This story appears in our May/June issue, officially on newsstands April 24.
I suppose that the story of the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is meant to be a heroic one. I struggle to express the expected, uplifting words I know I am supposed to say—how we are rebuilt, resilient and revitalized. We are all of that, but we are tired of hearing it. Black New Orleans withstood the battle. But we are still undergoing the war.
In New Orleans, we juxtapose “before the storm” and “after the storm” as points of reference and a way to contend with the drastic changes we’ve experienced in the last 20 years. This Hurricane Katrina anniversary feels heavier than those in the past. The buildup has brought me to, and through, so many emotions: grief, pride, empathy, anxiety, joy, pain and anger. Mostly anger. But Black women do not get to be “angry.” In New Orleans “after the storm,” that emotion must instead be exhibited in the constant need to protect and defend what has survived since 2005.
Nostalgia can be a form of escape from the present. It’s why I became a Black New Orleans historian. I’m fixated on the past due to how, in an instant, my childhood became history. Trauma’s impact on memory makes remembrance all the more critical in understanding who we are. I still remember the front room in the New Orleans East home that my grandparents purchased, after my family had lived and rented across the Seventh Ward for generations. The front room had plastic- wrapped sofas against a mirrored tile wall. My grandmother used the large window as a seasonal display for her porcelain dolls, Easter decorations and Christmas nativity scene. This room was reserved for company and special occasions. It was where she held her card games and the club meetings with her friends; it was where she hosted Christmas Eve, with gumbo served on her finest china from out of her glass cabinets. The loss of physical spaces that helped shape our identity—homes, schools, businesses, restaurants—has left us searching for the feelings of comfort and security that those spaces once gave. Twenty years later, I am still trying to navigate who I am without “Maw Maw’s house.”
Many New Orleanians lost family photos, videos, yearbooks, documents, jewelry, art and other irreplaceable items that proved we were here—that we lived. Repeated access to information we want to remember strengthens memory consolidation: the process in the brain that transforms short-term memories into long-term ones. Another passing anniversary year, without the presence of physical symbols of our memories, is an endless battle of the mind. We are fighting to remember what may no longer be in front of us but still exists within us.
“Before the storm” is the mental place I retreat to when the post-Katrina present feels too unfamiliar. I often contemplate, and even mourn, what our lives might have been; even while I’m eternally grateful for what they became, and what it means to be born in, raised in and returned to New Orleans. We lost so many to the storm—to water, heat, illnesses, violence, negligence and displacement. Being Black in New Orleans today is both a privilege and a miracle.
As evacuees, deemed “refugees” by our own country, we longed for home, despite the uncertainty of what, if anything, we had to return to. Numerous others were left behind without the luxury of choice, because socioeconomic disparities predetermine who the privilege of evacuation is granted to. Those who remained as the water rose were forced to watch from atop interstates, attics and rooftops as the home they knew disappeared before their eyes.
When it came to pre-Katrina New Orleans, you just had to be there. We grew up in a city that felt like it belonged to us. Life moved at a steady pace, with no threat that it might all be gone tomorrow. Our feet were planted on solid ground, and it was only on occasion that we stepped outside of our neighborhoods. Everything you needed was usually right where you already were. Our communities were the center of our worlds, until the formative years of our identities were interrupted. Some of us Katrina Babies were old enough when the storm hit that we vividly remember and miss pre-Katrina New Orleans—but were too young to have lived to our fullest potential in it. I struggle with the realization that many of our lives in “new” New Orleans have outlasted our lives in the old.
As Katrina approached the Gulf Coast, many of us had just completed our first week of the school year. I was at a friend’s sleepover that weekend—and had to leave abruptly to pack in the middle of the night. Three outfits for three days. We had been through this before and always came right back. I would be back at school, in my new fourth-grade class, with my new teacher. My biggest concern at 9 years old was not a hurricane, but to get old enough to be dropped off at the movie theater in my New Orleans East neighborhood, or finally tall enough to ride the Mega Zeph ride at the nearby Jazzland/Six Flags theme park.
I was never able to do so. Now, each week, I drive past my former school, stunned at the complete change in the racial demographics of its students. It was a largely Black and Latino Catholic school that has since shifted to a predominantly White one. Where the movie theater once stood is now a vacant parking lot. The Mega Zeph—the most memorable remaining structure of the theme park—was recently demolished after two decades of abandonment, with redevelopment plans on the horizon.
As we coped, others colonized. Katrina was the perfect storm for disaster capitalists: Buy the devastated land for cheap, renovate and resell, and raise the rent and property taxes. Black neighborhoods on higher ground saw increases in their White population after 2005, while some Black neighborhoods on lower ground, which were hardest hit by Katrina, saw Black population increases. This form of climate gentrification capitalized on our generational homes, deemed our lives disposable and ordained who deserves to experience the benefits of environmental disaster.
A 2020National Community Reinvestment Coalition study found that “New Orleans is gentrifying at an abnormally rapid rate compared to most U.S. cities” and identified New Orleans as the fifth-fastest gentrifying city in the United States. This data is indicated by an affordable-housing crisis, a short-term rental takeover, and rising home costs paired with stagnant wages. The levee failures following Hurricane Katrina resulted in citywide flooding and the destruction of over 130,000 homes in the city. Approximately eighty-one percent of these homes have been rebuilt, as reported in 2015. But the aggressive displacement devised by post-Katrina gentrification has pushed nearly 100,000 Black New Orleanians from their own neighborhoods. So while, yes, we have rebuilt, the question is: For whom?
