Everybody loves New Orleans. It’s only the fifty-fourth largest city in the United States—down from fifth largest two hundred years ago—but it occupies a much larger place in the national mind than, say, Arlington, Texas, or Mesa, Arizona, where more people live. There’s the food, the neighborhoods, the music, the historic architecture, the Mississippi River, Mardi Gras. But the love for New Orleans stands in contrast to the story that cold, rational statistics tell. It ranks near the bottom on measures such as poverty, murder, and employment.

None of this is new. If one were to propose an origin story for New Orleans as it is today, it might begin in 1795, when a planter named Jean Étienne de Boré held a public demonstration to prove that he could cultivate and process cane sugar on his plantation, which was situated in present-day Audubon Park—just a stone’s throw from where I grew up. This was during the years of the Haitian Revolution, which made the future of slavery on sugar plantations in the Caribbean look uncertain. De Boré’s demonstration set off a boom in sugar production on plantations in southern Louisiana. Within a few years, as a newly acquired part of the United States, New Orleans was on its way to becoming the country’s leading marketplace for the buying and selling of human beings.

This history feels ever-present in New Orleans, but it was perhaps most visible after Hurricane Katrina, which occurred twenty years ago this week. Two documentary film series timed for the anniversary—Traci Curry’s “Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time,” and Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Spike Lee’s “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water”—make for an excellent reminder not just of the terrible suffering the storm inflicted but also of how it showed New Orleans to be a place not at all like its enchanting reputation. Both series re-create day-by-day details of the week the storm hit, substantially through the testimony of a cohort of eloquent witnesses. They vividly remind us of what we already knew: that, with the notable exception of General Russel Honoré, the head of the military relief effort, public officials—the mayor, the governor, the President, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency—proved incompetent. New Orleans’s flood-protection was completely inadequate. The order to evacuate the city came far too late. After the storm, attempts to rescue people trapped in their homes and to get them out of town were inexcusably slow.

Both documentaries make obvious how much the story of Katrina—and New Orleans—is about race. New Orleans’s subtropical, swampy location makes it susceptible to recurring catastrophes, and these have periodically entailed the mass displacement of Black people. “Rising Tide,” John Barry’s book about the 1927 Mississippi River flood, memorably recounts an earlier example. The neighborhoods that flooded most severely after Katrina were the ones built during the twentieth century, when the city erected a pumping system that was supposed to keep its low-lying areas dry. Many of these were Black neighborhoods.

In the days after the storm, tens of thousands of refugees, the vast majority of them Black, jammed into the Louisiana Superdome, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, and the elevated sections of the local highways. During that terrible week after the storm, white observers—including, the documentaries remind us, members of the national press—often voiced the suspicion that these crowds would inevitably turn to theft, violence, and revenge. Such sentiments also have very deep roots in Louisiana, going back to the days of slave uprisings and, later, Black political activity during Reconstruction, which whites often chose to see as “riots” that needed to be violently, often murderously, dispersed.

Racial injustice wasn’t the only reason for the catastrophic aftermath of Katrina. The storm made it clear that New Orleans was unusually susceptible to general system failure. Katrina was not a world-historically severe hurricane, but it caused New Orleans to cease functioning almost completely for months: just about everybody, of all backgrounds, had to leave town. Flood control—the idea that the disaster happened simply because the levees broke—is also too narrow a frame to explain Katrina fully. The storm demonstrated the fragility that comes from being an extraction economy. Beginning in the days of plantation slavery, New Orleans and its surrounding area had no strong motive to develop a substantial middle class or high-functioning institutions, and, compared with most American cities, it never has. Low-skill industries such as sugar, and then oil and chemicals, and then tourism—by now sugar has faded, but the others, along with the port, still power the local private economy—seemed to provide what Louisiana needed. Local politics were historically corrupt and hostile to the participation of the federal government. Only one of the thousand largest companies in the country is headquartered in New Orleans. An extensive rebuilding of the levees prevented disastrous flooding after Hurricane Ida, in 2021, but the power in some areas was out for weeks and the streets were full of uncollected debris for months. Most American places work better than New Orleans does.

The city’s population peaked in 1960, at nearly six hundred and twenty-eight thousand. Today, it’s a little more than half of that. More than two hundred and fifty thousand people relocated after Katrina, and the city has continued to see a long, slow, steady population decline. Neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward, the area worst hit by the storm, are still full of empty lots. In Katrina’s immediate aftermath, it seemed as if every good-hearted national organization promised to come and help over the long term. That wave receded not too long after the flood waters did. A smaller-scale movement into the city by community organizers, artists, writers, musicians, and chefs has been more durable and has produced many achievements—most of New Orleans’s best restaurants and some of its liveliest neighborhoods are the fruit of post-Katrina efforts—but it hasn’t changed the city’s over-all situation. New Orleans is one of those declining cities where the local universities and hospitals are among the largest employers. It’s a place where you’re more likely to be asked who your people are than what you do for a living. It aims for your heart, not your head. By all means, visit. New Orleans needs you. But don’t deceive yourself about whether the city’s undeniable magic represents the level of its civic health. ♦