Since Katrina, there has been a strong focus on all that’s changed in our city, and for good reason. The end of August brings with it an annual reminder of the singular and insular facets of New Orleans culture that simply didn’t return, at least not with gusto, following the storm. The “Ain’t Dere No More” list grows longer—which our Bunny Matthews feature displays in spades—and New Orleans, little by little, inches towards hegemony. New Orleans is not like other cities, we know this, but Katrina was an excuse to try to tame it and reframe it as such. And so we rightfully mourn our losses, wistful for a city with a little more flavor.
What’s changed in New Orleans since Katrina is similar to what’s changed in a lot of places over the past few decades—the city whitewashed, everything privatized, and residents priced out. But in New Orleans, our reclusive microcosm, the cultural stakes were higher and the losses heftier.
Some of the changes that the storm brought felt promising, though. With an influx of attention, and an upending of all previous certainty, there came a chance to try something new. The public defenders office capitalized on that. Pre-Katrina, public defenders all worked part-time, had no relationship with their clients, and were funded through traffic tickets. After Katrina, the office was overhauled, and since 2020, the public defenders’ office has had funding parity with the district attorney’s office and regularly employs about 60 lawyers. That change, on the surface, was promising. Maybe it meant we could reckon with our status as the incarceration capital of the world. Still, New Orleans is locking people up at a rate beyond their mandated cap, and public defenders burn out because there are still simply far too many people to represent.
As we mourn the cultural losses, it’s clear that the larger mechanisms of power have resided here far longer than Katrina, and their shape has only evolved to match our tactics. “Crime” and its ever-elusive definition still fuels every social, political, and financial public policy decision.
In the 1982 documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine, writer James Baldwin travels through the South to interview Civil Rights leaders about the movement, and lack of movement, since. When the focus of the film turns to New Orleans, Oretha Castle Haley speaks: “One of the aspects that’s going on in this particular struggle here in New Orleans is elected officials cry about crime. What they’re literally talking about is building concentration camps to put youngsters in.” As Haley states, the mayor at the time—Dutch Morial, a civil rights lawyer and New Orleans’ first Black mayor—held a meeting saying that they would build as many jails as possible to keep the “urban terrorists” off the streets.
“Everything has been changed on the surface. Nothing else has been touched,” says Baldwin.
In 2020, Jason Williams ran on a “progressive” platform for district attorney. He placed himself in stark contrast to Leon Cannizzaro, who had a reputation as a ruthless, tough-on-crime soldier. One of Williams’ campaign promises was that he would not try children as adults. But in 2021, when a 15-year-old was charged with the murder of a 52-year-old woman carrying groceries to her in-laws during a carjacking turned homicide, he walked it back. The public wanted retribution, and Williams gave it to them. In 2023, Williams more than tripled the amount of juveniles he transferred to adult court from his first year in office, nearly tying with his tough-on-crime predecessor.
Twenty-one years after Katrina, so much has changed in the city, yet the bones are the same. While we struggle to make rent, our money is spent on drones that can potentially wield weapons. We are so bogged down by the deluge of information spewed at us daily, fighting micro-level battles with our current representatives (which is important, we should be confronting them every chance we can), it becomes easy to forget that what we’re fighting is not unique, and these individual players are cogs in a vast and ancient system. Haley diagnosed our struggle as long and protracted, and she was correct to do so. With each set of positive changes, the system changes to overtake it like a weed. This weed is aggressive, and left untamed fights its way into our hearts. It will make you its soldier if you let it.
It’s impossibly frustrating to know that the ever-powerful state continues to dupe us into isolation and familiar pitfalls. It morphs the face of our enemy so the enemy becomes more challenging to fight. Some enemies are clear—those working at the state level to strip political power outright make no effort to conceal their motives. But others, like Mayor Helena Moreno, who is potentially applying for a controversial grant from the Trump justice department, are trickier and embedded among us. They convince us we’ve taken a step forward.
As we take stock of our losses, it’s time to do some pruning. This means removing those in power who have aligned themselves with this system, but also tending to our own integrity. When headlines tout unprecedented danger, I invite us all to peel back the mask of the named enemy and interrogate what really lies beneath it—and do everything in our power not to become it. —Marisa Clogher
illustration by Laura Frizzell
About the Cover
Causonis japonica, a.k.a. “bushkiller” is an invasive vine that has aggressively established itself in New Orleans and the South. I first learned of it a decade ago when a mystery weed popped up, seemingly overnight, in my flowerbeds and covered my chainlink fence. A bit later I was out at A Studio in the Woods in lower coast Algiers and spotted it and asked the environmental curator what it was. He explained that it’s bushkiller, that it’s invasive, that it grows up, onto, and over plants and smothers them, and the only way to get rid of it is to dig up its extensive root system, which is next to impossible. These days, bushkiller is everywhere in my backyard. In the summer it runs rampant, growing up and over our bushes, our fruit trees, our vegetable garden, and creeping its way little by little, further and further through the grass of my yard. It feels like something of a metaphor for New Orleans, the insidious frustrations and fears that come with living here: from climate change and hurricanes to crumbling infrastructure, inept leaders, stifling humidity, potholes, and mosquitoes. For this cover I drew layer after layer of leaves in Procreate on my iPad using the 6B Pencil brush. I then moved the layers of leaf cluster drawings around the page until I settled on a composition I liked. The last step was adding shading with a light touch of the Charcoal Block brush. —Kyle Bravo
