You Can’t Have Our Story

Every time a new documentary drops about Hurricane Katrina, Netflix, Hulu, wherever.. I feel that pull between pride and pain. Because while the world keeps replaying our storm, most of them still don’t understand it. 

We don’t talk about Katrina with outsiders  much because for us, that is sacred ground. We are not trying to gatekeep , but for us we have this mutual and unspoken understanding that It’s not for consumption, it’s for comprehension. But too many people come to study, not to understand. They turn trauma into trend, and that’s where the disrespect begins.

What happened in 2005 was an American betrayal. A city full of Black families left to drown in neglect, then mocked for surviving it. They called us “refugees” in our own country. They laughed at our pain, judged our desperation, and turned our struggle into memes and punchlines. As if survival was something to be ashamed of.

People love to analyze how New Orleans “failed”... but nobody wants to talk about how the country failed us. No one wants to admit that leadership froze while bodies floated. Nobody wants to say out loud that what they saw wasn’t chaos... it was endurance under abandonment.

And yet, through all that, I don’t regret surviving it. I don’t even regret being there

Katrina carved me into who I am. Every storm tests you, but that one taught me how to protect my people, how to move when the system won’t. Those of us who stayed, who fought, who waited, who prayed... we didn’t come out unscarred, but we came out awake.

Yes, some people exaggerated their stories.... I don't know if they were looking for cloud or recognition but honestly  pain always has imitators. 

 What we went through doesn’t need embellishment. My family’s story doesn’t need dramatics or edits. It’s real. It’s ours. And it’s not for sale.

So when the world wants to “commemorate” Katrina, do it right. Don’t exploit the memories. Don’t flatten us into victims or villains. Remember that there are over 350,000 individual stories.. not just one city’s tragedy, but an entire people’s testament to survival.

And while they still play politics and point fingers every time a new storm hits, let me remind them: accountability was missing long before the floodwaters came. Katrina didn’t just expose the levees... it exposed the truth about this country’s priorities.

So no, you can’t have our story. You can witness it, you can learn from it, but you will never own it. Because what we lived in truth can't  be repackaged for entertainment.