The bridge from Hurricane Katrina to #BlackLivesMatter

Looking back, there were so many things we didn't know -- I didn't know -- on Aug. 29, 2005, the day that Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast near the Louisiana-Mississippi border. At first, we simply didn't understand the true nature of the storm. After Katrina bounced off South Florida and reformed in the Gulf of Mexico, authorities had warned the world that this monster might completely flatten New Orleans with Category 5 winds. That Monday night, at my safe, dry desk at 400 North Broad Street in Philly, where my editors had asked me to assemble a Page 1 story about this killer hellstorm, the first reports said Katrina wasn't as bad as feared. In the next day's paper, I wrote that Katrina had been "a powerful but glancing blow" to the Big Easy.

So much we didn't know.

While most of America was sleeping that first night, the levees broke -- no longer about to hold Katrina's massive storm surge of Gulf water. Throughout Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005, the water poured from the Industrial Canal, from the 17th Street Levee, and dozens of other break points, ultimately putting an estimated 80 percent of the city under water. Again, it was hard, in real time, to comprehend both what was happening in New Orleans, and why. Only years later, thanks to dogged work by the likes of the performer and New Orleans resident Harry Shearer, and his documentary The Big Uneasy, did we understand that it was really human error -- specifically, shoddy design and care of the levees by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- that had unleashed devastation on a great American city.

That's vitally important, but that's not how Katrina changed America. By Day 3, news helicopters over the flood zone began to capture the images that still haunt a nation, 10 years after. Families on rooftops, waiting in agony for rescuers who were nowhere in sight. A dead body floating face down in flood waters. A dire message, chalked on a rooftop: "HELP. The water is rising..."

A transfixed nation kept wait for a cavalry to come to the rescue -- a cavalry that so bafflingly was not coming. The New York Times wrote of 25,000 people stuck inside the Louisiana Superdome, "desperate refugees clamored for food, water and attention while dead bodies, slumped in wheelchairs or wrapped in sheets, lay in their midst." Thousands more gathered outside a convention center near the center of New Orleans, equally trapped and desperate.

"Refugees," the Times called them -- refugees not just in their own country, but their own hometown. Other news organizations wrote or spoke, with a growing voice of urgency, about the thousands of people who were stranded.

People. It was so generic.

It took a day or two. It usually does even when it's so obvious that the emperor -- or more accurately in this case, the empire -- is wearing no clothes, Slowly, hesitantly at first, some commentators like Slate's Jack Shafer called attention to the obvious, that every image of desperate folks with their hand-drawn pleas for help, every cutaway of desperate, dying throngs, screamed out for a better description than just "people."

They were poor people, mostly. And they were black people, predominantly.

Think back to America in 2005, 10 short years ago. The national conversations about poverty and about race in America had gone completely underground. Some of that was due to short-lived economic gains during the dot-com era boom of the late '90s, some of it real and some built on the back of what would prove to be mortgage scams targeting the working class. But then economics and everything else got lost in the so-called "war on terror" -- the trumped-up "orange" or "yellow" terror alerts, the breathless news reports that the No. 2 or 3 leader of al-Qaeda had been killed again and again and again and again. First 9/11, then Iraq -- terrorism talk had, to borrow a popular phrase, sucked all the oxygen from the American room.

The new buzzword was "homeland security." But here in the so-called "homeland," officials had no clue what to do with 200,000 poor folks and a storm like Katrina bearing down on them. While the region's more privileged residents filled up their SUVs and drove west on I-10,  the city of New Orleans mailed a DVD -- yes, a DVD -- to 134,000 mostly lower income residents who didn't own a car, and the gist of that message was they were on their own, that there was no way to evacuate them. Many of the poorest had been counting on government checks that were not due until Sept. 1. "No funds," one 41-year-old woman surrounded by four young children told the New Orleans Times-Picayune when asked why she was still there.

