There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster

Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina

Gregory Squires, Chester Hartman, Gregory Squires, Chester Hartman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136084829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política cultural

There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster is the first comprehensive critical book on the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. The disaster will go down on record as one of the worst in American history, not least because of the government's inept and cavalier response. But it is also a huge story for other reasons; the impact of the hurricane was uneven, and race and class were deeply implicated in the unevenness.

Hartman and. Squires assemble two dozen critical scholars and activists who present a multifaceted portrait of the social implications of the disaster. The book covers the response to the disaster and the roles that race and class played, its impact on housing and redevelopment, the historical context of urban disasters in America and the future of economic development in the region. It offers strategic guidance for key actors - government agencies, financial institutions, neighbourhood organizations - in efforts to rebuild shattered communities.

CHAPTER 1
Pre-Katrina, Post-Katrina

Editors' Introduction

The water- and wind-driven devastation that wracked New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast region during and after the 2005 hurricane season is virtually without parallel in recent U.S. history. A staggering 2 million people were displaced (Hsu 2006). In the wake of Katrina and Rita came a series of events that were also without parallel. Illustrations include:

• Credible accusations of dereliction, even financial improprieties, on the part of national sacred cows such as the Red Cross and the Humane Society, leading to firings, resignation of the Red Cross president, criticisms by international Red Cross organizations, and official state and federal investigations (Strom 2005, 2006; Salmon 2006a, 2006b; Nossiter 2006). FEMA workers too have been accused of bribery (Lipton 2006c).
• Foreign aid coming to us, not from us—and then mishandled. United Arab Emirates was the leader, contributing $100 million (Lipton 2006b). (Cuba, on the other hand, proposed to send medical personnel and equipment, which offer the State Department ignored.)
• Pets taking center stage: Many flood-endangered folks, the elderly in particular, refused evacuation when they learned from government workers that they could not take their pets—in effect, their family—with them. In response, full-page ads, with pathetic photos, later appear in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Humane Society of the United States cleverly entitled them “No Pet Left Behind” in their attempt to generate support for a Senate bill, The Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards (PETS) Act.
• A mandating of moratoriums (albeit ephemeral) on mortgage foreclosures and evictions—an intervention in the housing market virtually unheard of since Depression days.
• Absentee voting problems (only partially resolved) on an unprecedented scale for the April 22 New Orleans primary and May 20 run-off elections.
• The limitations of insurance coverage, as insurance companies flee coastal areas and the federal flood insurance program goes into the red to the tune of $23 billion as a result of post-Katrina claims (Treaster 2006; Treaster and Dean 2006).
• The Iraq war comes home, as a strapped U.S. military, bogged down in the Middle East, is unable to send National Guard, reservists, or active personnel to help out in the many ways the federal government has supplemented state and local resources in the past.
• Police officers simply walking away from their jobs, in many cases prioritizing the needs of their own families.
• Incidents of racism/exclusion/NIMBYism that still have the power to shock: On August 31, 2005, police in the West Bank city of Gretna blocked a bridge from New Orleans, preventing large numbers of African-American evacuees from escaping the deluged city (Hamilton 2006).

But of course the most salient and ongoing story is one of poverty and racism—all those dramatic, pathetic shots, on television and in the papers, showing who the prime victims were, their helplessness, suffering, and abandonment. While this was no surprise to the community organizers, journalists, academics, and others who deal with these issues every day, for all too large segments of America this was seen as a “wake-up call” (Turner and Zedlewski 2006; Brookings Institution 2005; Pastor et al. 2006; Dyson 2006). Speaking from New Orleans just a few weeks after the storms, President Bush asserted: “Poverty has its roots in racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America…. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.… Let us rise above the legacy of inequality.” Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, while mislabeling the events as a “natural disaster,” recognized that they “interrupted a social disaster” (Brooks 2005).

It is the pre-Katrina and post-Katrina worlds that this collection of essays addresses. What created the pre-Katrina world? What should the post-Katrina world be? How might we get from here to there? And since Katrina is in fact a shorthand for a set of economic, social, and political conditions that characterize most of metropolitan America, what lessons and models does this provide for the nation as a whole? Ironically, we might say that in some sense we are fortunate that New Orleans is the focus: One can hardly imagine equivalent national attention had the locus been Spokane, Toledo, or Utica.

Pre-Katrina New Orleans, like most major U.S. cities, was characterized by extreme levels of poverty and racial segregation. The local poverty rate has long been high, and poor residents have been heavily concentrated. New Orleans' poverty rate in 2000 was 28%, compared to 12% for the nation. The number of high-poverty census tracts (tracts where 40% or more of the residents are poor) grew from 30 in 1980 to 49 in 2000. The number of people living in these tracts increased from 96,417 to 108,419. Consequently, among US cities, New Orleans had the second highest share of its poor citizens (38%) living in such neighborhoods in 2000. In addition, the black poverty rate of 35% was more than 3 times the white rate of 11%, and 43% of poor blacks lived in poor neighborhoods (Jargowsky 1996, 2003; Brookings Institution 2005; Wagner and Edwards 2006). And New Orleans has long been highly segregated. According to two common indicators of racial segregation—the Index of Dissimilarity and Isolation —New Orleans is one of the 10 or 15 most racially segregated among the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas. As a Brookings Institution report (2005:5,6) summed up the situation: “By 2000, the city of New Orleans had become highly segregated by race and had developed high concentrations of poverty…. [B]lacks and whites were living in quite literally different worlds before the storm hit.”

But where New Orleans stands relative to other metropolitan areas is almost beside the point. Big cities throughout the U.S. all contain large numbers of poor people, many neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, and highly segregated housing patterns. Why is this? What are the consequences? Oddly enough—and even though nothing from his personal history or his followup actions reflects such understanding and analysis—George W. Bush got it right: We need to understand the history and the legacy of inequality, and why generations of Americans have been and continue to be cut off from opportunity (Massey and Denton 1993; Briggs 2005).

Racial disparities and poverty are not the result primarily of individual actions. They are the cumulative result of a long history of institutional arrangements and structures that have produced current realities. We can start with the 250 years of African-American slavery and the longer-term effects that status had on wealth creation, family life, and white attitudes toward—as well as treatment of—blacks. Following the secession by eleven southern states (including Louisiana) and a bloody civil war that ended the secession, the defeated states (selectively) asserted a claim of “states' rights” as a means of limiting federal intervention. Afterwards, a century of legal segregation throughout the South—overturned by the Civil Rights Movement and several court rulings—ensued, with less formal barriers at work in other parts of the country. Even progressive federal policies, in particular, those introduced in the New Deal period, were racially discriminatory. The social security system categorically excluded two occupations, courtesy of Southern members of Congress: farmworkers and domestics. Not coincidentally, these were occupations dominated by racial minorities, particularly African Americans. Federal housing programs provided minimal home ownership assistance to minority households and reinforced patterns of residential segregation. The GI Bill following World War II similarly provided relatively little education and housing assistance to minorities, compared to the massive benefits whites secured from this program. Even when African Americans received these federal benefits, they were still effectively denied by educational institutions, housing providers, and employers (Katznelson 2005; Williams 2003; Brown et al. 2003).

But, of course, this is not “just history”—and in any case history has clear and powerful continuing impacts. “Redlining” by lending institutions is still all too common. School conditions for black and white students are very different, and, Brown notwithstanding, K-12 schools are resegregating all over the country. Housing and employment discrimination, often hard to pinpoint and prove, is rife. Exclusionary zoning regulations, racial steering by real estate agents, federally-subsidized highways, and tax breaks for home owners as well as suburban business development prop up the system. Racial health disparities abound. The criminal justice system—incarceration rates, sentencing patterns, the laws themselves— reflects extreme racial disparities (Massey and Denton 1993; Mauer 2006; Smelser et al. 2001; O'Connor et al. 2001). Need we go on? Concentrated poverty and racial segregation severely reduce opportunity of all types. As sociologist Douglas Massey, co-author of the classic American Apartheid, observes: “Any process that concentrates poverty within racially isolated neighborhoods will simultaneously increase the odds of socioeconomic failure” (Massey 2001:424).

And, so, in New Orleans, those with means left when they knew the storm was coming: They had access to personal transportation or plane and train fare, money for temporary housing, in some cases second homes. Guests trapped in one luxury New Orleans hotel were saved when that chain hired a fleet of buses to get them out. Patients in one hospital were saved when a doctor who knew A1 Gore contacted the former Vice President, who was able to cut through government red tape and charter two planes that took them to safety. This is what is meant by the catch phrase “social capital"—a resource most unevenly distributed by class and race. Various processes of racial segregation have resulted in middle- and upper-income whites being concentrated in the outlying (and in New Orleans, literally higher) suburban communities, while blacks have been concentrated in the central city, where the flooding was most severe.

A related key issue is the failure to maintain critical public services, including the infrastructure (e.g., levees in flood-prone areas) on which low-income and minority residents depend to a far greater extent than middle- and upper-income families. In the Katrina case, officials long knew the protective levees surrounding the city were inadequate, leaving it vulnerable to precisely the type of disaster that occurred on August 29. But whether it is the levees in New Orleans, the bridges in the San Francisco Bay Area, or the public schools in almost every city, such public services are generally viewed as expenses that need to be minimized rather than essential investments to be maximized for the purpose of enhancing the quality of life in the nation's cities. In its 2005 Report Card for America's Infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers (2005) concluded: “Congested highways, overflowing sewers and corroding bridges are constant reminders of the looming crisis that jeopardizes our nation's prosperity and quality of life.” Assessing 12 infrastructure categories, the Society gave the nation a “D” for its maintenance efforts, noting there had been little improvement in recent years and asserting an as yet unfunded $1.6 trillion investment need over the next five years. The consequences have not been and will not be race- or class-neutral. Low-income people and people of color are disproportionately dependent on public transportation to get to work and to shop; on local police to keep their neighborhoods safe; and on emergency services of all types. They have fewer private resources to serve as cushions in times of stress—not only outside forces like hurricanes but personal disasters such as sudden unemployment, unexpected illness or injury, or other vagaries of modern life. As James Carr, Senior Vice President of Research for the Fannie Mae Foundation, observed, if the city of New Orleans had been a more diverse community it may well have had the political clout to secure the levees long ago (Carr 2005).

The clear “bottom line” is that, while there still is plenty of racist behavior by individuals, incompetence by FEMA and other public and private bureaucracies, corruption on the part of government contractors and their partners in the public sector (Eaton 2006), and other forms of malfeasance and misfeasance, by far the most potent force in creating these extreme disparities is institutional racism—“color-blind racism,” as it is often termed—something that most black people understand and experience, ...