When we look at the first 15 years of the 21st century, the most defining moment in black America’s relationship to its country isn’t Election Day 2008; it’s Hurricane Katrina. The events of the storm and its aftermath sparked a profound shift among black Americans toward racial pessimism that persists to today, even with Barack Obama in the White House. Black collective memory of Hurricane Katrina, as much as anything else, informs the present movement against police violence, “Black Lives Matter.”
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Support for the racialized view of Katrina can be seen in the way news outlets and commentators talked about the victims. One study, published a year after the storm, found a connection between mentions of race in news stories and references to survivors as “refugees,” a description opposed by many black commentators at the time. Analyzing stories from the period, researchers found exaggerated claims of violence amongKatrina victims, as well as grossly inaccurate reports of crime and disorder...
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In addition to disbelief that Katrina was a racial story, research and polling also showed a white public that held survivors in contempt. In a 2006 study that examinedwhite and black attitudes toward Katrina victims, political scientists Leonie Huddy and Stanley Feldman found that 65 percent of white respondents blamed residents and the mayor for being trapped in New Orleans. In a CNN/USA Today survey, half of all whites said that people who broke into stores and took things were “mostlycriminals,” compared to 77 percent of blacks who said they were “mostly desperate people” trying to find a way to survive. (Pew had similar findings.) If you turned to right-wing media, you’d find unvarnished disdain for those left behind in the city.
The idea that black Americans had a legitimate grievance was dismissed. The result was a collapse in black racial optimism. The year before Katrina, according to Gallup,68 percent of blacks said race relations were either “somewhat good” or “very good.” The year after Katrina, that declined to 62 percent. The next year, it declined to 55 percent, the lowest point of the decade. In broader surveys from the Pew Research Center, the period after Katrina is an inflection point, where the percentage of blacks who say they are worse off finally overtakes the percentage who say their lives have improved. Black optimism stayed on a downward trajectory for the three years after Katrina. In another Gallup trend-line, black satisfaction with society dips from a steady 41 percent in 2005, to 37 percent in 2006, to 30 percent in 2007.
