In 2005 a hurricane dubbed ‘Hurricane Katrina’ devastated parts of the United States’ Southeast, especially parts of Louisiana and in particular New Orleans. Storms reached up to 175 mile per hour winds, and featured incessant and damaging precipitation. Nearly 2,000 people were killed by the storm, with countless others injured or otherwise negatively affected. The cost of dealing with the disaster was at the time unprecedented, totaling over $100 billion.
There are general reasons to think that such a disaster would disproportionately affect African Americans. On the average African Americans live in areas that are less protected by social services of various sorts. African Americans on average have less wealth than white Americans—this makes them less able, in general, to recover from such a disaster. However, there were more factors at work in the sort of response that Katrina received than these general reasons allow us to retrodict. There are systematic, institutionalized reasons that African Americans were disproportionately affected in a negative way by Hurricane Katrina that go beyond the generalizations mentioned thus far.
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One aspect of this disproportionality was the way that the media tended to portray the events during the most difficult period for Louisiana in general, and New Orleans in particular. One pair of commentators notes that photographs were repeatedly shown on television depicting ‘mobs’ and suggesting or stating stories of “looting, rape, murder, sniping and roving gangs preying on tourists” (Rodriguez and Dynes, 2006). What is so remarkable about this is brought out by tow facts. First, the areas in question were predominantly African American. Second, it is quite obvious that African Americans are not any more likely than other races to engage in such activities. Yet we have seen, even in the past weeks and months, that the media does not portray victims of hurricanes in South Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rica (for example) as being especially prone to such misdeeds. This is an instance of something that we witness with near constancy in the social sciences—blaming the victim.
A second factor was surely that economic inequalities that Katrina had nothing to do with already existed in relevant parts of the American Southeast, and these unfortunately exacerbated problems that the hurricane would have brought in any case. This was made so manifest, in time, that even as unlikely a figure as George Bush II was compelled to acknowledge publicly that the damage that Katrina eventually wrought was part of a ‘legacy of inequality’. This is reflected in relevant statistics that have become familiar. Among residents of New Orleans who were devastated by Katrina over 2/3 of them were African American, and nearly 1 in 3 lived below the poverty line—the latter category being composed overwhelmingly (84%) by African Americans (Strolovitch, Warren, and Frymer, 2006). Of course, the initial damage to property and person tells only part of the story. What is more important, for present purposes, is that they tell less than half the story with respect to impoverished and disenfranchised citizens of the United States such as African Americans.
While there seems little doubt that the Bush administration’s inept and untimely response to Katrina would have been very different if those placed in danger had been white, this is in the end not the most important factor. The most important fact was economic. If a wealthy, or even middle-class, family’s home is devastated by a natural disaster they have the option of simply relocating. The poor have no such option (Cutter, 2006). In summary, African Americans were disproportionately affected by Katrina not primarily because they were considered less important than would be suffering white Americans (though there was certainly an element of this)—but because they were economically impoverished, and therefore much less able to rebound positively from the catastrophe.
- Cutter, S. (2006). The geography of social vulnerability: race, class, and catastrophe. Retrieved from http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Cutter/.
- Rodriguez, H. & Dynes, R. (2006). Finding and framing Katrina: the social contract of disaster. Retrieved from http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Dynes_Rodriguez/.
- Strolovitch, D., Warren, D., & Frymer, P. (2006). Katrina’s political roots and divisions: race, class, and federalism in American politics. Retrieved from http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/FrymerStrolovitchWarren/.
