CommentaryJURIST Guest Columnist Eileen Gauna of Southwestern University School of Law. now visiting at the University of New Mexico, says that the Hurricane Katrina disaster is a classic instance of environmental injustice, the longstanding pattern whereby people of color and the poor are exposed to greater environmental risk while receiving fewer environmental amenities…
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Katrina was a hurricane, and hurricanes harbor no race or class prejudices. President Bush, seeking to deflect criticism of the federal response to the storm, noted as much, just before asserting that there was, and would be, no discrimination in governmental response. But television images of thousands of African Americans stranded on rooftops in the flooded city belied that Presidential assurance, unmasking racial inequities with disturbing clarity. Astonishingly, during evacuation, these residents were given no transportation out of a below-sea level city in the path of a Category 5 hurricane. Compounding the horror, they were subsequently forced to endure the inhumane conditions of sweltering shelters, and were eventually driven to “looting” flooded grocery stores to find water, food, medicine and other necessities. More disturbing still were the images we did not see but could readily imagine: the bloated, rotting corpses of those who had perished.
Commentators across the political spectrum began to flirt with the seemingly inescapable conclusion of racism. But this alarming insight was quickly recast as merely a difference in perception between whites and blacks, an unfortunate misperception — by blacks — caused, perhaps, by an isolated incident of governmental ineptitude. Alternatively, we were told that the abandonment of the residents was a function of class, not race, because middle class blacks were able to leave the city while poor white people remained.
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Topic: That is a curious analysis indeed. Labeling the matter as exclusively a class issue ignores the reality that people of color are poor in disproportionately large numbers, while overlooking the legacy of our overtly racist past and the likelihood that subtle forms of institutionalized racism persist. The argument also seems to assume it is more acceptable to abandon people because they are poor than because they are black. As a matter of ethics, as well as sound policy, neither is acceptable. So strong is our impulse to avoid a conversation about race, however, that we are missing an important opportunity to think seriously and deeply about the intersection of race, class and lack of environmental protection.
Katrina was not an isolated incident. It was an exceptionally large echo of a socioeconomic political condition known popularly as environmental injustice, the longstanding pattern whereby people of color and the poor are exposed to greater environmental risk while receiving fewer environmental amenities. Between the two, race has a statistically stronger link than class, and recent reports reveal that the association between race and environmental hazards is increasing. If we examine the background policies and decisions that ultimately led to the devastation in the wake of Katrina, we begin to see the event as part of this larger pattern.
For example, planners anticipated that approximately 100,000 transit-dependent residents of New Orleans, mostly poor and black, would have no private transportation out of the city in an emergency. The federal, state and local governments made no provision for them. Instead, evacuation plans relied on private automobiles. Environmental justice activists, citing Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and the 2005 release of chlorine gas from a train crash in South Carolina, note that this is not the first time people of color have been overlooked by emergency planners and then received slower assistance afterwards.
Such fend-for-yourself planning is all too common. For example, emergency plans for many citizens living and working in the shadows of refineries, chemical plants and other large facilities provide “shelter in place” alarms in the event of an accidental release. Their protection against deadly gases: closed doors and shut windows. In other risk-producing contexts, subsistence fishing populations — predominantly Asian, Native American, and black — are protected not by reductions in mercury emissions but by fish advisories, signs that tell them not to eat the fish. Increasingly, these “risk avoidance’ strategies are coming to replace the strategies of reducing or eliminating the risk itself.
Local leaders also point to the repeated failure of the Corp of Engineers to heed community concerns and close down the underutilized MRGO Canal. Residents had long feared the Canal would act as a “hurricane alley,” offering storm surge a path of least resistance toward the City. Together with eroded wetlands, the Canal had come to be “a shotgun pointed straight at New Orleans.” Unfortunately, that prediction came true. This is consistent with the consensus among environmental justice advocates that community concerns are routinely dismissed by public officials.
There have been other questionable decisions that are consistent with existing patterns, decisions that made Katrina’s aftermath more deadly. Environmental justice advocates have maintained, and studies have confirmed, that cleanups under environmental laws take longer and are less protective in people of color communities. Remedies such as “capping” sites, i.e, placing asphalt or fill on top of the contamination instead of treatment, have been shown to be more common in communities of color. In New Orleans, three Superfund sites were affected by the storm and flood waters. One was the Agricultural Street Landfill, a 94-acre site that included a predominantly black, low-income community housing project and elementary school built on a municipal landfill containing liquid hazardous waste. EPA chose to excavate and treat less than two-thirds of the site, instead placing two feet of dirt on top of much of the hazardous waste. So concerned were the residents that they had filed a lawsuit seeking relocation, a suit pending at the time Katrina hit. In addition to the obvious question — why one would cap a contaminated site located in an area prone to hurricanes and flooding? — we must also ask whet
her the cleanup remedies for the New Orleans sites fit this national pattern of unequal treatment, and consequently made environmental conditions worse.
Serious questions remain about the role race and class might play in the cleanup and rebuilding of New Orleans. Will there be protective cleanups in poor people of color neighborhoods? Will these communities have an effective voice in planning and rebuilding decisions? Will people who have been displaced be given fair-wage employment in the reconstruction? Or instead, will environmental and labor laws be waived or inequitably applied, while the formerly stable communities of the working poor make way for a gentrified New Orleans — a vision already voiced by some elite New Orleans families?
The big question remains: will we have a serious inquiry into race, class and environmental protection in order to root out and eliminate inequities and provide safe environments for everyone? Or will we continue to engage in collective denial about well-documented disparities, thus allowing decisions, policies, attitudes, skewed implementation of laws, and deeply embedded institutional dynamics to continue to keep race and class inequities on a robust trajectory upward?
Katrina has presented us this choice in the most unambiguous terms.
Eileen Gauna is a Professor of Law at Southwestern University School of Law, a Visiting Professor at University of New Mexico and a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform. A full report on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina can be found at www.progressivereform.org.
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