The real moment of noticing that change was Katrina...our vye, our old people...the first words out of their mouths were, the water has never been th… - Colette Pichon Battle

My message to you, in the midst of all of this loss and in the shadow of fault and blame is that I’m angry. I’m angry that it took a storm of this magnitude to open the eyes of all those who would laugh and academically rebut the assertion of continued racial inequality. There are those who would suggest that people like being poor, that people wanted to stay in the path of the hurricane. We can look to the media and the hue of those who are accused of looting versus those who were accused of commandeering to see there are tangible injustices in this society today.

TV didn’t show the places around New Orleans. So driving across the bridge on Lake Pontchartrain, you have to go through a swamp, and everything that was so green all of my life was brown and stinky. And it was just death. I’d never smelled death like that. Everything died. The salt water intrusion killed all the vegetation in the swamp that you have to drive through.

there are bad people in this world, but mostly, there are just people who don’t know.