Bluesky

In late August 2005, as US newspapers were busy reporting on John Roberts’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the then-novel use of drones to fight California wildfires, and the escalating chaos in US-occupied Iraq, a massive hurricane was barreling toward the Gulf Coast. The mayor of New Orleans ordered residents to evacuate, but for many, the warning came too late—while others did not have the means to pick up and go. When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the low-lying region, its storm surge inundated nearly 100,000 acres of land, decimated whole neighborhoods, and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes (many never returned). Nearly 2,000 Americans lost their lives. The first images that emerged—of families stranded on rooftops, elderly residents abandoned to their fate, thousands packed into the Superdome—shocked the nation into a rare, and ultimately fleeting, moment of awareness about poverty, race, and government failure.

Some of The Nation’s initial on-the-ground reporting can still be difficult to read, such as Christian Parenti’s dispatch, “The Big Easy Dies Hard,” published in the first issue that went to press after the storm. Parenti described “dazed refugees wad[ing] through the filthy water,” maggot-ridden bodies decomposing in the streets. One resident told Parenti he couldn’t comprehend how unprepared the authorities had been for the storm: “I been hearing about this is gonna happen for my whole life—how could they not have a plan?”

Many of the stories published in our pages about Katrina have been collected into a still-valuable anthology titled Unnatural Disaster, edited by Betsy Reed, a longtime editor at The Nation, now editor in chief of The Guardian US. The storm “ripped off the facade that for so many years allowed the nation’s political class to betray its citizens without consequence,” Reed wrote.

The magazine immediately resisted a narrative that began cropping up in some mainstream media outlets suggesting that what New Orleans was really suffering from was the unleashed criminality of the city’s majority Black population. Instead of a story of public disinvestment, state failure, climate inequality, and federal mismanagement, the travails of New Orleans’s abandoned residents became grist for the competing neoconservative and neoliberal propaganda mills, which churned out ever more sensationalistic stories of lawlessness, criminality, and even, in one bizarre instance, cannibalism. The narrative had deadly real-world consequences. Police officers assigned to assist with the rescue operations were redirected to protect city businesses from looting—the extent of which, as it turned out, had been wildly exaggerated. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in The Nation on the storm’s fifth anniversary, “much of what got called looting was the stranded foraging for survival by the only means available.”

The storm and its aftermath perfectly encapsulated the tension between capitalism and the dignity of human lives. Above all, it revealed a country that had long before the storm already become, in the title of a piece by Eyal Press, “One Nation, Fragmented.”

Especially on TV, early news stories hyped the breakdown-of-civilization angle, suggesting that in the absence of authoritarian-style control, certain people—generally those with darker skin—would lose all sense of reason and order. As in the Middle East, armed mercenaries were needed to keep the population in line. Jeremy Scahill reported in The Nation that Blackwater mercenaries, fresh from Iraq, were among the first responders to arrive in the city. Scahill wrote:

In an hourlong conversation I had with four Blackwater men, they characterized their work in New Orleans as “securing neighborhoods” and “confronting criminals.” They all carried automatic assault weapons and had guns strapped to their legs. Their flak jackets were covered with pouches for extra ammunition.

Of course, as several Nation contributors pointed out, the actual crime unfolding in New Orleans was neglect of the city’s predominantly Black and poor neighborhoods, and this neglect had long predated the hurricane’s arrival. As Earl Ofari Hutchinson put it, “New Orleans is the classic tale of two cities: one showy, middle-class and white; the other poor, downtrodden and low-income black. It was a city that didn’t wait for a disaster to happen; grinding poverty and neglect had already wreaked that disaster on thousands.”

While training an eye on the storm’s disproportionate impact on the vulnerable, Nation contributors also emphasized some heartening examples of community organizing and mutual aid that helped people in and around New Orleans survive, even in the absence of any government help. In “Hurricane Gumbo,” Anthony Fontenot and the late Mike Davis reported on a grassroots community effort in the Cajun and Creole community of Ville Platte to welcome exiles from New Orleans. As Davis and Fontenot put it:

Ville Platte’s homemade rescue and relief effort—organized around the popular slogan “If not us, then who?”—stands in striking contrast to the incompetence of higher levels of government as well as to the hostility of other, wealthier towns, including some white suburbs of New Orleans, toward influxes of evacuees, especially poor people of color. Indeed, Evangeline Parish as a whole has become a surprising island of interracial solidarity and self-organization in a state better known for incorrigible racism and corruption.

Hurricane Katrina exposed the depths of government failure and neglect, but it also revealed astonishing acts of solidarity and mutual aid—reminders that in the face of disaster, people often step up where institutions fall short. It’s in the cracks of the empire’s crumbling edifice where the green shoots of genuine progress might begin to grow.

Long after the mainstream media had largely moved on, The Nation stayed on the story of what had really happened in New Orleans in the storm’s wake. In 2009, the investigative journalist A.C. Thompson published “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” a bombshell report about the murder by white vigilantes of at least 11 unarmed Black people, who were guilty of doing nothing more than walking through a white neighborhood on their way to an official evacuation center.

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to 30 residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws, or, as one member put it, anyone who simply “didn’t belong.”

In another piece in the same issue, Thompson reported on the gruesome murder of an unarmed Black man named Henry Glover by New Orleans police. His reporting eventually led to the conviction of three police officers for Glover’s killing, and Thompson’s reporting experience in New Orleans became a plotline on the HBO series Treme.

More so, perhaps, than the attacks of September 11, Hurricane Katrina introduced some of the themes that have since emerged as defining features of American life in the 21st century, from the cascading effects of anthropogenic climate change to the increasingly open negligence the federal government has shown toward the most vulnerable segments of the population. For those paying attention, that devastating storm 20 years ago was a reckoning. There could be no more pretending. Just as later disasters, like the coronavirus pandemic, would reveal a dangerously unequal society in which resources that ought to have gone toward social preparedness had instead been redirected to military adventures abroad and tax cuts for the rich, Hurricane Katrina showed that the federal government, especially when led by Republicans, could no longer be trusted to protect and serve the people. We were on our own.