NYC/New Orleans | ITP/Xavier Digital Storytelling Info Session
We had our first group meeting with Marianne and Shawn. It was very productive. Marianne and Shawn gave us a list of all the possible community organizations that we could work with, and possible ideas of what we may be able to accomplish within the week in New Orleans.
We will have two objectives: the first is to teach undergraduates at the Art Center at Xavier University, the second is to help community organizations build their online presences using Wordpress blogs. We will also be teaching the organizations on how they can update and modify the sites.
We discussed possible subjects to teach in the classes and I informed everyone that I would like to teach video editing, audio stuff, and basically anything that they think is needed. I just want to help in anyway shape or form. I truly am excited to help in my own way because of the guilt that lingers in my heart from not having done anything, besides donating money, when the levees broke.
I remember watching the news when the levees broke. I remember watching families, who shared my skin tone, on the rooftops of their homes, begging for the helicopters to come and rescue them. I remember how powerless I felt not being to help. Here I was thousands of miles away, and all I could do was donate money, and yet that didn’t ease away the guilt I felt from not being able to do anything to help.
I felt so much anger and hate for a government that would just wait idly as its own citizens suffered. I felt anger in ways words could never describe, because I knew that the government — or perhaps better yet, this current administration — really didn’t care about these poor black citizens. They didn’t care if these citizens were the elderly, who were dying of exhaustion. They didn’t care if they were babies, who had just entered this world only to suffer the ultimate betrayal by a government that states, in its constitution, that all of its citizens are created equal. This was the day that I realized that, as a man of color, I could never (and will never) depend on this government for anything. I know that in those fateful days America — or better yet, the Republican administration under Bush — showed its true colors to its citizens and to the world.