its worst excesses, but laws don’t solve moral problems. Witness prohibition and how it created far more problems than it ever hoped to solve.
LikeLiked by 1 person
From what I see, we seem to create more problems with every new solution…
LikeLike
And this is because we think entirely in terms of “crime” and “punishment.” I don’t think we’ve ever imagined any other approach. I think we completely miss the point and until WE change, life will never progress.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Too many people are so quick to condemn what they consider wrong, and until that changes, we won’t get anywhere…
LikeLike
my youngest daughter and her husband are in a mixed race marriage and they have two amazing children. we have always had discussions with the kids about the realities of life as part of a mixed family, as things have occurred already throughout their young lives. it’s so sad that these unfair and insane situations still exist and that people continue these racist ways of life. it makes me worry for what my grandchildren will have to continue to deal with.
LikeLike
I never imagined it could revert to this level of national hatred. Bad enough that we have to train little kids to hide “when the shooters come,” but having to teach your own kids to be careful lest some bigoted cop decides to kill you because he can, is appalling.
“Land of the free and home of the brave?” Really? That’s not what I’m seeing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
nope! No progress! But I am glad you enjoyed new orleans!
LikeLike
New Orleans is a bright spot in an otherwise terrifying part of the country. Not, of course, the ONLY terrifying part of the country. There are plenty of others. I was always sure if we were pleasant, friendly, congenial and somehow, it would all work itself out. But it doesn’t matter. Haters hate. They do not WANT to change. They LIKE hating.
WHY?
But I really loved New Orleans. The music, the food, the art, the history. If only there were more cities like that, more places like that. If only.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, New Orleans was a BLAST. Believe I was quite comfortable.
One of my former “friends” used to call me “Brownie”. It was said with obvious affection and I liked it.
LikeLike