Eye of the Storm: Commemorating Katrina as Political Praxis

This section of Souls, “After the Storm: 20 Years since Hurricane Katrina,” is prompted by the 25th-anniversary volume’s theme of “Divest/Invest.” As the journal’s call states, this theme is “occasioned by the case of Israel’s siege and starvation of Gaza, as it catalyzes historical comparisons to South African Apartheid and other political moments in which the call to materially and ideologically divest becomes central to public debate and organizing.” In this section, we join our contributing authors in focusing on specific conjunctural processes in post-Katrina New Orleans to interrogate commemoration as a political praxis. By studying the historical material relations and social practices that conditioned the post-Katrina political landscape, we invigorate and elaborate the revolutionary planning and counter-archiving of the Black Radical Tradition.

Twenty years ago, Manning Marable (2006), the founder of Souls, published “Katrina’s Unnatural Disaster: A Tragedy of Black Suffering and White Denial” in the journal. In this reflection, written just a few months after Hurricane Katrina, he poses the “public spectacle of black suffering and anguish” as a “civic ritual, reconfirming the racial hierarchy” of the U.S. His description of the criminalization of desperate Black New Orleanians, alongside the “federal government’s incompetence and indifference” to save lives during the floods, was partially constituted through ongoing forms of historical denial of American structural racism. Marable argues that the national inheritance of white supremacy is maintained through such denial, even in moments when anti-Black racism is formally acknowledged, as exemplified by the 2005 non-unanimous congressional resolution that apologized for lynchings as historical crimes against African Americans. This resolution passed in the Senate, with 8 senators still refusing to sign (including both Mississippi senators at the time, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran) just months before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the Gulf South. Through this essay, Marable situates anti-racist struggle not only as the reconfiguration of material conditions to ensure Black survival, but also as the attempt to build capacities for racialized subaltern groups to become actors in shaping major social outcomes. Formidable resistance, then, must reject the "civic rituals" of Black suffering and the formal veneration of American heroes, or nominal apologies for genocidal acts. To understand commemoration as an essential component of revolutionary praxis, we must actively denounce the appropriations and monuments of racial capitalist hegemony. A robust anti-imperial and anti-capitalist project requires what Walter Rodney (1981) describes as an active study of the forces of production—a process in which memory is used to map the material contradictions of the present, so that the masses can emerge as the primary protagonists of history.

To understand commemoration as an essential component of revolutionary praxis, we must locate Hurricane Katrina as the eye of a storm that reverberates out to our present. To simply place an event in the past is to evacuate the ongoing terrains of struggle that are partially transformed by it. Instead, commemoration is an activating process that brings history into the present to map current conjunctural contradictions. As Sadiya Hartman (2007) suggests through her analysis of the afterlives of slavery, these throughlines matter because they bring us into traditions of struggle that elucidate the material and social dialectics of freedom and captivity that continue to structure the present. These throughlines are not mere repetitions of the past; rather, in our analysis, we mobilize what Katherine McKittrick (2006) calls interpretive strategies wherein “blueprints” tracing histories of interrelated encounters of the past are used to compose terrains of struggle in the present. By treating sedimented geographic histories as “domains of political struggle,” McKittrick provides a framework for seeing the racial violence of Southern plantations, organized abandonment in the Gulf South after Katrina, and the military policing of urban centers today as "spatial expressions" of interlinked trajectories of global displacement and violence under capitalist hegemony. Moreover, this analysis also dialectically links slave rebellions, anticarceral organizing, and post-disaster mutual aid as interlinked trajectories of resistance. Enlivening such trajectories requires attention to the articulations (Hall 1980) of this particular conjuncture: the specific ways in which these historical afterlives are reconfigured within contemporary structures to produce new terrains of struggle. As such, the post-Katrina present provides a site where the social formations of domination of the past and the dialectical social formations of resistance are actively re-linked to current political economic crises, demanding an analytical praxis that is attentive to historical continuity and contemporary reconfiguration.

