It has been nearly two decades since Hurricane Katrina changed the city of New Orleans as we know it, and a new docuseries is drawing attention to not only the resilience of its survivors but also the responsibility of mainstream media in accurately informing and representing the masses.
During a panel conducted at the 2025 Essence Fest, which has been held in New Orleans for over three decades,Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time director Traci A. Curry emphasized that this is not a reframing or revisiting of the natural disaster that continues to have an impact today.
On holding the media responsible
“I think I came to it both as someone who remembers being a spectator and watching the media coverage,” Curry told Blavity’s Shadow and Act in an interview ahead of the docuseries.
“That particular moment that’s in Episode 4, where Wolf Blitzer says, ‘They’re so poor,’ I remember that. I mean, that stood out in my memory, and that’s just sort of an example of a place that I wanted to be intentional about how we put the people in the series in conversation with that moment, because that moment sort of is about this massive, needy Black suffering, and kind of very dehumanizing, and kind of deindividuating people. Until that particular moment, just for example, we put Wolf Blitzer in conversation with General [Russell L.] Honoré and with Kevin Goodman, who’s one of the Black Indians, saying, ‘Let me tell you about what it is to be a poor, Black person in New Orleans. You know how to survive.’ You know how to take a little bit and do a lot, right? That just sort of is an example of how I was just very intentional: that there was a media narrative that was persistent at the time, that I think to some degree persists to this day, that was just erroneous about the people of this city that I just kind of instinctually knew, just as a Black person, but that I also knew in particular about the people of New Orleans because the kind of character and people that they are.”…