Hurricane Katrina Damaged Black Children’s Lives Long-Term

Black and brown communities across the nation, particularly in historically segregated states like Louisiana, bear the brunt of environmental racism: water shortages due to drought, respiratory diseases due to air pollution, and the brutality of extreme weather events like hurricanes. It’s what some scholars call “a geography of risk,” in which the history of race-based and economic segregation puts overall resources, socio-political influence, and educational and economic opportunities out of reach of many Black and brown communities.

It’s no secret that communities of color are more likely than white ones to be located in neighborhoods with fewer resources and in the path of natural disasters. The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans is a striking example. The “Lower Ninth” is so-called because it lies on the lowlands near the mouth of the Mississippi River, a location that white New Orleanians traditionally considered undesirable. So it’s a place where Black families could build and buy homes and create a community. In 2005, close to 60 percent of the homes in the Lower Ninth Ward were owner-occupied.

After Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, it flung houses and vehicles around “like toys,” in the words of one report. And the poorest sections of the city, whose populations skewed heavily African American, sustained some of the most extreme damage from the storm and the flooding of the poorly maintained levees.

No way out

The lack of a meaningful plan to evacuate New Orleanians also disproportionately affected people of color. Some 112,000 poor, mostly Black residents did not own their own cars. And add to this geographical vulnerability a chronological one: Because Katrina hit so late in the month, money from many people’s social service checks for August had already run out.

So few of these poor New Orleanians—close to three-quarters of whom were Black—had enough support to get themselves to safety before or after the disaster. People from Black communities were also disproportionately more likely to die and more likely to remain missing.

Some 1,800 people in total lost their lives due to the immediate effects of Katrina, and almost everyone in the city was displaced. Thousands of those too poor to evacuate endured stifling, reprehensible conditions in mass shelters in the Superdome and the Convention Center, where food and water weren’t always available.

Private security firms with a reputation for brutality were contracted by officials and private businesses to “secure” the city, often behaving as if they were in combat in Iraq and calling local aid workers in the Black community “insurgents.” The commander of the state National Guard’s Joint Task Force told the press that military units were going to “take this city back” in a way that would make it “look like Little Somalia.” Police and vigilantes shot random Black civilians dead.

Meanwhile, media exaggerated episodes of survival scavenging among the largely Black population remaining in the city, and blew isolated instances of for-profit looting up into massive episodes of terror.

Many Black young people among the lower-income teens who had to wade through flood waters to scavenge the means to survive afterwards had to navigate a destroyed community with few realistic opportunities to learn and work. They went on to propel a surge in need for high school equivalency programs and basic job training.

Holding the pain

In the years since Katrina, we have also learned more about the detrimental effects on young people’s mental health after a disaster, compounded by environmental and systemic racism.

Reporting on the aftermath of a cross-section of hurricane events in the United States, researchers in a 2020 study found that Black and brown youth were statistically more likely to exhibit related mental health symptoms longer than white youth correspondingly affected.

This holds true in the case of Katrina, where all kids who went through the disaster suffered enormously, but poor African American youth were significantly more likely to show symptoms of PTSD. Many professionals believe this stems from the hyper-vigilance developed by people who have to navigate daily experiences of discrimination. Some have called this type of PTSD among the Black youth of New Orleans “post-storm duress.”

For the Black families who were able to evacuate New Orleans in Katrina’s wake, there were additional problems. While adults had to organize new jobs and rebuild their families’ lives, displaced kids missed crucial time in school even as they struggled in unfamiliar environments. Some had to change homes and schools multiple times, and others were displaced from supportive family structures.

All of that takes an enormous emotional toll on a child. So it’s understandable that an Atlantic magazine 10th anniversary article on the aftereffects of Katrina dubbed this group “The Lost Children of Katrina.” Teachers noted that for about a year after the disaster, almost all their New Orleans students experienced trouble focusing and learning, based on their experiences of a constellation of traumas. Some of the kids later described being bullied by classmates in their new cities, excluded, taunted, and called “refugees.”

The struggle to rebuild

A decade and a half post-Katrina, New Orleans’ Black community has still not recovered. In fact, it has not even recouped its numerical losses. Experts estimate that at least a third of the Black residents of the city left and never returned. A comparison of census figures from 2000 and 2020 shows about 100,000 fewer Black residents, but only about 7,000 fewer white residents, even as the city is back to about 80 percent of its pre-Katrina total population. As late as 2016, the Lower Ninth was still at less than half its previous population numbers.

Some of the post-Katrina infrastructure in NOLA’s Black neighborhoods—new big-box stores, a technologically sophisticated hospital—is encouraging.

Professionals have learned the importance of providing follow-up disaster trauma care that is culturally competent for Black youth and communities. And while increased gentrification filled the void left by so many African Americans leaving the city forever, those young Black New Orleanians who returned have done much to reclaim it: building new organizations, reviving a new musical and artistic culture, and more.

But it’s superficial to talk about the “rebirth” of New Orleans after Katrina when an entire generation of young people was held back from achievement over the long term, in ways not often appreciated even today.