To meet this demand, we center the broader elaborations of the Black Radical Tradition to explore a strategic abolitionist (that is, anti-imperialist and anticapitalist) politics of memory and commemoration. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2017: 237), drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, writes: “We might best understand tradition as an accumulation of structures of feeling through ‘the selection and reselection of ancestors...’” She continues that this “is itself part of the radical process of finding in political practice and analytical habit, lived expressions of unbounded participatory openness.” For us, the present is not rendered through specific ghosts of the past but through the traditions that emerge when we select historical ancestors who guide our understanding of “the dynamic material limits and possibilities of change.” This selection is necessary if we are to reject the “propaganda of history” that W.E.B. Du Bois (1935) interrogated in Black Reconstruction.

Du Bois observed that the organized forgetting of the revolutionary potential of the Black working class in the South was necessary for the survival of white capital. This forgetting materialized through the physical landscape after the American Civil War; Du Bois noted that the post-emancipation South was littered with monuments to the Confederacy that functioned as “the erecting of a system of history” designed to evacuate the actual terrain of struggle and replace it with a narrative of Black docility. For Du Bois, these monuments were not just statues but were “vicious and misleading” tools used to ensure that the radical democracy of the General Strike was erased from the public record, thereby domesticating the oppressed.

To commemorate an event, then, is a profound opportunity to dismantle this propaganda by centering the agency of racialized workers and the underclasses as the pivotal drivers of political transformation. This practice is given concrete form in contemporary social formations like Take 'Em Down NOLA coalition. As documented by researchers such as Maxson (2021), this movement to remove symbols of white supremacy in New Orleans is an active struggle to dismantle the monumental propaganda that Du Bois identified. By demanding the removal of statues dedicated to confederate heroes that Du Bois argued were built to solidify the “slaveholder’s version of history.” Take 'Em Down NOLA engages in a revolutionary politics of memory.

As many of us watched the removal of a monument in what was formerly known as Lee Circle in New Orleans in 2020, we had a small moment of witnessing a material collapse of the “plantation bloc’s” symbolic monopoly over the landscape. This was an assertion of a different way of knowing and ordering public urban space that enlivens the Black Radical Tradition of the region that Clyde Woods calls “Blues Epistemology.” Woods (1998) demonstrates how the Blues Epistemology serves as an oppositional framework to plantation legacy formations, functioning as a long-standing archive of social, economic, and political critique maintained by the Black working class to refuse the monumental narratives of the ruling elite. The Blues Epistemology marks an ongoing consciousness and pedagogy that maps the dialectics of displacement and resistance in the Delta.

In drawing on and invigorating radical historical materialist traditions of critique, commemoration is not a backward glance, but a diagnostic and insurgent tool. In recomposing the archive and mobilizing pedagogies of remembering as practices of political organizing, commemoration becomes an active, living form of resistance. Now more than ever, the organizing and knowledge traditions of the Mississippi Delta matter far beyond this specific geography. By engaging with this anniversary through this critical lens, we seek to center post-Katrina elaborations of the Black Radical Tradition to intervene against the rise of authoritarianism, imperial warfare, climate disaster, and the hegemonic denials of history.

What We Witness and Remember:

For people across the United States and throughout the international community, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 remains etched in collective memory through the harrowing images of poor and Black residents stranded on rooftops, holding signs pleading for help, only to be counterposed by news media portrayals criminalizing them for seeking provisions for survival. At the time, the call for the National Guard to patrol the city, armed and ready for combat, was partially rendered by the federal government and the media as a heroic necessity for both search and rescue and the militarized control of the city’s purported “criminal disorder.” However, for many observers, this moment marked a critical threshold of material crises and a growing public recognition of the intersecting violences of this era. Katrina, as an event, revealed the lethal coupling between long-term structural and infrastructural neglect, the organized abandonment of social safety nets, and the post-9/11 racist security apparatus. The heavy investments in military technology, domestic anti-terror forces, and ongoing carceral expansions were not deployed to alleviate suffering, but to contain and criminalize the populations most harmed by forces of divestment.

