ABSTRACT
Introduction In fall 2005, my family and I lived through one of the most catastrophic events in US history – the impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the Gulf Coast, and the failure of the levee system in New Orleans. Descended from African Americans and European Americans who have lived in lower Louisiana since the nineteenth century, we have struggled to salvage our lives in the aftermath of the flooding and a largely laissez-faire local, state and federal government response. This essay places my family’s history and contemporary experience in the larger context of the racialised history of economic opportunity in New Orleans that began in the seventeenth century, and the more immediate history of desegregation and resegregation in the fifty years immediately preceding Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
