National Geographic’s ‘Race Against Time’ Reminds Us: 20 Years After Katrina, the Story Isn’t Over

I didn’t expect to feel as heavy as I did sitting in the theater at Essence Festival, watching the premiere of National Geographic’s Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time. But how could I not? It’s been twenty years since Hurricane Katrina took more than 1,800 lives, exposed the rot in our institutions, and displaced an entire city. Still, watching this docuseries reminded me that the disaster isn’t just a past event, it’s an ongoing wound.

We’ve seen stories about Katrina before, but this was different. The difference wasn’t just in the footage or the facts. It was in the voices. The people who lived through the storm, who survived the abandonment, the lies, and the aftermath, were finally telling the story on their terms. And sitting there in New Orleans, twenty years later, I realized just how much we still don’t understand about what actually happened.

After the screening, Lucrece Phillips stood up to share her testimony. She made it to Dallas during the evacuation, having taken in three children who lost their parents. But when she arrived, those children were taken from her with no explanation. She was treated with suspicion, not compassion.

Her story pulled me right back to my high school days in Dallas when evacuees from New Orleans started enrolling. I was too young and too uninformed to understand the depth of their grief, but I remember the tension, the fights, the unease that filled our hallways. We didn’t have the tools to support them. We didn’t have the truth either, just the noise from the media that told us who these people were supposed to be.

Dallas wasn’t the villain, but we were not prepared to be a place of refuge either. Like the rest of the country, we consumed the images the media served us, images of so-called “looters,” of supposed chaos and criminality, all painted in Black. By the time evacuees arrived, many of us had already absorbed a distorted perception of who they were. The misinformation shaped the ways we saw our own neighbors, the people who came to our city looking for safety and found hostility instead. And if I’m honest, that’s what lingers. That we were unprepared not just materially, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to meet people where they were in their suffering.

That misinformation, the kind that dehumanizes Black people, wasn’t incidental. It was systemic. Traci A. Curry, the director of Race Against Time, put it plainly when I spoke to her: “There are pre-existing ideas that people have about Black people… why people were so willing to believe that we descended into an animalistic state.” We were fed stories of looters, snipers, and rapists, narratives that made it easier to justify the government’s slow response and the military’s heavy-handed presence. Stories that made Black suffering look like Black criminality.

When I asked Traci about her approach to telling this story, she was clear that it wasn’t just about Katrina. “I think the systems that fail people, especially Black people, are not unique to New Orleans or to 2005,” she told me. “These are systems that are always invisibly working, until they fail so spectacularly that no one can ignore it.” For her, documenting Katrina was about making those systems visible. She was mapping a pattern, a blueprint for understanding what happens every time Black communities face disaster, whether it’s environmental, political, or economic. The story of Katrina is also the story of who is prioritized for rescue and who is left to fend for themselves.

Contributor Lynette Boutte, a lifelong New Orleanian, was sharp in her recollection of that betrayal. She remembered the camera crews arriving, not to help, but to curate. She watched from the Claiborne overpass as non-Black survivors were quietly removed from the scene so that the media could frame their shots around Black faces, weary, stranded, desperate. She laughed dryly when recounting how the news focused on so-called “looters,” asking, “If you see somebody carrying a TV, where were they supposed to plug it in?” People weren’t stealing for sport, they were trying to survive, grabbing food, clothes, water, anything that might help them make it one more day.

I also spent time with Shelton Alexander, a poet, storyteller, and survivor whose footage of Katrina has been repurposed in documentaries for years. But this time, he said, it felt different. “People started trusting my words,” he told me. “So I can’t just say anything. I’ve got to tell the truth.” His footage isn’t just B-roll in this docuseries, it’s part of the narrative backbone. And for Shelton, the story isn’t only about memory. It’s about responsibility. His work is a safeguard against forgetting, against allowing the flood of misinformation to drown the reality of what happened.

But even with these stories finally being told right, I couldn’t help but notice what still hasn’t changed. There has been no real collective healing, not in New Orleans nor anywhere Katrina touched. The trauma didn’t evaporate when the floodwaters receded. It settled into the bodies of survivors, into the broken neighborhoods, into the families still fragmented. As I watched the documentary, I thought about how trauma recycles itself, passed down, re-lived, even when the headlines move on. There is still no national acknowledgment of that psychic injury, no sustained mental health care, no restoration for what was lost.

I left the screening thinking about how stories, when told correctly, can still shake something loose — even twenty years later. Race Against Time isn’t definitive because no story of Katrina can be. But it’s closer to the truth than most versions we’ve been handed. It’s a story told by those who paid the highest price, who are still paying it in many ways.

I’m not going to tell you to watch this series like it’s homework. But I will say this: if you think you know what happened during Katrina, if you think you’ve already heard this story, you haven’t. Not like this.

Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time premieres July 27 on National Geographic, with streaming available July 28 on Disney+ and Hulu.