The deaths of thousands of New Orleanians and the destruction of their homes and communities during Katrina were the outcome of long-term disinvestment in the social state executed by both the liberal and right wings of the American political structure. More critical readings attribute this destruction to decades of “aggressive neglect” (Ladson Billings 2006)—the dynamics, as Ruthie Gilmore discusses, between organized abandonment and organized violence. This was exacerbated by a national focus on the Iraq War and the expansion of the security apparatus after 9/11. While the displacements and violence caused by Hurricane Katrina were rendered an exceptional failure of infrastructure and racist domestic militarism, they were simultaneously celebrated by the powerbrokers of the ruling class as a tabula rasa upon which to remake a new racialized urban landscape. What followed was the further erosion of the limited welfare state, replaced by neoliberal private-public partnerships that ushered in the nonprofit service industry, charter schools, and mixed-income housing developments. As neoliberal recovery reconfigured forms of institutional care into a network of nonprofits and corporate philanthropy, carceral capacities too continued to elaborate, conjugating with the novel political-economic landscape of New Orleans.

In the decades of retellings that followed, Katrina has been simultaneously spectacularized and disavowed in formal commemorations. By framing the storm as a singular, exceptional tragedy, neoliberal discourses of resilience frame the anniversaries of Katrina as an opportunity to celebrate the city’s supposed capacity to overcome hardship. These kinds of retelling serve a specific ideological function: they “mystify the causes of vulnerability by systematically downplaying the structural determinants of change in favor of an agentic, response-driven approach to crisis, (McKeown et. al, 2022: 113). An insistence on individualized and local cultural resilience effectively masked the racialized realities of organized abandonment, corporate capture, and the redirection of material resources toward expanding carceral infrastructures. The insistence of a new form of resilience post-Katrina attempted to obscure histories of neoliberal transformations of the Gulf South as they linked to international transformations of imperial capitalism. As Clyde Wood writes, “What the failure of the levees in 2005 revealed was doubly shocking: the restoration of Bourbonism locally, its restoration nationally under the guise of Reaganism, devolution, starve the beast and so on; and its restoration internationally under the guise of structural adjustment and neoliberalism.” (Woods 2017: 217). Yet, while the discourses of "resilience" were mobilized to ideologically activate revolutionized neoliberal projects to attend to Katrina as a symptom of the crises of bourgeois hegemony, working-class Black people of the Gulf south elaborated practices of camaraderie and creativity that drew upon the resistance traditions of the region.

Writing on the remembrance practices cultivated through the repertoire of what Clyde Woods calls the “blues tradition,” Rebecca Louise Carter’s article in this issue attends to practices of care and repair rendered invisible by neoliberal narratives of resilience. Carter works with collage and with the practices of women supporting each other through loss in New Orleans to show how commemoration can be collective and unexceptional; she considers commemoration that is rhythmic, layered, and always working to move through grief to support Black life. Also featured in this focus on Katrina, in Dispatches, is a short film and companion essay by Justin Hosbey and his collaborator, JT Roane. This piece centers Black ecologies of marronage, featuring practices of Black masculine care work (Burton 2021) as rituals of care and commemoration. These practices become opportunities for Black men to articulate gendered subjectivities and relations beyond white heteropatriarchal norms. In Hosbey and Roane’s conceptualization, marronage is not only a means to evade physical captivity, labor exploitation, and spatial segregation; it is a method for defining oneself and one’s community outside of the strictures of racialized gender norms. Together these two works demonstrate the active composition of the blues tradition: describing ways of knowing, archiving and expressing collective self-determination counter to the organized abandonments and violence of a racial capitalist state (Gilmore 2023: 293-303).

The devastation and destruction driven by policies of abandonment from agencies like FEMA and the violent expansions of militarized policing are no longer exceptional as they may have seemed in 2005. These processes routinely structure American encounters with climate disasters as they have intensified and become more frequent. This reality is increasingly clear and urgent, the result of political-economic relations that prioritize capital accumulation over the stability of our ecosystems. These events are not accidents of nature but are fueled by industries of extraction. The same material relations that drive offshore drilling and petrochemical expansion in the Gulf South, intensifying the carbon-led destruction of the atmosphere and sea-level rise, also contribute to the extreme weather events that ravage those very coastal geographies. The specific industries responsible for ecological collapse and population displacements are the ones whose interests are shielded by the rising tide of authoritarianism and carceral expansion.

