Messed Up Things That Happened During Hurricane Katrina

Everyone remembers Kanye West's infamous comment that "George Bush doesn't care about Black people," but the issue ran far deeper than just the feelings of the president. The fact that Black homeowners were more likely to face flooding than white homeowners wasn't an accident or bad luck. As Talk Poverty notes, it was directly due to "racially discriminatory housing practices," which meant that "the high-ground was taken by the time banks started loaning money to African Americans who wanted to buy a home."

As a result, according to ESRI, most minority communities ended up living in neighborhoods that were cheaply built and in areas more susceptible to flooding. And as Rob Nixon notes in "Slow Violence, Neoliberalism, and Environmental Picaresque," "Discrimination predates disaster: in failures to maintain protective structures, failures at pre-emergency hazard mitigation, failures to maintain infrastructure, failures to organize evacuation plans for those who lack private transport, all of which make the poor and racial minorities disproportionately vulnerable to catastrophe." Meanwhile, in the Senate committee report, race isn't mentioned once in over 700 pages.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Black families have also had a harder time rebounding than white families. According to FiveThirtyEight, the Black middle class in particular was all but wiped out, and Black household incomes have fallen. The Black population of New Orleans has also fallen, since out of the 175,000 Black residents who left New Orleans, over 75,000 never returned.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qL7Up56eZpOkunCAkm9ubWlforK0v8SdZK6oXam1qrrGrGStoJGpeqmtz6mcp52UYrG2vsinnmagpae%2Fqq%2FAp5xmo5Gpv6q6wGg%3D