PROLOGUE

The Racial Capitalist State

In order to fully grasp how race and class fundamentally shape governmental and nongovernmental disaster response, we need to start with a baseline understanding that the United States is a racial capitalist state. My framing of the United States as a racial capitalist state rests on the basis that historically to the present, the United States was built on and continues to be sustained on racial, ethnic, and class exclusion, exploitation, expropriation, and violence.

The United States racial capitalist state amasses wealth through racial capitalism. Cedric Robinson, in his book Black Marxism, coined the concept of racial capitalism to capture the historical relationship between global capitalism and racism. European capitalists came from different ethnic groups than did the peasants whose labor they exploited. Then European capitalists’ expansionist goals led to a fulfilled desire to control entire regions and exploit populations, which were phenotypically non-White, non-English-speaking, and with unfamiliar cultures (Robinson 2000). Today, while we erroneously refer to those who fall outside the category of White as “racial minorities,” I adopt the more fitting term “racially minoriti[z]ed,” which was coined by Yasmin Gunaratnam (2003) in order not to lose sight of this fact of their subjugation.

As these systems of domination and exploitation through capitalism expanded, so did the need for their justification. Therefore, racial ideology developed to “exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones” (Robinson 2000, 25). Robinson (1983, 2000) argues that racism and capitalism developed concurrently and codependently. In this historical context, European capitalists developed and perfected racial ideology as their tool of justification for instituting systems of slavery and servitude globally beyond Europe’s borders (Robinson 2000).

However, we need to go beyond thinking of racial capitalism as merely a system of racial exploitation. It is also a system of racial violence, domination, expropriation, and exclusion. Nancy Fraser (2016) critiques exploitation-centered conceptualizations of racial capitalism for their lack of accounting for the difference between the “exploitable citizen-workers and [unfree and] dependent, expropriable subjects” (163). Historically to the present, the expropriated subjects are the “chattel slaves, indentured servants, colonized subjects, ‘native’ members of ‘domestic dependent nations,’ debt peons, felons, and ‘covered’ beings, such as wives and children” (165). Today the expropriated subjects are the descendants of these classes, many of whom live in cities within the United States (Fraser 2016).

The racial capitalist state is a modern empire state, built and sustained on racial violence on racialized others (Jung and Kwon 2020, 1014). Moon-Kie Jung and Yaejoon Kwon conceptualize the racial empire state as a colonial, imperial state, consisting of hierarchies of colonized and noncolonized peoples and “incorporated” and “unincorporated colonial spaces” (1014). Genocide of Native Americans and what Orlando Patterson describes as the “permanent, violent domination” or “social death” of African Americans through slavery marked the birth of this empire (Jung and Kwon 2020, 1015; Patterson 1982, 13).

The racial capitalist state excludes those who occupy the lowest rung of racial and class hierarchies, through the denial of social and legal citizenship rights. The United States, through a history of engagements of usurping sovereign nations and territories, has political subjects varying in rights and citizenship and characterized by amorphous colonial spaces (Jung and Kwon 2020). Jung and Kwon (2020) foreground the racial empire state’s use of control, coercion, and violence by police forces against Black citizens and noncitizens as a key strategy to maintain order. Similarly, even the awarding of citizenship to Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, as well as the status of resident alien to various immigrants, does not point to assimilation but to a means of racializing these groups (Jung and Kwon 2020). The key to the empire state is that it carries out similar policies of violence such as the “war on terror” on racialized subjects both on the mainland and beyond (Jung and Kwon 2020).

The racial capitalist state deprives those it deems excludable, exploitable, and expropriable from any real chance to survive and thrive. The racial capitalist state manufactures social, political, and economic deprivation through what Johan Galtung (1969) called “structural violence.” The social structure manufactures lack of freedom, chronic poverty, and the psychological and physical suffering that stems from these suboptimal conditions for human life (Galtung 1969). The travesty is that this structural deprivation is preventable due to the availability of resources, but a lack of will among those who benefit from the status quo keeps this unjust machine running (Galtung 1969).