Overnight, a contrast that had been overlooked in the mid-2000s suddenly jumped out, in stark black and white. A nation that had just spent hundreds of billions on ferrying tens of thousands of troops to remote outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on state-of-the-art drone technology that could kill an individual 11,000 miles away, seemingly didn't know how to get bottled water to a city in Louisiana. The Army Corps of Engineers had diverted most of its resources to Iraq -- and a war over bogus threats from "weapons of mass destruction" that didn't exist -- while the actual threat that would kill more than 1,800 people in places like New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward had been ignored. What had we been doing all this time?

"George Bush doesn't care about black people," hip-hop's Kanye West famously declared on a nationally television fundraiser. That went too far -- one of the very, very few good things about Bush's disastrous two terms, after all, was a surge in American dollars to fight AIDS in Africa. But his words did capture the shock of a nation that was abruptly waking up. And it wasn't just that we'd ignored poverty in America. The lasting lesson from Katrina was the ways that African-Americans were still treated differently -- by some white citizens, by the media, and especially by law enforcement.

At the height of the crisis, some in the media said that white people had resourcefully "found" bread or milk from abandoned stores; black people who did the same thing were called looters. As the numbers of stranded flood victims swelled, many watching on TV wondered why at least the more able-bodied ones didn't flee on foot. But when black refugees tried to cross the Mississippi into neighboring Gretna by bridge, mostly white officers fired shotguns over their heads and ordered them to turn around.(Somewhere down there, Bull Connor had to be smiling.)

It wasn't until later that the world realized that maybe those blocked from Gretna were, in a bizarre sense, lucky -- lucky that the shotguns weren't pointed at them. At the Danziger Bridge, members of the New Orleans Police Department shot at six African-Americans who had committed no crime -- killing two and wounding the other four -- and then, according to prosecutors, concocted an elaborate cover-up. (The 2011 felony conviction of five officers was tossed due to alleged prosecutorial misconduct, and the case is still mostly unresolved.) To citizens of urban America, the revelation of cops killing black citizens and covering it up wasn't a surprise, but Katrina brought the issue out in the open before a more credulous general public. In the same vein, news that agents from the private security firm Blackwater -- heavily involved, and accused of misconduct in Iraq -- has swamped New Orleans after Katrina helped convince many people that the post 9/11 militarization of local policing was becoming a threat to civil liberties at home.

It's taken most of a decade for this "Katrina effect" to work its way through the body politic. In 2008, most people thought there was a shortcut for changing America -- changing the president. But not long after that year's election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama, it became clear that social rot was more powerful than one man. Since 2008, the wealth gap between blacks and whites in America has soared to a modern high of 20-to-1. And by 2014, the spark could have come anywhere.

It came from Ferguson, Missouri. and the police killing of an unarmed black 18-year-old, Mike Brown. As Brown's body was left to rot for four-and-a-half hours face down on a hot street, it blended into those images of Katrina corpses who suffered the same cruel fate, of dying ignored. And when residents took to that street to protest, they were met first by police dogs and later by officers pointing weapons at them. Just like in Gretna, 2005. Just like in Birmingham, 1963.

In those first days of crisis in New Orleans, the televised images of human suffering, the whispered reports of abusive authority, were so visceral and so raw that it was hard to attach a name to it. Now, in 2014, nine years after the peeling away of the facade of racial progress by hurricane-force winds, they did name it, in just three words.

#BlackLivesMatter.

But, so many critics have asked, don't all lives matter? Of course. Ten years ago this Saturday, as the eye of Katrina was bearing down on the Louisiana bayou, every life in the path of that storm was precious. And 110 mile-an-hour winds don't know the color of the human skin they lash with pelting rain; a 20-foot storm surge doesn't ask your country of origin. But after the flood, we saw that it was primarily black people who were sent useless DVDs instead of buses and trains to safety,and  that it was mainly African-American neighborhoods that were suddenly less accessible to American might than the mountains outside Kandahar.

To suggest otherwise, at this point, does not make you "color blind." It makes you willfully blind. And if we continue to look away, that brackish, foul-smelling storm surge of August 2005 will never truly subside from America's muddied soil.