Systemic abandonment continues to articulate through “sacrifice zones,” areas where Black, Indigenous, and low-income residents are subjected to extreme environmental hazards for industrial profit (Lerner 2010). In Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” Black communities face the slow violence of industrial poisoning alongside the organized neglect of their social needs. When residents organize for clean air, water, or flood protection, they are met not with healthcare or housing, but with the organized violence of police surveillance and the criminalization of dissent. What Gilmore (2023) calls the lethal relationships between organized abandonment and organized violence were equally clear during the July 2025 flash floods in Kerr County, Texas. While officials had previously refused to fund a flood warning system, they instantly authorized the violence of National Guard surveillance and drone patrols to protect property as the water rose. Similarly, during the 2025 and 2026 Canyon Fire in California, vital firefighting capacity was strained as National Guard resources were diverted to federalized immigration and “public order” missions.

The surge in policing infrastructure capacitated through the post-9/11 security apparatus, as Jordan Camp (2016) argues, served the ruling elites, who have spent decades investing in militarized policing to manage the intrinsic crises of global capitalism. This machinery can be redeployed and reconfigured to displace the terms of ongoing material crises, like population displacement and economic instability, by transmuting them into racist and xenophobic violence, framing the immigrant, the dissident, or the urban resident as a national threat under the banner of “domestic terrorist.” In 2025-2026, the federal targeting of cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, and New Orleans by the Trump Administration demonstrated the Right-wing authoritarian radicalization of DHS capacities as ICE agents were recruited and deployed to round up immigrants and the neighbors who stand with them. While the interlinked processes of organized abandonment and organized violence today were not simply predictable, the specter and meaning-making of Katrina offer a way to critique the political trajectories of investment/divestment and to render the political potentials for the present.

Redemption and Resistance in a Neoliberal City

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was structured by a specific set of neoliberal reconfigurations of power predicated on divestment from public infrastructure. This rebuilding era became one of organized violence—marked by the immediate planning by the Heritage Foundation, which proposed the near-total privatization of public institutions, and the siphoning off of public recovery dollars by multibillion-dollar corporations, like Halliburton. As Andy Horowitz (2020) argues, this was the man-made extension of a century of political-economic choices; the storm did not create these predatory impulses but rather provided the state and its corporate partners with a catastrophic opening to accelerate a long-standing project of dispossession. To understand this transition, it is worth revisiting Marable’s (1983) How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Marable demonstrates that collective efforts to realize freedom dreams have often been met with unrelenting structural predation. In New Orleans, this underdevelopment was a process of direct material takings under the ideological rubrics of economic progress and racial uplift: the demolition of public housing, the shuttering of Charity Hospital, and the dismissal of 7,000 Black educators through the charter school takeover.

Disaster Capitalists (Klein 2010) asserted what Sylvia Wynter (2003) critiques as a "tabula rasa"—a claim to sovereignty that treated the city as a blank slate for neoliberal transformations. In the 19th century, Redemption was the violent restoration of the plantation bloc’s authority over the radical democratic possibilities of Reconstruction; in the post-Katrina present, this project, according to Woods, was updated for a neoliberal conjuncture. This modern Redemption sought to overturn the liberal compromise of the New South bloc—which had previously afforded Black working people a marginal but organized claim to city governance—and replace it with a technocratic meritocracy. By framing the pre-storm Chocolate City as a site of inherent corruption and inefficiency, the new Redeemers used the disaster to strip the Black working class of its institutional power, effectively re-establishing a monopoly of rule under the guise of innovation and professional reform (Tompkins 2025). Jarrett Drake elaborates on this process in his contribution to the special issue through his theorization of “rainbow redemption”. Theorists of conservatism have argued that right wing reactionaries consistently adopt the posture of victimhood in response to gains from subordinate classes (Robin 2018). Drake demonstrates how state and business work together to appropriate signs of vulnerability from marginalized groups like LGBTQ+ communities in order to propagandize police as the vulnerable strata of New Orleans society in the service of a restoration of a reconfigured monopoly capital. Drake explicitly renders the modalities of neoliberal nonprofit coalition building to support police powers as a locus of contemporary fascist rise.