In favor of capitalist interests, the State enacts policies that pursue a neoliberal ideology that routinely erodes the social safety nets of the economically deprived. Neoliberal ideology holds that the market is the only regulator of social goods (INCITE 2020). The proponents of neoliberalism eschew governmental intervention in meeting the needs of the economically deprived. However, in practice, neoliberal policy requires “an active state to direct the dismantling of social welfare programs, the deregulation of labor and trade, and the protection of the wealth and assets of transnational corporations and a global elite class” (xiv). Milton Friedman and the Chicago school were the proponents of neoliberalism as a U.S. policy (INCITE 2020). In the 1980s, Reagan adopted neoliberal policies that dismantled labor organizing and allowed for unbridled racial capitalism (INCITE 2020). Reagan’s neoliberal policies eroded social programs that were meant to combat the urban poverty that resulted from massive unemployment in deindustrializing cities.

The racial capitalist state pushes the precariously employed and unemployed Black, Latino, and noncitizen urban economically deprived into segregated urban residential clusters that are chronically disinvested by the State (Taylor 2014). On the other hand, the State may subsidize the cost of the means of production for the capitalist class (Fraser 2016). The State also ushers in “legal frameworks that legitimate the confiscation of the land and resources of ‘dependent paupers,’ convicted felons, undocumented workers, and colonial immigrants of color” (172). Most economically deprived residents, in the absence of housing assistance from the State, live precariously, which either ends in eviction or homelessness (Desmond 2016).

Economically deprived neighborhoods become a money pit for landlords who enjoy low taxes and low interest rates yet charge high rents to already economically deprived urban residents (Desmond and Wilmers 2019). According to Matthew Desmond and Nathan Wilmers (2019), “nationwide, the median rental unit located in an economically deprived neighborhood yields $98 in profits, compared to only $3 in middle-class neighborhoods and $49 in affluent neighborhoods” (1108). The annual rent in economically deprived neighborhoods far exceeds the property value (Desmond and Wilmers 2019). This rent to value ratio is much higher in economically deprived neighborhoods than it is in economically privileged neighborhoods. The economically deprived also pay a higher rent burden of 50–70 percent of their income (Eggers and Moumen 2010, cited in Desmond and Wilmers 2019, 1091 [Eggers and Moumen 2010]).

In northern cities, developers and landlords amassed great wealth by allowing “slum” conditions to grow in Black and economically deprived neighborhoods. One of their strategies is dividing dilapidated homes into smaller units without incurring costs of repair (Desmond and Wilmers 2019). Landlords exploit Black renters by charging high rents with no obligation to rehabilitate the old housing stock (Desmond and Wilmers 2019).

Global financial institutions, many of which are based in global cities such as New York City, also promote dispossession of economically deprived and working classes by debt, foreclosures, predatory loans, and other instruments of confiscation (Fraser 2016). In my fieldwork, I encountered the use of similar expropriation and exploitation tactics on Black, Latino, Native American, White ethnic, and undocumented impoverished residents on The Rockaway peninsula (henceforth “The Rockaways”).

Nowhere else have I seen such a sharp contrast between the White protected class and the exploited, expropriated classes of the racial capitalist state than in the segregated landscape of The Rockaways. I spoke with Westvillers (pseudonym), who are White, economically privileged to affluent, and who reminisced about their interrupted leisure, which includes jogging along the beaches and on the boardwalk and spending their summers in beach bungalows. Some owned rental property and small businesses in Eastville (pseudonym). Eastvillers (pseudonym) are the non-White and White economically deprived, elderly, new immigrant, substance-dependent, “deviant,” and formerly incarcerated population. They are the peninsula’s excluded, exploited, and expropriated surplus population of the racial capitalist state who feel the brunt of inequities during disaster (Laster Pirtle 2020; Pulido 2016; Collard and Dempsey 2017).

I say that Eastvillers are the expropriated class because their bodies are the captured pawns through which State-funded capital flows to White economically privileged slum lords and White small business owners. Some of the Eastvillers to whom I spoke have been made unemployed and chronically economically deprived via economic exclusion from the 1980s with no opportunity to climb out of poverty. Already economically deprived urban residents are trapped in a system that on the surface seems to benefit them, when in reality it fills the coffers of those who use their bodies for profit. Similarly, developers are continually devising strategies to displace The Rockaways’s economically deprived population, in order to grab the increasingly coveted coastal properties for their projects.

