I was born in 1980 in New Iberia, Louisiana. I was reared in a house and on property my great-great-grandparents, Alcide LANDRY and Félicianne PRINCE, purchased and built in 1907. When my grandfather’s mother, Marie May VAVASSEUR died in 1919, she left 5 toddlers and a widow. My grandfather was almost 2 years old. He did not remember his mother. His widowed father, Télesmar, left the 6 children with his parents in New Iberia, so that he and his baby brother, Alcide Jr., could go work in the petro-chemical refineries in Port Arthur, Texas. Their stint in the new industry attracting Louisiana Creoles by the thousands, did not last long, for both were back in south Louisiana by 1920.

Upon their return, Alcide Jr. moved to New Orleans, where he spent the rest of his life. Télesmar returned to St. Martinville, and to his high school sweetheart, Marie Estelle ISIDORE, who was his first wife’s second cousin (their grandparents were siblings). For a few short months, Télesmar took the 6 children to live with them, but after St. Martinville family reported to my great-great-grandparents that Estelle had been mistreating and abusing the children, Alcide and Félicianne went to get them, and ended up rearing the 4 boys. So, my grandfather ended up being reared by his grandparents. My grandmother was, and I too was reared in my grandparents’ home. Six generations lived in our home, and heirlooms, memories, traditions, and knowledge passed from each to the next. Such that, my entire life I knew enough about family born in the early to mid 19th century as if I personally knew them. I learned my grandparents’ recollections of their physique, dislikes, past-times, attitudes, and genealogy.

With the constant displacement of families from their “homelands,” our family’s story, and continuity, sounds extraordinary. They aren’t though. Our story is shared by most in the Louisiana Creole community. We tend to know our history, genealogy, and traditions well. It’s why we still live on land that family purchased during the colonial and provincial periods. It’s why we still speak our community’s historic languages. It’s why Louisiana is the only state to have its own academic studies program, why tourists flock to our region of the state by the millions every year. We are different from the rest of the United States, and everyone seems to know it, all over the world.

When I was growing up, students went to school, and teachers and staff were always right. If we misbehaved, we got triple whippings, from the principal, another family member, and from our parents. We were taught to respect adults and were also taught to show deference to specialists, like doctors, nurses, carpenters, priests, teachers, and researchers. When the internet finally grew in use, sometime in the late 1990s, or early 2000s, it profoundly disrupted this flow and transfer of knowledge and respect. Suddenly, Wikipedia replaced encyclopedias prepared by specialists, and from that point onward, anyone and everyone could, in the click of a mouse, or swipe of a finger, scan various websites containing easy information. And because these websites are maintained, and or edited by non-specialists, a whole bunch of nonsense went and goes into them. Out of the blue, everyone felt that their internet browsing made them experts on topics they do not understand, and they began to chastise and attack specialists as ignorant buffoons, caricatures that think they are specialists, but are not. Journalists, tv and movie producers throughout the United States began using these internet sites also, to such an extent that the misinformation became common knowledge. Any utterance to the contrary can – and does – lead to much blustering of specialists. More crucially, this evolution has eroded respect in the institution of knowledge.

Case in point. Some time in the 1990s, Louisiana history got rewritten by Cajunist activists. These activists were journalists, supervisors, policy-makers, and occupied virtually every rung of society. History is always being rewritten, because history is consciously constructed and reconstructed, based on changes in social attitudes, political exigences, and economic trends. When US President NIXON reversed the 1924 Immigration Act, and the Federal Government overturned Jim Crow traditions and laws, it opened the floodgates for people to run for dear life from being associated with racist white-identified people, and these changes also directly led to communities redefining themselves, on their own terms. Thus the rise of “ethnic” identities and all of the color movements (red, yellow, brown, black). Cajunism came out of this context, and Louisiana Creoles who converted to Cajun identity, played an active role in erasing créolité from the memory of all who listened and consumed our culture, history, and traditions. This ultimately whitened Cajuns, and blackened Creoles, because, in the minds of Americans, whites and blacks are the only humans; the rest don’t matter … that is, until 2017, with a particularly problematic confrontation between Hispanophones (Spanish-speakers) and white-identified Americans. That’s for another post, though.

