Somebody Has to Say It: Where She At and Why Do We Keep Giving Helena Moreno a Pass?
Mayoral candidates Oliver Thomas and Royce Duplessis at a recent Small Business Mayoral Forum. Helena Moreno was not in attendance.
Helena Moreno has managed to pull off something we have never seen in New Orleans politics: openly snubbing Black organizations, leaders, and communities while still enjoying their support. And we have to ask—why are we letting her get away with it?
To paraphrase the words of the great Bounce legend MC T.T. Tucker and in his unmistakable voice, “Where she at? Where she at? Where she at? Where she at? Where she at? Where she at?”
Let’s check the record:
The Martinet Society—our city’s historic Black lawyers association—hosted a major forum. Moreno? Nowhere to be found.
The Ashe forum on utilities was packed. Moreno skipped that one too.
The Culture Forum hosted by ELLA drew a strong crowd; Moreno was a no-show. Let that sink in.
The a forum for small business owners hosted by Propeller and others? A packed house, and again—no Helena.
Let’s be real. This isn’t a one-off. This is a pattern – a pattern of calculated indifference from not only Helena, but from those in our community that support her while claiming to care about accountability, equity, and representation.
To every Black leader trying to convince us that she deserves our vote, that she is just what we need, “Where she at? Where she at? Where she at?”
You can bet $100 bills to doubloons that if this is the other way around, the chatter would be roaring. Let Royce Duplessis or Oliver Thomas so much as leave a forum early, and Moreno’s team blasts it all over social media. Yet, when Helena doesn’t even bother to show up, there’s silence. Worse, there are still Black leaders who cover for her, who hand her endorsements, who pretend this disrespect doesn’t matter. Either they have lost their minds or they think the rest of us have. To be sure, what makes this sting worse is not just Helena’s disrespect, but the betrayal of our own leaders who keep propping her up. Folks who know she’s skipping out on our forums, our spaces, our people — and still hand her endorsements like nothing happened . . . like her behavior is righteous and regular. They smile, they cover for her, they act like absence is the same as presence. She snubs Black lawyers, and yet Black lawyers endorse her. That’s not leadership, that’s enabling.
And let’s call it what it is: a double standard. Black candidates get dragged if they’re late, leave early, or miss one event. But Helena can ghost an entire room full of Black lawyers, small business owners, or cultural leaders, and our own people rush to defend her or turn a blind eye. That isn’t just Helena playing us — that’s our leaders helping her do it.
So what are we saying when we support her anyway? That accountability only runs one way? That we will scrutinize and punish our own but bend over backward to excuse her absence, her avoidance, her disregard?
This is bigger than one candidate. This is about a community willing to demand perfection and over performance from Black leaders while giving a free pass to someone who doesn’t even show up. If Helena Moreno won’t stand before us, why should she stand for us? And if we don’t demand more from her, what does that say about how much we really demand of ourselves?
It’s time to stop pretending we don’t see the pattern. Because if we keep letting Helena Moreno get away with this, the truth is—she isn’t the one playing us. We’re playing ourselves. Is this the “something different” that our leaders keep trying to tell us we need, it’s a hard pass. Thanks, but no thanks. Your silence on Helena’s disrespect is not neutrality. Nor is it accountability — it’s complicity.