Racism and State Violence, Then and Now: Hurricane Katrina 20 Years Later
STEVEN ROBINSON
Racism and State Violence, Then and Now: Hurricane Katrina 20 Years Later
DSA Statement - August 29, 2025
On this day 20 years ago, Hurricane Katrina made landfall over Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, as a high-end Category 3 hurricane. Prior to landfall, Katrina was the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico, only to be surpassed by Hurricanes Rita and Wilma later that year, and remains the costliest tropical cyclone on record, tied with Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. As Katrina moved inland, storm surges of 14 to 16 feet and hurricane-force winds in excess of 125mph (205kmph) rocked the city of New Orleans, LA for hours. By 8:00am local time, levees along the Industrial Canal and Gulf Intracoastal Waterway in New Orleans East had overtopped and breached in 53 places, and 80% of New Orleans as well as all of neighboring St. Bernard Parish was flooded with as much as 15 feet of water.
Hurricane Katrina was able to intensify as quickly as it did because of “unusually warm” waters in the Loop Current in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. While we may not be able to attribute these unusually warm waters directly to capitalist-driven climate change, we know that sea-surface temperatures have continued to rise year after year due to extractive industries and the capitalist death cult. Further, the mass death and displacement felt across New Orleans was directly caused by organized abandonment of the State at every level of government.
Reports vary, but at least 1,000 people (and likely closer to 2,000) were killed by the storm and ensuing floods in New Orleans. People incarcerated at the Orleans Parish Prison were left to die in rising floodwaters and the records were later altered to claim that many were never there to begin with. The Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) — which had recently been reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by then-president and forever-war-criminal George W. Bush — had no presence on the ground for several days following the storm. Instead, fully-armed National Guard and U.S. Army personnel were deployed to “restore order” amidst exaggerated reports of looting and civil unrest. When all of society is literally underwater, taking lifesaving goods from behind the walls of capitalist strongholds like Walmart is not looting, it is liberation.
In the absence of support from the state and federal government and collapse of local governments, people turned to one another for support, gathering whatever supplies to live in whatever facilities could safely hold them. This communal survival was a threat to capital, which responded with disproportionate violence from state and private violence. The mass shooting by NOPD officers on an unarmed group of families on the Danzinger Bridge exposed the notion that police “protect and serve” people under duress, with the charged officers all having served less than a quarter of their prison sentence. The deployment of Blackwater mercenaries to “protect” storefronts from people attempting to get food and dry clothes extended the overreach of DHS to make private contractors money at the expense of working people fighting for their lives.
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