Katrina Washed Away New Orleans’s Black Middle Class
By BEN CASSELMAN
Ten years ago, shortly after the floodwaters subsided, James Gray stood in the ruins of his New Orleans home and tried to salvage what remained of his belongings. They fit inside a handbag.
“I don’t know if my wife will ever get over that,” Gray said recently.
But Gray and his wife have since restored the New Orleans East home where they have lived for more than 20 years. Most of their neighbors have returned, too. And Gray, who now represents the neighborhood on the City Council, points to other evidence of rebirth in a district that has long been home to much of the city’s black middle class: a gleaming new hospital, which opened last year; new schools open or under construction; national chains such as Wal-Mart and CVS that are returning after years of absence.
“All of those things are bigger, prettier, shinier than what we had before the flood,” Gray said. “I think we suffered a lot, [but] I think we have recovered far better than any of the experts thought we would recover.”
The improvements to Gray’s neighborhood, however, don’t tell the full story of New Orleans in the decade since the city’s levees failed to hold back Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters. The numbers paint a more equivocal picture, particularly when it comes to the black middle class that has long been a core part of the city’s cultural identity. New Orleans’s economy is in many respects stronger today than it was the day before the levees broke. Yet the city’s remarkable recovery has, to a troubling degree, left behind the African-Americans who still make up the majority of its population. Black New Orleanians are less likely to be working than when the storm hit in 2005 and are more likely to be living in poverty. Black household incomes, adjusted for inflation, have fallen. And the earnings gap between black and white residents has grown.1
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