Slum lords and capitalists siphon transfer payments from the State through various programs designed to rehabilitate and provide the basic needs of The Rockaways’s economically deprived. This racial capitalist, social services economy that has arisen in The Rockaways is the result of what many Rockaway residents see as New York City discarding its social services–dependent populations in this coastal periphery, which is mainly out of sight. The capitalist, social services economy is visible from the neon “We Accept EBT [Electronic Benefits Transfer] Here” signs that flash from corner stores to the various forms of precarious housing paid with monthly government transfers. While they profit from governmental programs, the State does not hold accountable these slum lords who warehouse the impoverished masses in inhabitable conditions.

The racial capitalist state does not only facilitate the interests of for-profit corporations, developers, and landlords. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) lobby elected officials for contracts, public infrastructure investments, and favorable regulations (Marwell 2007). NGOs outside economically deprived neighborhoods are the recipients of this State funding (Marwell 2007). While NGOs have public-facing missions that deliver public goods, they connect to capitalists either directly or through their foundations. From the early 1900s, foundations served as tax shelters for multimillionaire capitalists and their families who wanted to evade estate or corporate taxes (INCITE 2007 cited in INCITE 2020).

This means that we need to scrutinize NGOs as we would for-profit corporations. We need to go beyond their missions and examine their institutional logics, practices, and work cultures. We also need to ask how the activities of NGOs in segregated urban communities may negatively impact their racially minoritized and economically deprived aid recipients. We especially need to examine whether and how they attempt to ensure equitable disbursements of public and government-subsidized resources.

Contrastingly, small community-based organizations serving in racially segregated urban areas step in to provide the economic and social safety nets that the State fails to provide. Community-based organizations benefit the increasing populations of Black and Latino residents (Marwell 2007) who have migrated to cities from the rural United States and the Global South. In the 1960s, African Americans’, Puerto Ricans’, and Mexican Americans’ fight for economic and housing inclusion led to the first State-supported community-based organizations in New York City, which would serve as models for other cities (Marwell 2007).

Community-based organizations operate on a local neighborhood or neighborhood area scale with their missions typically oriented to providing services such as “affordable housing, childcare, drug treatment, cultural programs, services for the elderly . . . [and] job training programs” as well as fighting homelessness, neighborhood self-revitalization, and legal advocacy for disenfranchised local residents (Marwell 2007, 4). Their volunteer and staff pool are typically local (Mar-well 2007).

Local community-based organizations and small churches based in economically deprived and racially and socioeconomically segregated urban communities are the most attuned to the specific needs of the urban economically deprived but are also the ones that are often on the brink of extinction. These small, community-based organizations experience disconnection from foundation or State-funded capital. This unfortunately also means that they are severely underfunded despite their vital role in serving racially minoritized and economically deprived urban residents.

As we have seen, the United States, as a racial capitalist state, widens the gap between urban White economically privileged and non-White economically deprived communities. The State subjugates, exploits, and excludes the latter. Simultaneously, the State rewards White economically privileged citizens with freedoms, opportunities, and advantages, making it possible to live an entire life in oblivion. Furthermore, the State supports the interests of capitalists and organizations that disproportionately benefit White economically privileged citizens and their communities.

Contrastingly, small community-based organizations serving their majority Black, Latino, and economically deprived communities experience a disconnection from State resources. Therefore, in order to understand how disaster response reproduced race and class inequality after Superstorm Sandy, an urban disaster, we need to examine the role of the State through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and local government, nongovernmental organizations, and community-based organizations in the implementation of disaster response.

Superstorm Sandy: A “Post Katrina” Disaster

Superstorm Sandy made landfall in New York City on October 29, 2012, resulting in an urban disaster. Many of the city’s essential and residential buildings lined the coastline, leaving over one million New Yorkers in the highest priority evacuation zone (Gibbs and Holloway 2013). Sandy’s storm surges flooded lower levels of homes and apartment buildings and left eight hundred thousand residents without power, heat, or hot water for up to several months during cold temperatures (Gibbs and Holloway 2013). The sudden need to provide essential services and supplies led the city to coordinate a massive disaster response operation with large NGOs and local nonprofits to mobilize twelve thousand volunteers within the first eight months of the disaster (Gibbs and Holloway 2013).

