Striking similarities exist between Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, slavery, and the Middle Passage.

I say “aftermath” because the actual storm was less hellish than the flooding of New Orleans that followed it. Human decisions caused the flooding tragedies. The same was true of slavery and the Middle Passage.

Like the Middle Passage, Katrina’s aftermath was watery. During the Middle Passage, the enslaved ancestors of the New Orleans sufferers were marched through a “door of no return” onto a small vessel on an ocean of death. Many Black bodies ended up in that water, either thrown overboard after dying or leaping overboard when death seemed preferable to life.

Also in New Orleans this September, Black bodies were in water. Some drowned, in effect “thrown overboard” by a government that diverted resources from the protection of Black lives toward the destruction of Arab lives. Other Blacks chose to chance the floodwater rather than suffer slow death in the slave ships called “Superdome” and “Convention Center.”

In the Convention Center and Superdome, Blacks were stuffed together, living and sleeping day and night in the same narrow spots, without adequate food, water, bathing facilities, or toilet capacity. On the slave ships of the 15th through 19th centuries, their ancestors had been packed between decks as cargo, spewing phlegm and defecation on each other day and night. Families were separated during African enslavement and also during Katrina’s aftermath.

Attitudes of elite white society’s observers during the Katrina aftermath resembled white attitudes during the centuries of the Middle Passage. Back then, many Europeans and Americans rationalized that slavery helped Africans since, whatever its hardships, it saved Blacks from what whites perceived as Africa’s “savagery.” Similarly, in September 2005, Barbara Bush expressed that the Blacks stuffed into the Houston Astrodome were doing well since they were “underprivileged” anyway.

Our Middle Passage and enslavement are called the “MAAFA”, a Kiswahili word that means disaster, great calamity, catastrophe, tragedy, or great suffering. The great suffering of New Orleans’ mostly Black poor during Hurricane Katrina’s disastrous aftermath illustrates that the MAAFA continues.

Several Black churches in the United States have incorporated commemoration of the MAAFA into their annual worship. For Black Christians, the most significant aspect of the MAAFA is that God brought us through it, believing and relying on Him.

“Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us/ Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.” —Lift Every Voice and Sing.(Lyrics by James Weldon Johnson; music by J. Rosamond Johnson)

God also brought us through Katrina’s aftermath, keeping the death toll lower than anticipated, and saving the masses one by one.

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