After Katrina, new nonprofit social entrepreneurship and a call for innovative expertise to address the social problems of a recovering, relatively more affordable, city facilitated the arrival of a younger, whiter cohort of ‘ambivalent change agents’ (Ehrenfeucht and Nelson 2013). While these YURPs—young urban rebuilding professionals—were mobilized within the machinery of privatization, their presence also marked a specific racializing encounter around housing, education, and carceral systems. Many arrived with a sincere, if fraught, desire to tether themselves to ongoing struggles for civil rights and racial equity. In the spaces of negotiation, often within the nonprofit and education sectors, these newcomers often found themselves confronted by the local organizing of longtime residents, leading to internal critiques of the very neoliberal structures they were hired to manage and to coalition-building that challenged the urban regime.

This racializing encounter is mapped onto a landscape of profound demographic and economic upheaval. While the Black population of New Orleans was approximately 67% in 2000, it fell to roughly 59% by 2020—a material displacement of nearly 100,000 Black residents (The Data Center 2025). This contraction of the Black community is the legible result of neighborhood gentrification and the ramifications of disaster capitalism. The influx of relatively wealthier residents into historically Black wards functioned as a spatial expression of a neo-redeemer project, effectively reordering city space while stripping the Black working class of the geographic density required for institutional power. Alix Chapman’s piece in this issue uses New Orleans’ musical genre of sissy bounce as a lens through which to understand the current iteration of racialized dispossession through gentrification in New Orleans. A genre that originated in the city’s Black queer working class and an exemplar of the blues tradition, bounce music comments on and claps back against structural violence even as transplants to the city appropriate the pleasure of participation in the music. Chapman traces bounce’s path into the mainstream alongside changes in New Orleans’ housing market to argue for attention to the ways in which this kind of cultural production contributes to and mediates the changing landscape of the city. The story is neither a romance of resistance nor a tragedy of capitalist capture; but rather a way of attending to superstructure with love and strategies for coalition.

As Chapman and our other contributors show, an analysis of the multiracial technocracy (Tompkins 2025) and neoliberal reformism in post-Katrina New Orleans does not represent a final victory for capital, but it remains an urgent and ongoing terrain for organizing. The "redeemer" project is constantly destabilized by the traditions of struggle it seeks to bury or pacify. While the accelerated neoliberalization of the city operated to subsume and appropriate Black working-class politics, the resulting ‘shadow state’ of nonprofits (Wolch 1990; Gilmore 2017) and charter boards became new institutional nodes for political contestation. The "blues development agenda", therefore, is certainly not a process in the past but an actively reconfiguring set of processes to radicalize these novel social formations. From the fight to reopen Charity Hospital to the demands for ‘Take 'Em Down NOLA, these movements reject the propaganda of history and redemption through elite capture (Táíwò 2022). By selecting these dialectical histories of underdevelopment and resistance as our analytical habit, we enliven the contradictions of neoliberal leadership and political economy in the post-Katrina present.

Carceral Monuments: Dynamic Transitions of Prison Infrastructure

The massive material and political investment in Louisiana’s carceral capacity has established the state as the prison capital of the world. Louisiana consistently maintains one of the highest incarceration rates, with Black residents being incarcerated at a rate nearly three times that of white residents. Between 1980 and 2016, Louisiana’s prison population increased by approximately 360%. This growth of the carceral infrastructure resulted from a bipartisan program in which the expansion of carceral state endowments served to address surplus crises of land, labor, and state capacity (Gilmore 2007; Pelot-Hobbs 2023). By the 1980s and 90s, Louisiana’s fiscal volatility was leveraged to justify neoliberal austerity while simultaneously funding a massive public and private investment in prisons and jails. This carceral infrastructure was built to manage the social unrest and mass unemployment produced by the state’s own economic restructuring, ready at hand to be deployed when the 2005 storm hit. The abandonment and divestment of federal emergency aid and water management infrastructure ensured that policing and captivity became the primary modalities for managing the disaster. This crisis activated an intensified ‘carceral cooperation’ (Pelot-Hobbs 2023), a multi-scalar coordination that not only mobilized the National Guard, DHS, and local police to facilitate criminalization and racist vigilantism, but also established a horizontal circuit of cooperation between parishes. This allowed for the evacuation of prison populations from flooded areas to ready and available prison facilities in inland towns.

