My sister never ceases to amaze me.

This is my sister, the Harvard Grad School Student. The woman who regularly watches Xena: Warrior Princess. The woman who used to make my stuffed animals rap for me.



This is an address she gave on behalf of a Student Volunteer Organization who did benefit work in New Orleans over spring break.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007


Reflections on The Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans
Current mood: tired

I spent my spring break (the end of March) volunteering with fellow students down in the Gulf Coast. We were helping one specific woman clean up her home, which had not been touched since the storm hit.

Today my fellow students and I gave a presentation to our community here at school about what we witnessed, and our reflections on our work. I was asked to reflect, and felt convicted to speak about my experience standing right where the levee broke in the lower ninth ward.

I decided to post my speech. So you all can get to know me a little better. It's one of the most vulnerably honest things I've ever written and then delivered in a public format. The Dean of the Divinity School was there and everything.

Well, Here it is:

Today I do not want to talk about the work that we did. I want to talk about all the work left to do.

On the last day of our trip we traveled into New Orleans. We had arranged to meet with Gene, a facilitator for fellow Harvard volunteers from the Philips Brooks House.

Gene took us on a tour of the devastation that remains in New Orleans. As we wound our way through the unfamiliar city, I suddenly knew where we were. This was the ninth ward. Looking back I see that I probably recognized the area from all the video footage I had seen throughout my fall semester in Professor Green's class. At the time my recognition felt more like intuition, as though the air had suddenly changed. It possessed a heaviness thicker than that of Ocean Springs.

The houses looked as though the hurricane had hit the previous week. FEMA spray pain, bright as ever, was ont he face of each house as we drove through those streets. I knew that the code in the spray paint revealed what FEMA had found there: the number of dead, the number of living, and when the houses had been checked. I also knew that many of these houses were marked but had never actually been investigated.

As we drove through the streets I realized people still lived here. These remnants of houses served as homes for so many people. And that is all that remained - pieces of houses that once stood whole and solid.

The segregated nature of the lower ninth ward was absolutely undeniable. As Irene, one of our fellow student volunteers who is originally from Ghana exclaimed upon our arrival in New Orleans, "There are so many black people here!" As we drove through the ninth ward, echoes of James Cone reverberated in my head:

The meaning of the message for our contemporary situation is clear: the God of the oppressed takes sides with the black community. God is not color-blind in the black-white struggle, but has made an unqualified identification with blacks. This means that the movement for black liberation is the very work of God, effecting God's will among men (and women).

We followed Gene to an area on the edge of town where we pulled our cars over and stepped out onto the abandoned streets. We stood surrounded by empty lots where homes once stood. Now they were covered with overgrown grass and foilage. I was so focused on the area that I did not even turn to see what was behind me until Gene said, "This is where the levee broke."

I turned around to face the levee - the levee I had seen on video footage countless times. Scenes from Spike Lee's documentary on Hurricane Katrina flashed through my brain, but nothing had prepared me for the reality of standing on that ground. Although Gene spoke at length, all I remember hearing him say is "Many of these homes were passed down generation to generation. When the levee broke these people lost everything they had."

Everything they had?! This was not only everything the people currently living there had. This was their inheritance. These were the houses their grandparents scrapped and saved for while doing everything they could to survive Jim Crow America. These houses were the only property owned by the descendents of people who were once considered property. These houses weren't just houses. They were a source of pride and dignity in a country whose history leaves too little to feel honest pride for.

Standing there, where the levee broke, I broke. In front of all my peers and a man I had only just met, I sobbed like a child. The times I have cried like that I can count on one hand.

I cried for the depth of loss in the lower ninth ward - the overwhelming loss of life that could easily have been prevented if we truly worked to love our neighbors as ourselves. I cried for how these people had been failed - not just by nameless government agencies, but failed by all of us.

James Cone spoke again in my head:

We must made decisions about where God is at work so we can join in the fight against evil. But there is no perfect guide for discerning God's movement in the world. Contrary to what many conservatives would say, the Bible is not a blueprint on this matter. It is a valuable symbol for pointing to God's revelation in Jesus, but it is not self-interpreting. We are thus placed in an existential situation of freedom in which the burden is on us to make decisions without a guaranteed ethical guide. This is the risk of faith.

The risk of faith requires us to face our responsibility to the people of New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast area. We bear responsibility as participants in a social and political structure that not only allows for but perpetuates conditions of such stark inequality. We bear responsibility to our community members here at the Divinity School with families and loved ones affected by Hurricane Katrina. We bear the responsibility as people of faith and scholars of conscience to fight injustice whenever and wherever it exists.

Injustice exists in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans. Now I, like my fellow students on the trip, bear the special responsibility of witness. As a witness I cannot turn my back on this abandoned community. I cannot let my community here in Cambridge forget what so many of us have seen. We cannot fail to

Open our mouths for the mute,
For the rights of all the unfortunate.
Open our mouths, judge righteously
And defend the rights of the afflicted and needy.*

Amen.


* Proverbs 31:8-9




I'm so stinking proud of her.