Beyoncé’s Formation video and the inequality of climate impacts

In one of the most arresting images in pop culture in recent years, Beyoncé lies sprawled atop a New Orleans police cruiser as it slowly sinks beneath murky floodwaters. This closing tableau of her Formation music video is haunting and layered: a Black woman posed regally on the roof of a drowning police car, calm amid a deluge that evokes Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. It’s a scene that feels both elegiac and defiant. Nearly two decades after Katrina, as climate change fuels ever more ferocious storms, this watery vision resonates as a potent allegory – a lyrical indictment of how the American state confronts climate disaster and a celebration of Black resilience floating above the flotsam of institutional failure (The Guardian).

The Deluge and Its Discontents: Katrina’s Climate Shadow

When Formation opens and closes with Beyoncé atop a flooded squad car, the reference is unmistakable. The video is bookended by imagery of post-Katrina New Orleans – a disaster in which the city’s Black residents were disproportionately hurt. Hurricane Katrina killed over 1,800 people and permanently displaced over a million, a catastrophe now understood as a preview of climate-charged extremes. Scientists note that climate change amplified Katrina’s wrath, elevating storm surge and rainfall, and likely boosting its ferocity.

But the human toll of that storm was not merely a function of wind and water. Katrina exposed how disasters prey on society’s wounds. As the Union of Concerned Scientists has reported, the impacts “are disproportionately felt by low-income communities and communities of color,” because historical inequities left certain neighborhoods more vulnerable to flooding and harm. Decades of segregation and disinvestment meant that Black New Orleanians lived in some of the lowest-lying, most flood-prone parts of the city. When the levees broke, it was these neighborhoods that drowned.

The trauma of Katrina still hangs heavy in the American imagination – a symbol of government neglect in the face of climate catastrophe. It’s no wonder, then, that Beyoncé’s flooded-city backdrop “still resonates” today, as NPR cultural critics observed. The flood in Formation is more than historical set dressing; it is a climate omen.

Beyoncé atop the Sinking State: Power, Resistance, and Rebirth

Against this backdrop of inundation, Beyoncé’s choice to perch on a sinking police cruiser becomes fiercely symbolic. The New Orleans Police Department squad car – emblazoned with authority yet helplessly adrift – represents the very institutions that failed their people. In the mythic logic of the video, the state’s power is not only impotent in the face of natural disaster, it is being ritually cast down. Beyoncé’s presence on that rooftop is a study in poise and reclamation: she literally rides out the flood on the back of the state, a Black woman physically above the emblem of law and order that historically has oppressed Black communities.

Director Melina Matsoukas explained the intent: “I wanted it to be a police car to show that they hadn’t really shown up for us,” she said of the scene, “and that we were still here on top, and that [Beyoncé] was one with the people who had suffered.”

Sociologist Zandria F. Robinson frames it as a “celebration of the margins” – a vision in which Black bodies and voices at the periphery ultimately vanquish the state’s authority. “Black bodies in motion, women’s voices centered, black queer voices centered – is what ultimately vanquishes the state, represented by a NOPD car,” Robinson writes. Beyoncé as the conjured every-southern-black-woman slays atop the car and uses the weight of her body to finish it off, sacrificing herself in the process.

Others have read Beyoncé here as embodying Mami Wata, a powerful water spirit in African and Caribbean traditions. Dressed in flowing red and white, she reclines on the car like a mermaid on a rock. “Mami Wata (Beyoncé) sinks into the water … taking with her something as payment for the injustice that has been perpetrated.” The police car is that payment – a sacrificial offering to the flood.

Marquita Harris of Refinery29 reflects on the tragedy in the scene: “The image of her drowning along with the car is powerful. More than 1,800 innocent lives were lost during Hurricane Katrina. Most of those lives could’ve been saved. If the system doesn’t change, we’ll continue to sink down with it.”

Environmental Racism and Carceral Climate Politics

Hurricane Katrina remains the textbook case. In its aftermath, as Black neighborhoods were submerged and families clung to rooftops, what did government authorities prioritize? Too often, the answer was property over people, order over compassion. As detailed in a ProPublica investigation, law enforcement was instructed to treat looters with lethal force. White vigilante groups in suburbs like Algiers Point murdered Black evacuees with impunity.

The sheriff of Orleans Parish refused to evacuate the city’s prison, leaving over 6,500 inmates (including juveniles) trapped for days in chest-deep toxic water. As an ACLU report later noted: “The Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did more for its 263 stray pets than the sheriff did for the men, women and children left in his care.”

This is what carceral strategies in a climate disaster look like: containment and abandonment of the vulnerable rather than proactive care.

And the pattern repeats. According to Harvard’s KSR Journal, Black Americans are more likely to receive less FEMA relief, take longer to recover, and face greater barriers to relocating from high-risk areas. Scholar Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns of “climate apartheid,” where disaster response reinforces inequality and exclusion.

The image of Beyoncé on the roof as the water rises asks us a devastating question: when the storm comes, who gets rescued, and who is left to sink with the state?

By folding in the climate disaster context, Formation makes an unspoken but deeply political claim: environmental justice is racial justice. Beyoncé places herself in that watery tableau not as a victim, but as a force – a reckoning.

Her visual poetry joins a growing canon of cultural critique that does what policy reports often can’t: it makes us feel the stakes. The image of a Black woman rising above a crumbling system as the waters rise is no longer just metaphor. It’s prophecy.

We are already watching institutions drown under the weight of their own inaction. Beyoncé, poised and powerful, invites us to choose: we can build something new – or sink with the old.