The racial demographics have drastically shifted in historic Black neighborhoods like the Tremé, the oldest Black neighborhood in the country—and new residents who willingly moved to the birthplace of jazz now file noise complaints about live music. Sacred, ancestral traditions like second lines have become a commodity, and we routinely force our way through transplants and tourists, both Black and White, who obstruct the spaces that Black natives created out of necessity and resistance. To come for our cultural breath is to come for our life. Have we not lost enough?
The levee failures, delayed disaster response and irresponsible media coverage of Katrina epitomized the U.S. governmental failure and anti-Blackness that cost us our lives and livelihoods. The lessons of Katrina resulted in calls for the nation to confront and correct its “national preparedness, search and rescue, communications, critical infrastructure, logistics and evacuations” efforts, along with other admitted “critical challenges” included in President George W. Bush’s list of federal failures during the storm. The media framing of Katrina coverage became the case study for racial stereotyping and bias, forcing society to reexamine the implications of misrepresentation and the lack of media ethics. Katrina thrust the city into the national and international spotlight—at a time when the platforms to speak for ourselves, in the way modern technology currently allows, did not exist.
New Orleanians’s lived experience—from accounts of hearing the levees blown up to numerous stories of White vigilantism and police brutality—is often minimized as conspiracy theories. The storm prompted nationwide opinions and biased media that criminalized survivors; argued if the city was worth rebuilding; and referenced its destruction as a “blank slate.” The stereotypes of New Orleans as barren and desolate allowed for a delusion that we needed to be rediscovered, reinvented and renewed from the outside. Consequently, the narrative of the city became tied to the narrative of Katrina—and asserted a level of comfortability for outsiders to tell New Orleans about New Orleans, in ways that would be acknowledged as inappropriate if it were any other place.
The lesson in narrative, 20 years post-Katrina, is that New Orleans can speak for itself. We’re a culturally sovereign city with a complex past, and our history can’t be understood only from a tragedy, a book, a visit or a Google search. We live in a routine of cultural memory and speak in heavily accented idioms, proverbs and chants that often don’t have direct English translations—and are understood only by learned expression and context. Who we are and why we are cannot be fully verbalized; they are mostly felt, in our blood, bones and spirit.
The anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is not only New Orleans’s burden to bear. There is a responsibility for people to interrogate their relationship to the city—and unpack and unlearn their own biases, narratives or (mis)understandings from the storm. It is not enough only to love New Orleans. There has to be an intentionality in how people speak upon and interact with New Orleans, regard its traditions as sacred and position its voices as experts.
“This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city. It’s the way God wants it to be. You can’t have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn’t be New Orleans.” Local and national communities highly criticized this 2006 statement by former Mayor Ray Nagin, in response to the early displacement of New Orleans’s Black population post-Katrina. This assertion of a destined, predominately Black New Orleans was considered offensive to many, but it proved prophetic in the context of the aggressive gentrification to come.
New Orleans as a Black city has, at various points throughout history, been foundational to preserving its widely recognized culture and traditions. From 1788 to 1830, its enslaved and free Black population outnumbered its White residents. The Black population declined with political and racial turmoil—the Civil War, Emancipation through Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation through the Civil Rights Movement. Since 1980, Black New Orleans has been the city’s majority; and in pre-Katrina, Black New Orleans made up 67 percent of the city’s population. It has since fallen to 59 percent.
Despite devastation, removal and extraction, we continue to seize our right to be here. Come Sunday, we are pounding concrete in neighborhoods we have been priced out of; and in Congo Square, drumming in a very different Tremé. By Monday we have red beans cooking on the stove, as we have done for centuries. Throughout the week we show up as artists, educators, elders, youth, adults, chefs, community leaders, construction workers, beauticians, storytellers, first responders, health care workers, entrepreneurs and hospitality workers. We are still up at dawn on Mardi Gras morning and out at dusk for St. Joseph’s Night. We call redeveloped housing developments by their pre-Katrina names and still rep the neighborhoods where we were raised, no matter where we may now be.
The memories, emotions and realities evoked by Katrina are our proof of life. We remember, although some recollections we’d rather forget. We feel, although it pains us. We take up space in this new reality because we must. We are what has remained constant, when everything around us has changed and tried to change us.
The 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is, in fact, a heroic one. Except the only saviors are ourselves.
Cierra Chenier is a New Orleans–based writer and historian, and the creator of Noir ‘N Nola (noirnnola.com), a digital platform dedicated to preserving the history, culture and soul of Black New Orleans.
CREDITS
Photographed by Edward Buckles Jr.
Styled by Megan Coates
Hair & Makeup: Sabrina Blunt
Creative: Chike Ozah
Lead Photo Assistant/Additional Photographer: Alejandro Moreno
Photography Assistants: Val Dagrain & Heaven Boudy
Lighting Assistant: Giancarlo D’Agostino
Styling Assistant: Jen Wasson
Gaffer: Cyr Eugene
FX Rigger: Tim Bell
FX: Hunter Baxley
Producer: Alex P. Willson
Associate Producer: Christian McLain
Production Assistants: Chanté Ward & Ammara Khalid
Post Production: Carlos Jiménez Varela & Shaquille Dunbar
