Katrina’s deaths concentrated in poor Black neighborhoods that were more flood-prone

Evidence

Hurricane Katrina makes landfall, becoming one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit the United States in almost a century. In the days to follow, as many as eighteen hundred people die and around one hundred thousand are stranded, mostly in poor Black neighborhoods in New Orleans that are disproportionately susceptible to flooding. Some thirty thousand evacuees, most of them Black, take refuge in a makeshift shelter at the Louisiana Superdome. The chaotic, desperate scene that unfolds there becomes a symbol of rampant racial inequality. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1296

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in origin stories as infrastructure — Katrina as a contemporary consequence of centuries of racialized land policy and neglect, showing how ‘deviation vs design’ applies to present-day disaster outcomes. — connects to: Black flood victims were forcibly confined and worked while white victims were evacuated — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 135