Grieving for Our Country

A history of extraction and exploitation feels ever-present in New Orleans, but it was perhaps most visible after Hurricane Katrina, which occurred 20 years ago this week.

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— The New Yorker (@newyorker.com) August 29, 2025 at 1:04 PM

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…

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Today marks 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall. One last thing I wanted to share is this video we did as part of Crash Course Black American History that examines the storm and its aftermath.
Thinking about all my New Orleans people today. And always.
youtu.be/VmqZvlj07-w

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— Clint Smith (@clintsmithiii.bsky.social) August 29, 2025 at 5:08 PM

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Delta Merner reflects on her time in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 20 years ago: "Katrina showed me that climate change doesn’t just create disasters; it magnifies the injustices we’ve already allowed to exist."

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— Union of Concerned Scientists (@ucs.org) August 29, 2025 at 2:52 PM

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After the flood and the trauma of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was flush with financial resources, big ideas and hope. Two decades later, much of that hope has gone unrealized as residents cope with dysfunction and soaring costs. nyti.ms/4mCyS8e

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— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) August 29, 2025 at 1:24 PM

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“over the past 15 years more than 600 affordable housing units have been scrapped or delayed because of opposition from white-led neighborhood associations …. neighborhood associations in New Orleans are predominantly white and affluent, while the city is majority Black, working class renters”

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— micchiato 🍉 (@micchiato.bsky.social) August 30, 2025 at 12:51 AM

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"In New Orleans, nearly one in three children live in poverty — and for Black children, the rate is 43 percent. In once-thriving Black neighborhoods, schools and libraries never reopened. Bus routes were cut and never restored. Hospitals closed and never came back." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/o…

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— neilpunkdafunk.bsky.social (@neilpunkdafunk.bsky.social) August 30, 2025 at 2:04 PM

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The government's colossal failure to respond after Hurricane Katrina led to major reforms at the nation's top disaster agency. Now, the Trump administration has reversed some of those changes.

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— NPR (@npr.org) August 30, 2025 at 7:53 AM

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I was in New Orleans recently. While driving around the city, I noticed that every roofer and landscaper and contractor I saw out working under the blazing sun was Hispanic.

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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) August 30, 2025 at 11:14 AM

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Craziest thing is that Rove thought it’d work and help him.

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— Clean Observer (@hammbear2024.bsky.social) August 29, 2025 at 11:00 AM

… Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters in American history, made landfall on Monday, August 29, 2005. The day before, the National Weather Service’s bulletin issued a terrifying, all-caps warning: “Devastating damage expected…Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks…perhaps longer.” Winds up to 125 miles per hour battered the Gulf Coast. Storm surges rushed over failing levees and flooded New Orleans. Hundreds of thousands of people across the region left their homes and never returned.

As the disaster unfolded, then-president George W. Bush was in the middle of a lengthy stay at his 1,600-acre Texas ranch. When Katrina made landfall, Bush had been vacationing at the ranch for 27 days, CBS News reported at the time. Bush had taken what his staff called “working vacations” at the Crawford, Texas property throughout his presidency. During the 2005 stay, Bush monitored the situation through aides, signed a disaster declaration, and stayed in contact with disaster officials in Washington. Still, he was planning to go ahead with a trip to California and Arizona.

By the time the sun rose on Aug. 30, Katrina’s devastation became clearer. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater. The Superdome, which had been converted to a shelter for nearly 20,000 people, was surrounded by water. Mostly Black New Orleanians begged for aid on television, and images of people standing on rooftops while waving their arms and pleading for rescue were beamed into every household in the nation. Bush, after giving a speech in Coronado, California, announced that he would cut his trip short and return to the White House the next day on Air Force One, with a flyover of the Gulf Coast on the way…