Gov. Jeff Landry ordered flags lowered for Martha Elizabeth Odom, the 17-year-old Lafayette student killed in a shooting at the Mall of Louisiana.
Let’s start where basic decency requires us to start: Martha Odom was a child. Her death was a horror. Her family deserves grief without spectacle, memory without exploitation, and space to mourn a daughter whose life was stolen before it had the chance to become what it should have been.
That is precisely why what Landry is doing is so disgusting.
There is nothing wrong with mourning a murdered child. There is nothing wrong with honoring a young woman remembered for her kindness, intelligence, discipline, artistry, and promise. There is nothing wrong with saying her death was senseless. It was.
The problem is that Jeff Landry is not simply mourning. He is signaling.
And the signal is not subtle.
Landry’s executive order says Odom’s death is a reminder of the need for “unity, resilience, and compassion in the face of unspeakable evil and hatred.” Those words might sound noble if they came from someone who had shown a consistent concern for the lives of children in Louisiana. But from Landry, they read less like a tribute and more like a political flare shot into the darkest corners of the state’s racial imagination.
Because Louisiana loses children to violence all the time.
Black children. White children. Children from poor families. Children whose names never become statewide symbols. Children whose grieving parents do not get executive orders, Capitol flags, or carefully written prose from the governor’s office. Children whose deaths are filed away as unfortunate background noise in a state that has long tolerated poverty, gun violence, neglect, underfunded schools, broken mental health systems, and communities left to bleed.
Where was this performance for them?
Where was this level of solemn state mourning for the Black children who die in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Shreveport, Lafayette, Monroe, Lake Charles, and everywhere else in Louisiana? Where was this grief when families were burying sons and daughters whose lives apparently did not fit the political story Landry wanted to tell?
And for that matter, where was it for the white children who have died too? Because this is not really about whether Landry cares more about white children than Black children. It is uglier than that. It is about when a dead child becomes useful to him.
Landry waited until he had the “characters” he needed.
A young white girl. A public place. A terrifying act of violence. A racial implication ready to be whispered loudly enough for everyone to hear but not stated plainly enough for the governor to own.
That is the game.
He does not want to say outright that he believes Louisiana’s crime problem is a Black problem. He does not want to say directly what his politics keep implying. He does not want to say that his vision of public safety is built on the old, poisonous idea that Blackness itself is the threat.
So he dresses it up.
He wraps it in flags. He places it beside a grieving family. He uses the language of compassion while feeding the machinery of resentment. He turns a dead girl’s memory into an instrument for racial fear, then expects the rest of us to pretend we do not see what he is doing.
No.
If Jeff Landry believes that crime in Louisiana is fundamentally a Black problem, he should say it. Say it without hiding behind Martha Odom. Say it without hiding behind the flag. Say it without using a funeral as a campaign prop.
Say it plainly.
Because the rest of us are tired of watching politicians exploit tragedy while refusing to do the actual work of preventing it.
If Landry cared about children dying, he would be talking about guns with something more serious than bumper-sticker bravado. He would be talking about youth violence as a public crisis, not a racial talking point. He would be talking about poverty, trauma, domestic violence, school discipline, mental health care, after-school programs, neighborhood stability, and the obscene ease with which conflict becomes gunfire in this state.
He would be asking why so many children in Louisiana grow up surrounded by grief before they are old enough to understand it.
He would be asking why families across this state are forced to mourn in silence while politicians only show up when the optics serve them.
But that is not the conversation Landry wants. He wants the simpler one. The older one. The one Louisiana knows too well.
He wants people scared. He wants them angry. He wants them looking at race instead of policy. He wants them to believe the problem is not that Louisiana has failed too many children, too many schools, too many neighborhoods, too many families, and too many victims. He wants them to believe the problem has a face, a color, a zip code, and a convenient political use.
That is not leadership. That is cowardice.
And it is especially cowardly because Martha Odom is not here to consent to this. Her family should not have to watch their daughter’s name dragged into the governor’s culture war. They should not have to see her life reduced to a symbol in a racial morality play. They should not have to wonder whether the state’s highest elected official is honoring her memory or weaponizing it.
A decent governor would understand the difference.
A decent governor would mourn her without exploiting her. A decent governor would speak about violence with enough seriousness to include every child whose blood has been spilled in this state. A decent governor would recognize that grief is not a branding opportunity.
But Jeff Landry is not governing from decency. He is governing from appetite.
He has an appetite for conflict. An appetite for racial division. An appetite for turning every tragedy into proof of whatever ugly thing he already wanted people to believe.
And that is the obscenity here.
Not the lowering of the flags. Not the honoring of Martha Odom. She deserved honor. She deserved life.
The obscenity is that Landry’s compassion appears only when it can be pointed like a weapon.
Louisiana does have a crime problem. A serious one. A painful one. A deadly one. But we do not have a “Black problem.” We do not have a problem that can be solved by demonizing entire communities, stoking racial panic, and pretending selective outrage is moral clarity.
We have a leadership problem.
We have a governor who sees some victims as people and others as statistics. We have a governor who can summon the full ceremonial weight of the state when a tragedy fits his politics, then offer silence or slogans when it does not. We have a governor who seems more interested in inflaming fear than reducing harm.
Martha Odom’s death should have called Louisiana to shared grief and serious purpose.
Instead, Jeff Landry used it to do what he so often does: divide, provoke, and imply the worst while hiding behind official language.
He should be ashamed.
The real question is whether he still knows how.