Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, bursting levees in areas where Black residents were concentrated. It became one of the costliest and deadliest hurricanes in the United States.

The number of deaths attributed to Katrina ranges from approximately 1,400 to over 1,800. Katrina exposed the wide socioeconomic gaps between white and Black folk in New Orleans and the surrounding areas. Poor Blacks were disproportionately trapped in the city to fend for themselves, dying at rates 1.4 to 4 times higher than whites.

A lot has changed in New Orleans since that dreadful day. In 2023, the city had 120,000 fewer residents than in 2000, representing a 25 percent decline. With a decline of 39 percent during this period, the Black population decreased 2.5 times faster than the white population.

However, two things remain unchanged. First, despite the resettlement of Blacks from New Orleans and surrounding areas to other states during Katrina, today 84 percent of Blacks in New Orleans were born in Louisiana, just a tad down from 89 percent in 2000. On the other hand, the percentage of Louisiana-born whites living in New Orleans decreased significantly, from 59 percent in 2000 to 48 percent in 2023.

Second, the major socioeconomic gaps between Blacks and whites in New Orleans before Katrina made landfall persist today, as data from the American Community Survey (ACS) show. While the percentage of Blacks 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher more than doubled from 13 percent in 2000 to 28 percent in 2023, approximately three-fourths of whites hold a college diploma, with 2.6 white college graduates for every Black college graduate.

Despite the rise in educational attainment among Blacks, they have fallen behind whites in several key socioeconomic indicators. In 2020, Black households earned 56 cents for every dollar earned by white households, but by 2023, this had decreased to 41 cents for every dollar. The ratio of Black–white family poverty also rose from 2.8 to 3.2 during this period. The Black family poverty rate remained virtually unchanged at 32 percent in 2000 and 30 percent in 2023, compared to much lower rates of impoverishment among white families at 12 percent and 9 percent, respectively.

While Blacks have made some progress in homeownership rates, rising from 47 percent in 2000 to 56 percent in 2023, they still lag behind whites by 7.5 percentage points in 2023. Among those who own homes, the Black–white gap in home values has remained unchanged, with Black home values being 55 cents to the dollar of white home values in 2000 and falling slightly to 53 cents to the dollar in 2023. The American Dream of homeownership and wealth building eludes Black families in New Orleans.

Finally, not only do the large socioeconomic gaps between Blacks and whites persist, but they also continue to live apart from each other. Demographers use a measure called the index of dissimilarity to assess the distribution of given racial groups, such as Blacks and whites, in a given area (such as Orleans County, where New Orleans is located), with the index ranging from 0 (no residential segregation between the two racial groups) to 100 (complete segregation between the two racial groups). Indices of dissimilarity of 60 or higher are considered high levels of segregation. Blacks and whites were highly segregated from each other before Katrina, with an index of dissimilarity of 66 in 2000 and 65.3 in 2023. When Blacks and whites live apart from each other, Blacks live in isolation from social and economic opportunities, including better-paying jobs, educational opportunities, grocery stores, parks, libraries, etc., that exist where white people live.

In sum, Hurricane Katrina exposed the consequences of systemic racism and the great degree to which societal institutions were ill-prepared to protect the lives of people on the margins. Given the persistence of inequality between Blacks and whites in New Orleans, future cataclysms, like Hurricane Katrina, are likely to reproduce the misery that disproportionately took the lives of Black people. Unfortunately, the existence and stability of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are uncertain in the Trump administration.

Rogelio Sáenz is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio. This opinion piece represents his own thoughts and does not reflect those of the University of Texas at San Antonio. 

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