The New Orleans That Hurricane Katrina Revealed

By Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker

Twenty years ago, the storm showed how few resources a city built on extraction had.

Everybody loves New Orleans. It’s only the fifty-fourth-largest city in the United States—down from fifth-largest two hundred years ago—but it occupies a much larger place in the national mind than, say, Arlington, Texas, or Mesa, Arizona, where more people live. There’s the food, the neighborhoods, the music, the historic architecture, the Mississippi River, Mardi Gras. But the love for New Orleans stands in contrast to the story that cold, rational statistics tell. It ranks near the bottom on measures such as poverty, murder, and employment.

None of this is new. If one were to propose an origin story for New Orleans as it is today, it might begin in 1795, when a planter named Jean Étienne de Boré held a public demonstration to prove that he could cultivate and process cane sugar on his plantation, which was situated in present-day Audubon Park—just a stone’s throw from where I grew up. This was during the years of the Haitian Revolution, which made the future of slavery on sugar plantations in the Caribbean look uncertain. De Boré’s demonstration set off a boom in sugar production on plantations in southern Louisiana. Within a few years, as a newly acquired part of the United States, New Orleans was on its way to becoming the country’s leading marketplace for the buying and selling of human beings.

This history feels ever-present in New Orleans, but it was perhaps most visible after Hurricane Katrina, which occurred twenty years ago this week. Two documentary film series timed for the anniversary—Traci Curry’s “Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time,” and Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Spike Lee’s “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water”—make for an excellent reminder not just of the terrible suffering the storm inflicted but also of how it showed New Orleans to be a place not at all like its enchanting reputation. Both series re-create day-by-day details of the week the storm hit, substantially through the testimony of a cohort of eloquent witnesses. They vividly remind us of what we already knew: that, with the notable exception of General Russel Honoré, the head of the military relief effort, public officials—the mayor, the governor, the President, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency—proved incompetent. New Orleans’s flood-protection was completely inadequate. The order to evacuate the city came far too late. After the storm, attempts to rescue people trapped in their homes and to get them out of town were inexcusably slow.

Both documentaries make obvious how much the story of Katrina—and New Orleans—is about race. New Orleans’s subtropical, swampy location makes it susceptible to recurring catastrophes, and these have periodically entailed the mass displacement of Black people. “Rising Tide,” John Barry’s book about the 1927 Mississippi River flood, memorably recounts an earlier example. The neighborhoods that flooded most severely after Katrina were the ones built during the twentieth century, when the city erected a pumping system that was supposed to keep its low-lying areas dry. Many of these were Black neighborhoods.

In the days after the storm, tens of thousands of refugees, the vast majority of them Black, jammed into the Louisiana Superdome, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, and the elevated sections of the local highways. During that terrible week after the storm, white observers—including, the documentaries remind us, members of the national press—often voiced the suspicion that these crowds would inevitably turn to theft, violence, and revenge. Such sentiments also have very deep roots in Louisiana, going back to the days of slave uprisings and, later, Black political activity during Reconstruction, which whites often chose to see as “riots” that needed to be violently, often murderously, dispersed.

Discover how racism was only one of the factors at play in the storm’s aftermath.

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