Katrina at 20: America’s Inequality Still Drowns Its Own
By Mohamad Hammoud
Lebanon – The US can send aid to the world, but when disaster strikes at home, its poorest—especially Black Americans—are left to suffer, neglected and now militarized.
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, the memory remains less about wind and rain than about betrayal. The storm ripped away the mask of American exceptionalism and showed the world what many citizens—especially Black Americans—had always known: the United States talks endlessly about freedom, equality and global leadership, but abandons its own people when disaster strikes.
Katrina was not just a natural disaster. It was a man-made failure that exposed the depth of racial and economic inequality in the wealthiest nation on earth. And two decades later, the same fault lines remain.
Hypocrisy on Display
Washington often boasts about sending aid to famine-stricken countries, airlifting supplies to distant disasters, and preaching about poverty abroad. Yet in August 2005, when the levees broke in New Orleans, the world watched American citizens—most of them Black and poor—trapped on rooftops, wading through filthy water or begging for help at the Superdome. Days passed before the federal government acted. The so-called global superpower could invade Iraq in a week, but could not rescue its own people in a major US city.
The hypocrisy was glaring. America spends trillions on wars and foreign adventures, but cannot guarantee clean water, safe housing, or a functioning evacuation plan for its poorest citizens. Leaders speak of lifting the world out of poverty, yet allow entire neighborhoods at home to rot.
Discrimination in Disaster
Katrina struck unevenly. It drowned the neighborhoods that had already been neglected: low-income, predominantly Black areas with weak infrastructure, aging hospitals, and underfunded schools. Wealthier, whiter areas evacuated more quickly and recovered faster. The disaster response mirrored this divide. Some hospitals secured quick evacuations; others, mainly serving Black patients, were left to improvise in suffocating heat. At Memorial Medical Center, staff—overwhelmed and abandoned—classified the sickest patients as “too ill to save”. Many died waiting.
This was not an accident. It was the product of decades of racist housing policies, economic segregation and political neglect. Katrina made visible what America’s elites prefer to hide: disaster does not strike equally. It exposes the lines of privilege and abandonment already etched into the system.
The Poverty That Never Went Away
Two decades later, the poverty that Katrina exposed remains unaddressed. Black Americans remain far more likely to live in underfunded neighborhoods, to attend failing schools and to lack access to decent healthcare. Instead of building opportunity, the government doubled down on surveillance and policing. The result is a cycle where minority communities are over-policed but under-protected, criminalized rather than supported.
Politicians brand Black neighborhoods as violent, but ignore the root causes: decades of disinvestment, the collapse of industry and deliberate neglect. Drugs, unemployment and crime thrive in places where the state has withdrawn every service but the police. And in many areas, even the police refuse to enter, leaving entire communities effectively abandoned.
Occupation, Not Support
Now, in 2025, America marks Katrina’s twentieth anniversary with another disturbing sight: the National Guard patrolling major Black cities. Troops have already been deployed to Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Chicago is next on the list. Officials justify this as crime control, but violent crime has fallen in many of these cities. The facts don’t matter; the symbolism does.
Is it a coincidence that the cities being militarized are majority-Black and governed by Democrats? Or is this the logical continuation of a system that treats minority communities as problems to be contained rather than citizens to be served? Once again, the government answers poverty with soldiers, not investment. It is Katrina all over again—abandonment disguised as policy.
Manufactured Inevitability
American leaders often talk about urban crime and poverty as if they were inevitable, natural conditions of Black life. But nothing about this is natural. Just as the levees of New Orleans failed because they were neglected, Black communities suffer today because they have been systematically starved of resources. Schools were closed, factories shuttered, housing denied through redlining, and healthcare stripped away. The “urban crisis” is not fate. It is policy.
To claim otherwise is to excuse decades of intentional decisions. The government chose to spend on prisons instead of schools, on tax cuts instead of hospitals, on foreign wars instead of housing. And when the consequences explode—whether in floods or in crime statistics—the response is not repair, but repression.
Katrina’s Unfinished Verdict
Katrina was a verdict on America. It showed the world that the wealthiest nation cannot protect its own poor, especially when they are Black. Twenty years later, the verdict still stands. Poverty remains entrenched, discrimination remains structural, and the government still treats minority communities as expendable.
The true tragedy of Katrina is not only that thousands died in 2005. It is that the lessons were never learned. America prefers to act as though the disaster were an aberration, when in fact it was a mirror. And that mirror still reflects a nation willing to let its own citizens drown—whether in floodwaters, poverty or neglect.
