America's new jazz museum! (No poor black people allowed): "'We should not allow the mythic significance of this moment to pass without proper consideration,' he wrote. 'Let us assess the size of this cataclysm in cultural terms, not in dollars and cents or politics. Americans are far less successful at doing that because we have never understood how our core beliefs are manifest in culture -- and how culture should guide political and economic realities.' In an interview with BBC-TV, Marsalis went further, describing the black faces on CNN looking for lost mothers and fathers as calling up a historical memory of Southern slave families torn apart.

And at Marsalis' 'Higher Ground' benefit, the tone was more pointedly political than is customary at Lincoln Center. 'When the hurricane struck, it did not turn the region into a third-world country,' actor Danny Glover said from the stage. 'It revealed one.' Singer Harry Belafonte, at his side, declared, 'Katrina was not unforeseeable. It was the result of a political structure that subcontracts its responsibility to private contractors and abdicates its responsibility altogether.'"

Emphasis mine.

(Via Salon.)