Ten Years Gone: We Have Not Recovered

Today, on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we at Women With a Vision, Inc. remember, lift up, and honor those who have been forgotten, those erased from their own stories and histories, those displaced by the flood and by the mechanisms of white supremacy, neoliberalism, and disaster capitalism that has characterized the “rebuilding” of New Orleans in the past decade.
While some New Orleans neighborhoods and communities have rebounded, many of the communities that Women With a Vision stands beside every day have been left out (and pushed out) of the recovery process. Low-income communities, women of color, and LGBTQ communities of color continue to face difficulties in accessing many of the things needed to live in safety and wellness, including: affordable healthcare (exacerbated by the destruction of the city’s safety-net healthcare system); affordable housing (rents have more than doubled since Hurricane Katrina and continue to rise as gentrification takes root in several poor communities of color); healthy food and grocery stores; culturally-relevant education; functioning public transportation; and jobs that pay living wages.
The recovery has not been even or equitable. Institutional racism, sexism, and classism have been prime markers of the rebuilding and redevelopment processes. Even as government officials and mainstream media declare the rebuilding process a success story this week, calling New Orleans an example for the world of resilience and progress, the truth is much murkier.
Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. Across the Gulf Coast, Katrina devastated communities as the storm arrived on shore. But it was deep institutional failures — the failure of the federally-funded and regulated levee system and the failure of government disaster response systems — that would change New Orleans irrevocably. In New Orleans and the surrounding parishes more than 1,800 people died, hundreds of thousands more were displaced. Over 80% of New Orleans was flooded.
For those of us who live at the margins of society, and who are at the center of America’s interlocking systems of oppression, the storm rages on. Today there are 100,000 less Black people in New Orleans, a city that had been known as one of the centers of Black cultural survivalisms in the United States. Today white New Orleanians make on average more than double what Blacks make. Today Black men and women face high rates of unemployment, with rates as large as 50% for Black men. Today more than 50% of Black children in New Orleans live under the poverty line. Today the lack of healthcare, affordable housing, jobs, and adequate public transportation continue to plague low-income Black communities.
New Orleans has not recovered.
Ten years ago the receding flood waters revealed a part of New Orleans that had been hidden from much of America’s tourist-blinded eyes. Images of Black poverty and death flashed across our TV screens. We saw Black families — especially women and children — left to suffer in the overcrowded and under-resourced Superdome during the failed government response. We saw images of Black bodies floating in dirty flood waters. And we heard horror stories — Black people barred from entering white neighborhoods as they tried to escape rising waters. Nameless black people killed by police and white vigilantes. Black pain was on our TV screens in a way America was unprepared for, underscoring how even in the 21st century, black lives still didn’t matter. We also saw how racist, mainstream narratives of Black people — Black people as “thugs” and “animals” and “drug addicts” and “welfare queens” — became used as an excuse to write-off entire communities. This racist and sexist stereotyping continues to fuel the removal of Black communities in New Orleans.
The abandonment of poor blacks in New Orleans after Katrina is part of a long history of divestment, anchored by policies of disposability, aided by stereotypes of Black criminality, and accepting of Black pain and suffering. During and after the flood, poor Black women and their families were used as scapegoats to enforce policies of removal and erasure. Today, poor Black men and women fill the largest system of incarceration in the world, underscoring how criminalization and incarceration became a tool of social policy and rebuilding after the storm, a tool necessary for constructing the “new” New Orleans.
Poor black women bore the brunt of exclusionary housing policies. Their forced relocation out of public housing, and the unnecessary razing of the Big Four public housing developments, left thousands of women and children without homes. The firing of 7,500 veteran teachers, mostly Black women, deeply hurt the Black middle class. The privatization of public schools left Black children in unregulated schools whose militarized policies feed into the school-to-prison pipeline. The closing of Charity Hospital reduced access to health care among poor Black New Orleanians. The failure of Road Home to adequately compensate poor Black families meant that many Blacks homeowners could not rebuild or return home.
New Orleans has not recovered.
What is happening instead is a changing of the landscape. The demographics and economic profile of New Orleans is different today than ten years ago. Today, New Orleans is a city that is rapidly shifting — it is whiter, richer, and more popular than ever. Gentrification is changing the way Black bodies move through the city, changing how Black families are able to access what they need to survive in the city.
Those who were left behind ten years ago, continue to be left behind today. In many ways, the story of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is the story of race in America, shining a light on the ways that white supremacy, poverty, exclusion, divestment, and discrimination are reproduced and upheld in deep, systemic ways.
Here at Women With a Vision, we know our work has only just begun. For 25 years we have stood beside communities that have been systematically left out and invisibilized. We will continue to stand with those communities, fighting for a right to our stories, our voices, our health, our lives, and our very homes.
Today we remember, stand with, and SEE those who have been left out of the “New” New Orleans.