My Top 10 documentaries # 2 - “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

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So it’s pretty fair to say Spike Lee makes some great movies, none more so than ‘Do the Right Thing’, comfortably in my all time top ten. But he has a huge chip on his shoulder when it comes to racial injustice in America, spending a lot of his unique film making anger juice by making documentaries about that as he flexes his power in Hollywood, none more so than the film about Hurricane Katrina and the shocking response in New Orleans to the disastrous aftermath. This is that movie. The inference of the film was the levees in the city that hold back the big tidal surges from the big hurricanes were at a state of disrepair and one day a big category 5 storm would breech them spectacularly. Which they did. Poorer Americans live in the zones behind the levees, built to protect those once prosperous areas in the 1930s. Now they are full of poor black Americans and their areas were completely flooded, Lee, then suggesting the white folks in powers wanted the levees to be breached so the blacks would be washed out of the city and crime would fall and property values would rise. Interestingly, the Katrina flooding did indeed displace huge swathes of black citizens and crime did indeed fall dramatically in the city over the next year and clear up. Many were moved to other big cities and towns and crime shot up there, none more so than Houston. The most famous scene of post Katrina was the rammed Astrodome as people who had not fled the storm took shelter there as the water rose quickly. The national storm response, of course, was too slow, suggestions from many - including Lee - that because it was poor black folks in need they will just have to wait. And wait they did. I like Lee but this is just an angry polemic against white America. When Florida gets hit hard by storms you don’t see the Latinos rioting. You see them pull together and get stuff done. You don’t see Hispanic cops filling their police cards with looted goods as we saw cops do in New Orleans. New Orleans is run by mostly black politicians, mostly black cops, and mostly black public service workers. A lot of poor black Americans chose to not be a pillar of the community and turn on it to loot and steal, and from their own. That aside it’s an interesting in-depth look at what happened back then with many perspectives from all sides of the response and hopefully the template for lessons learnt. SO great tunes on the soundtrack and however much Spike wants to blame white folks for every black American fail it still remains a fact that Americas ten most dangerous crime ridden cities are the ones with the largest black populations. One question is left hanging here: Do black Americans struggle because of racism or is it all an excuses not to try and succeed?