Commentaries by Lance Hill

By Lance Hill
September 2008
 

In the last year I have developed an analysis of “disaster racism” that argues that there have been real advances in racial equality and racial attitudes in the past decades and that structural racism (the absence of conscious human agency) is probably the dominant form of racism today;  but that Katrina revealed that social, economic, and political chaos arising from a disaster can bring to the surface deeply imbedded racism that can even inform government policy through human agency, e.g. the “relief blockade” of the Convention Center being the clearest example. 
 

Disaster racism in the rescue and recovery took many forms and affected liberals as well as conservatives.  It manifest itself as both action and inaction represented in the indifference to black suffering and policies; the neglect of housing, healthcare, and employment needs of displaced blacks; the emergence of the white “exclusionist movement” in New Orleans under the pretext of shrinking the “footprint” of the city, which sought to eliminate poverty by eliminating poor people from the city’s future; and the transparent efforts to reduce black political power in the recovery, which was aimed at all black classes, in the power grab that continues today.
 

I think it is important to interpret what happened in Katrina a special form of racism because it is impossible to protect African Americans and other minorities from this phenomenon in the future unless we understand that it occurs in a crisis context in which whites are not guided by reason or morality based on their understanding of the past.   Reason and morality don’t shape our judgments in crisis situations e.g. when we just climbed onto the last life raft and quickly realize that if anyone else gets on, it’s going to sink.  The survival instinct kicks in–call it whatever you like: “the compulsion to fulfill our basic human needs” or “reflexive survival neural maps,” in the end, most people succumb to the selfish or self-preserving aspect of human nature.
 

But that’s where law comes in (my apologies for invoking Edmund Burke–but I like the idea of law as the collective wisdom of the past).  We have laws for many reasons, but one is because we know we can’t always trust morality and reason to govern out behavior.  The civil rights act was premised on the realization that white people in the segregated South had to be forced to act with justice under threat of criminal or civil penalty.  Eventually when forced to treat other people like equals, they came to see them as equals.  Drawing on cognitive behavioral science: it is easier to behave our way into new thinking than to think our way into new behaving.  This new behavior probably took a generation to turn into new ideas, as the second generation grew up free of the ritual debasements of blacks imposed by formal and informal segregation and discrimination. 
 

So Katrina taught us that we can’t trust people to do the right thing in a natural disaster in which, for the first time in U.S. history, an entire urban community is uprooted and displaced.  Who could have seen that coming? 
 

The solution is (1) a frank and uncompromising national discussion of the truth of what happened in the storm and the recovery and (2) federal laws that mandate equal allocation of rescue, evacuation, and relief resources and a “bill of rights” for displaced people, e.g. the right to return to your home; the right of referendum on any land usage plans devised in your absence; the right to retain or rebuild healthcare and educational facilities; and first claim on recovery jobs. 

Lance Hill, Ph.D.,  is Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University and Author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement.   Permission is granted to reprint and reproduce this commentary.  To subscribe to future commentaries, just google for “Commentaries by Lance Hill.” He can be reached at Lhill@tulane.edu