Kyla Mandel, writing for THINKPROGRESS, provides an overview of research that exposes the structural racism in federal disaster aid programs:
“Last year the United States suffered more than $260 billion in direct damages from natural disasters — mainly from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria,” said the study’s lead author, Junia Howell, a scholar at Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. “And there were also numerous wildfires, floods, and tornadoes.”
“Data show that since 2000, approximately 99 percent of counties in the U.S. have experienced significant damage from some type of natural disaster, with costs expected to increase significantly over coming years,” Howell explained in a statement. “We wanted to investigate how these damages impact wealth inequality and accumulation.”
For those familiar with structural racism, and how it reinforces and magnifies the pernicious economic racial caste system in the US (most clearly seen in persistent wealth inequality between Whites and People of Color), the findings are shocking, but not surprising:
The study looked at data from roughly 3,500 families across the United States between 1999 and 2013. It looked at how the families’ personal wealth was impacted by natural disasters and recovery efforts, taking into account factors such as age, education, home ownership, and county population…
...white communities in counties that received $900 million in aid between 1999 and 2013 saw their wealth increase by an average $55,000. This is compared to counties that only received $1,000 in aid during that time.
For minority communities in counties that received higher FEMA aid, Blacks accumulated an average of $82,000 less in wealth and Latinx communities saw $64,000 less in wealth accumulation compared to their counterparts in areas that received little FEMA assistance.
The disparate economic effects of federal disaster aid are not coincidental, they are not what insurers refer to as ‘acts of God’; they are the result of deliberate actions and the priorities of those that dole out aid:
…as Howell noted, “based on previous work on disasters such as hurricanes Katrina and Harvey, we know FEMA aid is not equitably distributed across communities.”
“This is particularly true when it comes to infrastructural redevelopment,” Howell said, “which often has profound effects on residents’ property appreciation and business vitality. When certain areas receive more redevelopment aid and those neighborhoods also are primarily white, racial inequality is going to be amplified.” (emphasis added)
This is not an aberration.
Prof. Walter Johnson of Harvard provides a superbly clear and concise explication of the role of government aid programs in maintaining the framework of racial economic discrimination and inequality, which is the core purpose of structural racism:
George Lipsitz’s Te Possessive Investment in Whiteness provides a detailed accounting of the ways that white freedom has been extracted from Black abjection in the twentieth century. Beginning with the whites-only character of thecharter documents of the US middle class—the GI Bill, the Social Security Act,the Federal Housing Act—and following them through the history of restrictive covenants, redlining, block-busting, anti-busing, urban “renewal,” and federally subsidized suburbanization, most notably in the form of the interstate highway system, Lipsitz chronicles the history by which Black neighborhoods were downgraded, degraded, and in many cases simply destroyed during the twentieth century. US urban policy, Lipsitz shows, has consistently—indeed,unerringly—promoted both segregation and white privilege.10 (pg. 41)
The entire economic edifice of the United States has been built upon structural racism, and for the sole aim of maintaining a culture of White Supremacy:
To get from the neighborhood where Michael Brown died to downtown Ferguson, one has to travel a long, undeveloped stretch of Ferguson Avenue and then make a near-180-degree turn under a railroad bridge to merge onto another street that leads to the downtown. There are no sidewalks bordering this stretch of road, and many of those who travel it do so by walking on the shoulder—a notable issue given the risk of being cited for “manner of walking in the roadway” faced by Black pedestrians in Ferguson. The “two Fergusons”mentioned by many commentators are effectively connected by a back door. All of this inverts the whole purpose of funding economic development through taxpayer dollars. Under Missouri laws, TIF district plans are limited to areas that have been designated “blighted” by that municipality. They were designed to bring the benefits of capitalist development to areas that would otherwise be regarded as inhospitable to investment. Along with Chapter 353 tax abatements, which have a similarly framed focus on “blighted” areas, TIF bonds were designed to use the market economy to push forward the not-yet-realized project of racial equality in the United States.43 In the event, however, these tools have often been turned inside out: used to generalize the risk of investment to the entire population of a city while concentrating their financial benefits in small tracts of development. (pg. 52, emphasis added)
Any effort to remedy income inequality that doesn’t first account for and address structural racism and the systemic racial discrimination that sustains the racial wealth gap, will fail, because it will leave the foundation and framework of economic disparities intact: White Supremacy.
For more on the concept of structural racism:
‘Racism without Racists’ Pretending the election wasn’t about white supremacy won’t help. (Nov. 29, 2016)
For more on the racial wealth gap:
from The Root: Want to fight economic inequality? Then fight systemic economic racism. (Oct. 16, 2017)
For more on the racial caste system:
Anti-Capitalist Meet-up: ‘Color-Caste’: W.E.B. DuBois on Race and Class. (May 6, 2018)