The 1998 establishment of the Jena Juvenile Correction Facility functioned as a primary node in the state's cycle of carceral reinvestment. The facility’s creation was a salve to the collapse of the local economy; as inland oil and gas companies abandoned Central Louisiana for offshore deepwater drilling, towns like Jena were left with a 15% unemployment rate and a gutted tax base (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). The state resolved this crisis of rural social reproduction by leveraging the national super-predator panic of the late 90s to tether the economic survival of a majority-white town to the systematic captivity of Black youth. This carceral endowment, contracted to Wackenhut (now GEO Group), was met by emergent abolitionist and decarceration projects that refused to see rural development and urban criminalization as separate issues. Organizations like The Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana launched a sustained campaign of political education in partnership with grassroots mobilizations documenting the facility’s routine brutality to break the narrative of the social need for "juvenile rehabilitation." Their work eventually impelled a U.S. Department of Justice (2000) investigation that substantiated the organizers' claims, reporting that “juveniles at Jena are at a substantial risk of harm due to unreasonable levels of violence from juvenile-on-juvenile assaults and the use of excessive force and abuse from staff,” and were subjected to “unreasonable isolation and restraints [and] inadequate medical and mental health care.”

While the pressure from organizers forced the juvenile center’s closure in 2001, LaSalle Parish and the GEO Group did not dismantle the facility; instead, the physical infrastructure remained a carceral asset. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the facility was reactivated to absorb some of the massive displacement of prisoners from the New Orleans jail. This reactivation occurred after more than 6,000 incarcerated people were abandoned in the rising floodwaters of Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), trapped in cells without power, food, or water for days. Once evacuated, thousands of these individuals began serving what they called “Katrina time,” held in rural facilities like Jena long past their release dates or without ever being charged. This indefinite detention was facilitated by the collapse of the New Orleans court system and the loss of paper records in the flood. As Human Rights Watch (2005) documented, “men who had been through the horrors of Katrina were then subjected to new horrors at the hands of prison officers.” Detainees at the Jena facility reported being “beaten, kicked, and struck while restrained in shackles” and were frequently “forced to maintain excruciating kneeling positions for hours, only to be assaulted if they fell.” In response to such conditions of displacement and violence, the Amnesty for Prisoners of Katrina campaign, spearheaded by Critical Resistance, demanded the full release and expungement of all those abandoned in the storm's carceral wake (Pelot Hobbs 2021).

In the contributing paper, “Unmaking Carceral Disasters: A Post-Katrina Timeline of Struggles Against the New Orleans Punishment Regime,” Lydia Pelot-Hobbs activates this history of anti-carceral struggle as an insurgent archive. She documents specific dialectical moments of domination and resistance—such as the Critical Resistance Amnesty Campaign, the successful eighty percent reduction in jail capacity, and Women With A Vision’s dismantling of the Crimes Against Nature Statute (a statute criminalizing queer sex work)—to show how regional organizing networks transformed the carceral disaster into a site of ongoing abolitionist organizing. This timeline functions as a tool for the present, tracing the throughlines of state violence from the shootings on the Danziger Bridge to the latest law and order regime of Governor Jeff Landry—as forces that must be met with persistent and nimble organizing. This paper demonstrates that the struggle to unmake carceral infrastructures is always interlinked with climate justice in an era of escalating disaster.

Journalist and activist Jordan Flaherty makes this connection as well in his 2010 book Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. The climate of carceral expansion and racialized policing and the forced displacement and heightened national attention to the region in the aftermath of Katrina directly set the stage for the Jena Six case in 2006. One year after the storm, in a town where the economy had been structurally tethered to the punishment of Black people, the simple act of Black students sitting under a de facto “whites-only” tree at Jena High School was met with the hanging of nooses—a clear racist threat. A subsequent schoolyard fight led to the over-charging of six Black students with attempted second-degree murder: an attempt to use the state’s punishment regime to shape another generation of Black youths. However, this attempt backfired, partially because of the post-Katrina public outcry against carceral racism. The networks of Louisiana activists and journalists formed after Katrina provided the vital conduit for the national mobilization that brought over 20,000 people to Jena in 2007 to protest to free the Jena 6. In contrast to racist narratives that speak of a damaged and dangerous “Katrina generation,” Flaherty shows how events from Katrina to Jena have shaped a “Jena generation” of powerful activists (Flaherty 2010).

Now in 2026, a reinvigoration of this movement must combat a new crime panic of “Katrina babies”—a term used in media to pathologize the generation of Black youth born or raised during the displacement and trauma of 2005 (Buckles 2022).This narrative frames these young people as inherently unruly and predatory due to their exposure to disaster, providing a fresh ideological justification for the continued investments in carceral capacities. The rightward swing toward tough-on-crime governance was made concrete in Louisiana by the 2024 special legislative session, which overturned a slate of decarceration reforms, reinstated harsher truth-in-sentencing laws, and passed a statute sentencing 17-year-olds as adults (Louisiana Legislature, 2nd Extraordinary Session 2024).

Today, this long-term carceral investment has also evolved into a significant hub for ICE detention. Louisiana hosts eight major rural detention centers within a 100-mile radius of a deportation airport in Alexandria, LA; these facilities operate within the shells of former prisons and rely on guards recruited from local residential populations and sheriff's departments (McDonald et al. 2025). The federal suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act deliberately lowered wages during the post-Katrina reconstruction, creating a desperate labor market that pitted displaced Black residents against newly arrived migrant workers. This engineered wage suppression fueled a virulent, exclusionary nativism that contributed to the political justification and subsequent expansions of immigrant policing and detention. As Clyde Woods (2017: 240) observed, while these workers were promised secure work since 2005, “a dangerous script emerged that framed immigrants as job-stealing mobs rather than as desperate workers who arrived in a city defined by a long history of racially discriminatory employment practices” Consequently, immigration enforcement under the first Trump administration was further emboldened to conduct regular ICE raids at construction sites and at Home Depot parking lots. This practice has remained commonplace since 2016.

In March 2025, the Jena facility, now the Lasalle Detention Center, was used for the retaliatory kidnapping and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate held for 104 days for pro-Palestinian activism. Khalil described the facility as a “testimony on America’s racist policies against immigrants.” This particular trajectory reveals a devastating cycle of institutional reinvestment and betrayal. In 2014, Columbia University became the first university in the United States to divest its endowment holdings in the privatized prison and detention industry, including divestments from the GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America. The success of the student-led prison divestment campaign is now being undermined by the university’s commitment to criminalizing student activism, a mere decade later. By aiding and facilitating the federal administration’s punitive targeting of its students, the university is now paying financial and human tribute to an authoritarian regime, marking a clear reinvestment in carceral infrastructures that lock up and deport their students.

These conjunctures reveal a dialectical relationship between carceral elaborations and insurgent organizing. When organizers gathered at the Jena facility in 2025, they were not merely protesting a single detention; they were evoking a decades-long history of coalitional resistance. The coalition of Gulf South activists after Hurricane Katrina established counter infrastructures to organize to free the prisoners of Katrina, free the Jena 6, free Mahmoud Khalil, This lineage of struggle continues through the current movement against the targeting of activists and immigrants. The high-profile DHS detention of students like Khalil and Rumeysa Öztürk, a Tufts student, bridges the domestic prison complex of Louisiana with global imperial violence. During her detention in Louisiana, Öztürk engaged in a deliberate political praxis of commemoration, documenting a counter-archive of the women held alongside her to ensure their experiences were not lost to the fascist practices of the U.S. state. By recording testimony from women who stated that “living amidst the chaos [of war] feels more bearable than being trapped here,” Öztürk's writing transforms the monuments of U.S carceral violence into stages for cultivating internationalist camaraderie (Öztürk 2025). By locating our eye towards the storm of Katrina, the fight for carceral abolition, climate justice, and the anti-imperialist movement for Palestinian liberation become inextricably linked through a shared opposition to the current global infrastructures of punishment and militarism and a revolutionary worldmaking (Kelly 2019) that can begin with a praxis of radical commemoration.