Due to identity changes, and greater mobility, people partaking in the identity movements were now in a position to institutionalize their reconstructed memories, history, identity. Cajuns, seemingly overnight, between 1980 and 2000, had virtually rewritten and rebranded Louisiana Creole history. The tourism bureaux in Louisiana loved it, because people’s interests had shifted from revering bourgeois and elite history, to that of the “dirt poor.” Clinging to a fabricated history of eternal impoverishment ensured that the Cajunized story of Louisiana was well received, both by Americans and by Francophones from Canada and Europe; all white-identified. People began to flock to South Louisiana for Cajun Gumbo, Cajun Étouffée, Cajun music, Cajun French, Cajun festivals, and Cajun Seafood. It was a win-win for everyone involved … except those who continued to identify as Louisiana Creoles, who watched their shared history, culture, and identity, be highjacked and claimed by now white-identified Louisiana Creoles who became Cajun-identified after the 1970s.

Within this context also came chefs who concocted new dishes, like étouffée and blackened seafood, branding all of it, and the historic dishes, like Gumbo, as Cajun. They focused these culinary changes on South Louisiana. But they excluded New Orleans. For New Orleanians had abandoned our community languages (and identity) almost 100 years prior, settling for American racial identities and English instead, both of which were forcefully imposed upon them by Americans in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. New Orleans Creoles did this as their public face, but behind closed doors maintained many Louisiana Creole traditions, identity, and some elements of our history survived. Above all, they could negotiate the continuation of some Creole things in public, like cuisine. It was cuisine, and also French, Creole, and Spanish surnames that set them apart from African Americans and their Anglo-American relatives, without causing a fuss. Disidentifying with white and black/African American became a serious offense, that could – and often did – lead to brutal public condemnation. But the stuff that Americans (Anglo and African) loved most about New Orleans was its Créolité, because to them, Créolité was fancy. So, New Orleanians held onto Creole dishes, which they sold in fancy dining establishments for tourists, like Galatoire’s and Antoine’s. There, they sold stock Creole dishes, like Gumbo, but the atmosphere and presentation led diners to assume that these dishes came directly from France. Louisiana Creole chefs wanting to capitalize on this money-making industry, began telling diners, or allowed diners to assume that, Creole food was from French aristocrats, and that it differed from the new Cajun food in ingredients and presentation. Apparently, Creoles cooked with tomatoes, which they got from Italians (nevermind that tomatoes are indigenous to North and Central America), rich crèmes, and the best cuts of animals. Cajuns, they began to say, cooked “from the land,” with wild game, poor people food like crawfish, boudin, and gratons, which they claimed came from Nova Scotia. So, in a single trip, a tourist could experience France and Canada in South Louisiana restaurants.

Pretty soon, journalists began to cover Cajunism and fancified Créolité in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States. As far back as the 1980s, and as recent as 2017, newspapers lectured their readers on the “difference between Cajun and Creole,” and those differences are all of the ones mentioned above. Even credible media, like CNN, jumped on the bandwagon, as did the Travel Channel’s Delicious Destinations with Andrew ZIMMERMAN. With these misconceptions, consciously dubious history, everywhere, it must be true. If the only Mexicans one sees have Mayan physiognomies, and the only Africans one sees are Nigerian Igbos, then it must be true that all Africans have dark brown skin, coarse hair, fleshy lips and derrières, and obviously hung like horses for the men. Not so much. It’s why Kabyles in Algeria, Eritreans, and white-skinned South Africans, cringe when confronting these stereotypes and fantastical expectations.

All of this presents a crisis for academics, who are professionally trained researchers, and specialists of their fields. How do we compete with Wikipedia and internet experts? It’s not only that the internet and policy changes have redefined access to information in an instant, or that people are free to identify and identify things they do, as they please. It is also that there is a very present anti-intellectual attitude in the United States, where academia and academics are respected less by a large numbers of Americans. The academy is no longer viewed by the masses as the incubator of knowledge. That incubator, for many Americans, is now the internet and tv. And what is on the internet, with a gazilion likes on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter, is what the masses seem to value most now. Much to our chagrin. Because, still, academics and educators in America are forced to figure out how to compete with internet experts. It is an issue that remains unresolved, and one we tackle everyday in the academy.

– Christophe Landry