In Katrina’s America, the Storm Still Echoes 20 Years Later

This piece has been shortened and adapted for The Thread from C.K. Weekly, where you can read the piece in its entirety.

I was five when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. I don’t remember much. There are hazy memories—church prayers for victims, distant headlines, and the overwhelming joy of Saints fans when they won the Super Bowl years later, a moment that felt bigger than sports. I didn’t fully understand the depths of why. Nearly 20 years later, that meaning finally became tangible.

New America recently hosted “Katrina’s America: 20 Years Since the Storm” in DC, bringing together journalists, artists, and thinkers to reflect on how Katrina didn’t just devastate a region—it exposed a nation. The category-5 hurricane didn’t discriminate in its destruction. Nature doesn’t choose who to hit. But in the aftermath, we saw exactly who was left behind.

The city’s evacuation plans failed those dependent on public transportation. Generations of disinvestment in public infrastructure in lower-income neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward—predominantly Black and working-class—led to the collapse of poorly maintained levees. FEMA’s slow, disjointed response left thousands stranded for days or even weeks. Media narratives criminalized survival, painting Black residents as looters. Even in the recovery phase, programs like the Road Home Program prioritized white, wealthier homeowners, while Black families were buried in red tape over missing property titles.

Katrina revealed more than logistical failure; it revealed structural rot. The disaster didn’t create inequality: It exposed and intensified it. The aftermath wasn’t a glitch in the system. It was the system at work. 

As John McQuaid wrote in The Atlantic a decade after Hurricane Katrina, “America is an optimistic nation. It has a short memory.” He argued that we often ignore the lessons playing out in real time—and continue repeating our errors. He wasn’t wrong.

Our optimism is problematic when it’s paired with amnesia. Progress is often only acknowledged in hindsight, and our refusal to confront deep-rooted inequities ensures we remain vulnerable. The infrastructure and responsive failures in New Orleans were decades in the making, rooted in policies of redlining, segregation, and environmental neglect. And while we like to think we’ve moved on, the systems that failed in 2005 still exist today. Only now, disaster has become big business.

“The systems that failed in 2005 still exist today. Only now, disaster has become big business.”

In 2024, a growing number of private equity firms are profiting off billion-dollar weather events. Trivest Partners, for example, has invested in 14 storm restoration companies since 2020. Simultaneously, a report on 21 major private equity firms found their portfolios are responsible for 1.17 billion metric tons CO2 emissions annually—through investments in oil, gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and coal.

We’re trapped in a cycle that we actively incentivize. We can disagree over the extent to which climate change is creating this destruction, but competing motives caused by continuous corporatization push us further away from solving these problems, not closer.

Investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones (of The 1619 Project) delivered a sobering message. She spoke of a country moving into darker and ever more unforgiving systemic terrain. Our inability to solve obvious structural issues is now being accelerated as Black people are being “disappeared” from mainstream institutions, she said, forced “back under the veil.” Her words carried weight—not just because of their truth, but because of their historical echo: Progress has been reversed before. It can again.

A partial conclusion felt within the room at this event is that we are experiencing such a moment again. It’s hard to argue against that. And in the days since, I’ve struggled to find the emotional energy to feel optimistic. I am pained to feel that some of our major thinkers are so convinced of our limited path forward, of our inability to solve certain challenges in our time. The rising tide of inequality, political dysfunction, AI disruption, and corporate capture have been heavy thoughts to ponder. Cynicism can feel more accurate than hope.

I don’t draw these conclusions as my own, but maybe that’s the point. Not to reject cynicism, but to sit with it.

One panelist, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah—a New Orleans-born visionary musician, composer, and cultural leader—offered another way forward. He articulated the artistic expression and spirit of the people of his city. New Orleans, he said, exists in resistance. Its culture, art, and joy are all defiant. The people of New Orleans have long lived with the knowledge that systemic change may not come in their lifetimes. And yet, they celebrate life, they create art, they express both the pain and joy of their experience, and they keep going.

That’s the lesson I’m carrying from this week. When systems fail and hope feels abstract, we must still remember our humanity. And as long as that is the case, we can choose joy, community, fellowship, and a love for life. Those choices are not trivial—they’re a form of resistance.

I do not live in a constant state of cynicism, but I’ve felt it. Maybe you have too, and maybe that’s okay. What I walked away with was not necessarily a new worldview, but a deeper conviction in one we sometimes overlook: that we can’t fix everything. We can’t fix the whole system on our own. But we can show up for each other. We can connect beyond identity, beyond polarization, beyond those things that threaten our personal convictions. We can see one another for who we really are: humans having a human experience. 

And there’s power in that.

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