A Katrina Retrospective: Structural Inequality, Environmental Justice and Our National Discourse on Race

The Huffington Post September 1, 2010

Written by Rep. Barbara Lee

While there will be many essays written upon the 5th anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, I am compelled to offer my own contribution because there are important lessons to be learned from those tragedies that must not be lost.

In the wake of the Shirley Sherrod affair and in the context of the multitude of debates and controversies (some phony, some legitimate) involving race in the last several months, I called for a national dialogue on race. In doing so, I acknowledged that such calls had become cliché and outlined a prescription for a genuine and substantive dialogue, with advocates willing to have an open, honest and deliberative discussion respectful of others' viewpoints on a wide range of issues at the intersection of race and class in America.

I argued that we cannot have a reasonable dialogue about race if we do not begin by recognizing that white privilege, institutional racism, and structural inequalities still exist. And, there is no better evidence of this fact than the ways in which Hurricane Katrina disproportionately affected communities of color.

Numerous scholars have examined the historical, institutional, and geographic causes for the disparate outcomes suffered by African Americans and other communities of color in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Their findings reveal just how structural inequalities and lingering institutional discrimination shaped the disparities in who experienced the impacts of Katrina and help to explain the images of predominately African Americans and the poor that we and the world watched suffering on our television screens.

The disparities in which different communities, neighborhoods, and individuals experienced the effects of Katrina were driven by a history of racism and inequality in the region and manifest in everything from historical patterns of settlement, to the location of public works projects, to the lack of transportation resources.

Reilly Morse, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, wrote in a report titled "Environmental Justice Through the Eye of Hurricane Katrina":

Many differences exist between how African Americans and the poor in New Orleans and the Mississippi Coast experienced the hurricane: the nature of the disaster, the size of the population affected, the complexity of the geography, and the duration of the disparities. But these communities share a common history of discrimination in settlement and other living conditions that disproportionately increased their vulnerability to disaster and the barriers they faced in precaution and recovery.

(Anyone skeptical of this analysis should watch, If God is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise, the new documentary by Spike Lee; or Jon Stewart's recent interview with NBC Nightly News anchor Brain Williams, who spent days reporting directly from New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina).