Politics, Domestic

The Politics of Race in Disaster

The United States is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse countries in the world. However, even when the law asserts or requires racial equality, white people enjoy advantages and benefits that nonwhites do not. Explicit discussions of white privilege and race relations in the United States are studiously avoided in the public sphere, with the focus always brought back to legal matters and guaranteed rights, rather than the very real but legal disparity between the white and nonwhite experiences of America.

Research has shown that in general, nonwhites experience the effects of natural disasters more severely than whites. There are a number of reasons for this. Whites are statistically more likely to be adequately insured, more likely to have significant savings or assets to fall back on in the event of a disaster, less likely to live in the most disaster-vulnerable areas, and less likely to live in the areas most likely to be affected by industrial disasters. There is a national resistance to publicly acknowledging these facts, but civil rights activists have long spoken of “environmental racism,” a phenomenon by which, as a result of intentional or unintentional race-based discrimination, the environment of low-income and/or nonwhite communities is negatively affected.

For instance, hurricane evacuation plans rely heavily on private transportation, but a high proportion of the country's black population lives in the hurricane-prone states of the south, and more than three times as many black households are without cars as white households. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) at one point recognized the disparity and began a program to provide transportation funding to communities in order to create better evacuation plans; the program was discontinued in 2001 by the Bush administration. In New Orleans, a predominantly black city at the time of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, one third of the city's black population did not have cars.

Some have argued that the evacuation transportation provided to the public was insufficient to transport everyone out of the city, even if more warning had been given and the evacuation had otherwise proceeded in an orderly and timely manner. Furthermore, although everyone in the city suffered from the effects of the storm, blacks were four times more likely to lose their jobs than whites, and the storm had a deeper impact on the predominantly black student populations of the University of New Orleans and Dillard University than the predominately white populations of Loyola College and Tulane University.

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