Katrina coverage in Canada.

I have recently discovered your magazine on Canadian news racks. For the most part, I am impressed by the critical inquiry of the journalists' articles. In the Spring 2006 issue, with its many articles on Katrina, I felt there could have been more interrogation of the invisible white institutional privilege that often escapes critical scrutiny.

While there was much discussion devoted to racism, bear in mind that the dominant white mainstream is so distanced and removed, spatially and ideologically, that they refuse to see themselves as part of New Orleans' past problems and potential solutions. I would like to hear what the white mainstream thinks and feels about their social responsibility and commitment to New Orleans' rebuilding.

Overall, the media's reporting of Katrina was not much better in Canada with the familiar "racialization of crime" and "blame the victim" discourses spinning overtime. One is constantly bombarded with images of "pitiful" and "whining" Black folk and "oh, so resourceful" white folks, who are usually represented taking dignified control over their lives, not waiting for government "hand-outs."

However, the hyperbolic coverage of New Orleans' jazz legacy and Mardi Gras madness has persistently annoyed me. Essentially, the media are deploying this Afro-American culture in distracting and deflecting viewers from any critical examination of the issues on the ground-worldwide. The television news media bombard Canadian viewers with special features about jazz, constructing the Big Easy as a pleasure-loving Mecca. That may be true, but what else do we see--white male entrepreneurs talking about how "sweet it is" and how they can't live without their jazz! No kidding? Let's face it, Black folks have never really "owned" jazz, historically or in contemporary times.

When have Afro-Americans truly had the means of production and distribution over this music-the record companies and distributors? When have they owned the clubs, the venues, the theatres? When have they truly possessed the time and resource opportunities to research, reflect and write about the music they created? I have two bios on Louis Armstrong and five on Billie Holiday--only two of them were written by Black authors. When have Black folks made the big money from jazz? We may perform and compose the music, but do we "own" the creative license and copyright over this product? Finally, when does Black culture and pop music, the multicultural and diversity rhetoric, truly intervene on the white privileged status quo in challenging the power structure when the music can be so easily commodified and appropriated? Funny how white America likes to deny and efface jazz and blues' once "low-life" brothel history, not to mention the contempt they once had for it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So, no real disrespect as a fellow African-Canadian jazz and blues lover, but put the noisemakers and the Mardi Gras feathers on hold! Members of the privileged white mainstream know they own it--and they are using it as a smoke screen in reconstituting the dominant order. Beware Big Easy....

Joseph Worrell

Toronto, Canada