Reorienting the Eye of the Storm

The contributors to this issue section are not writing reflections on Katrina as a past we have overcome, but are each asking what the Black Radical Tradition of remembering calls us to do today. Our contributors explore specific terrains of struggle that render how the conjunctural conditions of a post-Katrina present open onto the organic crises of racial capitalist hegemony.

Articles from Rebecca Carter and Alix Chapman as well as a short film and Dispatches companion essay by Justin Hosbey each mark gathering as an essential practice of memorialization and future making in the wake of loss and exclusion. In her essay, “A Bird Sang (The Blues) to Me,” Carter explores the intimacy of remembrance among a Baptist support group for mothers who have lost children to violence in New Orleans. Centering Black women as “summoners of life” in the reinvigoration of a blues epistemology, Carter attends to the rituals of remembrance in the face of social erasure and death. Using collage as a creative device for Black storytelling in a fragmented, post-truth world, she calls for attention to the everyday forms of social and spiritual transformation that support Black knowledge for the “weathering of coming storms.” Alix Chapman’s performance ethnography, “At the End of the World: On the Temporal Limits of Katrina” explores how the musical genre known as “sissy bounce” helped define more inclusive notions of Black belonging. By immersing himself in the city’s music scene and following bounce artists in their daily lives, he asks what Black queer culture can teach us about survival and futurity in an age of increasing disaster and urban displacements. Hosbey and his collaborator’s contributions in Dispatches highlight marronage as a form of gathering as refuge from dominant race/gender systems. The subjects of the short film “Nola” attempt to bring others across the veil, if only briefly, through practices of commemoration.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs’ and Jarrett Drake’s contributions explore the construction of carceral enclosure and countermobilizations against them. In “Unmaking Carceral Disasters: A Post-Katrina Timeline of Struggles Against the New Orleans Punishment Regime,” Pelot-Hobbs attends to the dialectic of resistance and domination. She highlights how New Orleans organizers have sought to dismantle carceral infrastructures of criminalization, policing, and detention. This work articulates turning points in abolitionist struggles, including organizing for full amnesty for “Prisoners of Katrina”—those abandoned in Orleans Parish Prison and those arrested as “looters” for seeking food—as well as efforts to get federal consent decree intervention. In “Rainbow Redemption: A Forensics of Fascism in the Crescent City,” Drake takes up the theorizations of imprisoned intellectual George Jackson to articulate fascism as “capitalism in crisis and monopoly capitalism in reform.” He analyzes the operations and dangers of how the Nola Coalition, a nonprofit collective, works to manufacture consent for the New Orleans Police Department, illustrating how these structures undermine conditions for solidarity.

Taken together, the contributions to this issue commemorate Katrina not as a singular event but as one of many potential moments from which to consider the conditions, contradictions, and trajectories that shape the storm winds of the current moment. Katrina is the eye of the storm, and the eye of the storm is also now. We study and organize in order to identify how to harness its force and change course. We conclude with the spirit of cross-movement solidarity expressed by movement organizers from Project South and the Katrina 20 Local Planning Committee:

From the Gulf South to Gaza is a shared call for solidarity and action against violence, displacement, and the climate crisis. The slogan 'We are the storm' – is a call to remember and reckon with the devastation & systemic displacement after Katrina... It is paired with 'Gaza is the compass.' Gaza keeps our path true: it reminds us of our direction in the struggle and the sacrifices made by the Palestinian people; it exposes the forces we must contend with on our collective path to liberation.

We Remember Katrina. We Stand with Palestine. The meaning of Katrina is right now.