Everyone loves New Orleans. It is only the fiftieth largest city in the United States – from the fifth largest two hundred years ago – but it occupies a much larger place in the national spirit than, let’s say, Arlington, Texas or Mesa, Arizona, where more people live. There is food, neighborhoods, music, historic architecture, the Mississippi river, Mardi Gras. But the love of New Orleans contrasts with the story that cold and rational statistics tell. He ranks near the bottom on measures such as poverty, murder and employment.
None of this is new. If we were to offer an original story for New Orleans as it is today, it could start in 1795, when a planter named Jean Étienne de Boré held a public demonstration to prove that he could cultivate and treat cane sugar on his plantation, which was located in the current Audubon park – just a stone throwing of the one where I appeared. It was during the years of the Haitian revolution, which made the future of slavery in the Caribbean plantations uncertain in the Caribbean. De Boré’s demonstration sparked a boom in sugar production in plantations in southern Louisiana. In a few years, as a newly acquired part of the United States, New Orleans was about to become the country’s main market for the purchase and sale of human beings.
This story still seems present in New Orleans, but it was perhaps the most visible after Hurricane Katrina, which occurred twenty years ago this week. Two series of timed documentary films for the birthday – “Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time” by Traci Curry, and Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles and Spike Lee “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water” – make an excellent recall of the terrace that suffers from the storm but also in the way he showed that New Origin do not present to the child. The two series recreate the daily details of the week that the storm struck, substantially by the testimony of a cohort of eloquent witnesses. They remind us very well what we already knew: that with the notable exception of General Russel Honoré, the head of the military aid effort, the officials – the mayor, the governor, the president, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency – were incompetent. New Orleans’ flood protection was completely inadequate. The order to evacuate the city arrived far too late. After the storm, attempts to rescue people trapped in their homes and to get them out of the city were inexcusably slow.
The two documentaries are obvious how the story of Katrina – and New Orleans are on the breed. The subtropical and marshy location of New Orleans makes it sensitive to recurring disasters, and these periodically led to the mass movement of blacks. “Rising Tide”, John Barry’s book on the flood of the Mississippi river in 1927, tells a previous example. The districts that flooded most severely after Katrina were those built during the 20th century, when the city erected a pumping system which was supposed to keep its low areas dry. Many of them were black neighborhoods.
In the days following the storm, tens of thousands of refugees, the vast majority of them black, stuck in the Louisiana Superdome, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and the high sections of local highways. During this terrible week after the storm, white observers – in particular, documentaries remind us, members of the national press – often expressed the suspicion that these crowds would inevitably turn to theft, violence and revenge. Such feelings also have very deep roots in Louisiana, returning at the time of the uprisings of slaves and, later, a black political activity during the reconstruction, which the whites often chose to consider as “riots” which were to be violently, often murderous, dispersed.
Racial injustice was not the only reason for the catastrophic consequences of Katrina. The storm clearly indicated that New Orleans was unusually sensitive to the general failure of the system. Katrina was not a serious global hurricane, but that made New Orleans stop working almost completely for months: almost everyone, from all horizons, had to leave the city. Flood control – The idea that the disaster occurred simply because the lifes have broken – is also a frame too narrow to fully explain Katrina. The storm has demonstrated the fragility which has just been an extraction economy. From the days of planting, New Orleans and its surroundings had no strong reason to develop a substantial middle class or high-level institutions and, compared to most American cities, it has never done so. The low -skilled industries such as sugar, then oil and chemicals, then tourism – by sugar have faded, but the others, as well as the port, still feed the local private economy – seemed to provide what Louisiana needed. Local policy was historically corrupt and hostile to the participation of the federal government. Only one of the thousand larger companies in the country has its head office in New Orleans. An in -depth reconstruction of the dikes prevented the disastrous floods after the Hurricane Ida, in 2021, but the power in certain regions had come out for weeks and the streets were full of debris not collected for months. Most American places work better than New Orleans.
The city’s population culminated in 1960, at almost six hundred and twenty-eight thousand. Today, it’s a little more than half of this. More than two hundred and fifty thousand people moved after Katrina, and the city continued to see a decrease in the long, slow and regular population. Quarters such as the ninth lower district, the region most struck by the storm, are always full of empty terrains. In the aftermath of Katrina, it seemed that any national organization of good heart promised to come and help in the long term. This wave fell shortly after flooding waters. A smaller movement in the city by community organizers, artists, writers, musicians and chefs has been more sustainable and has produced many achievements – most of the best restaurants in New Orleans and some of its most lively districts are the fruit of post -katrina efforts – but that has not changed the excessive situation of the city. New Orleans is one of these declining cities where local universities and hospitals are among the largest employers. It is a place where you are asked more that is your people than what you do in life. It targets your heart, not your head. By all means, visit. New Orleans needs you. But do not be mistaken if the undeniable magic of the city represents the level of its civic health. ♦