Several studies have documented that New York City’s racially minoritized and urban economically deprived disaster survivors shouldered the brunt of disaster inequality (see Faber 2015). These Sandy studies focused on how race and class shape disaster risk as well as vulnerability in coping with the storm (Faber 2015). These studies reveal that Black disaster survivors and the most economically deprived White disaster survivors, including the elderly, were more likely to live in flooded areas (Faber 2015). Black and Latino residents were also more likely to experience exposure to storm surges and flooding, because they tended to reside in public housing near coastal areas (Faber 2015).

Disruption to transportation impacted Black residents who already live further away from bus stops, constraining their access to networks, employment, and schools (Faber 2015). Sandy studies also emphasize how housing and the lack of health care shaped the vulnerability of the economically deprived urban residents during Sandy (Hernández et al. 2018). These studies also show that public housing residents, who were already economically, socially, and medically vulnerable, were without water, electricity, heat, and transportation for several weeks after Sandy. While these studies point to demographically associated disaster inequality, they leave us with the question of how race and class structures and processes infiltrate disaster response. This was a question I explored during my fieldwork in New York City’s Brooklyn and The Rockaways, after Superstorm Sandy.

This book contributes to the archive of post-Katrina studies on race and class inequality in disasters. I cannot overstate the defining role Hurricane Katrina played in pointing disaster scholars to the centrality of race and class before, during, and after disaster. The case of Hurricane Katrina also established the significance of race and class inequality in the collective memory of Americans (Brunsma, Overfelt, and Picou 2007). The stark difference in the experiences of Black New Orleans residents from those of White residents, the disproportionate deaths among Black residents in the lower ninth ward, and finally the slow governmental response to the crisis led to public allegations of racism.

Prior to Katrina, discussions of race in the disaster literature focused on indicators such as race and socioeconomic status of individuals and measuring how these impacted risk and access to services (Bolin 2006). However, once it became clear that a lack of appropriate and timely governmental response became “the disaster” or “the crisis,” a new wave of disaster research began to reconsider how we theorize the workings of race and class in racially minoritized and economically deprived urban areas.

We saw in New Orleans that decades of disinvestment by the local government in the infrastructure and welfare of the Black urban areas, and in particular the lower ninth ward, explain the “wider disparity in adaptation and recovery between Black and white storm victims” (Bullard 2009). We understand that Katrina is a man-made disaster that implicates the State in the loss of life and property of an already socioeconomically deprived, racially minoritized population. The case of New Orleans also revealed that the State and NGO response only served as a multiplier effect on longstanding race and class spatial inequalities (Bullard 2009).

A few years before Katrina, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 privatized emergency management and devolved the State’s responsibility to private organizations such as corporations and large NGOs. The 2002 Act also reorganized FEMA as a purchaser and coordinator of services. The act also allows the federal government to contract out disaster recovery activities to private firms.

Rita J. King (2009, 169) writes that by the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, FEMA was already “crippled by cutbacks and gutted of personnel.” Neoliberal ideology reduced governmental intervention and emphasized calls for personal responsibility in disaster recovery. This ideological infiltration of disaster response has led to a shifting of the responsibility of response and recovery to local governments, communities, and citizens. States that were already experiencing fiscal problems would in turn rely on the private sector. Unsurprisingly, the move toward privatization of disaster response resulted in corporate interests playing a significant role in disbursing disaster aid, proposing redevelopment plans, and bidding on government contracts to rebuild disaster-impacted cities. This means that disaster response follows a market-oriented model of redevelopment that equates rebuilding communities with subsidizing business recovery and revitalizing financial centers (Gotham and Greenberg 2014).

Private interests often use crises as means to restructure under the guise of redevelopment. Naomi Klein (2008) theorizes the State’s role in the relationship between disaster and capitalism: The State backs corporate interests. Corporations capitalize on the collective trauma that disasters unleash on the impacted population. They do this by opportunistically pushing through capitalist interests and simultaneously stripping preexisting social safety nets for vulnerable survivors. Kevin Fox Gotham and Miriam Greenberg (2014) argue that disaster redevelopment in New Orleans after Katrina and New York after 9/11 bolstered the French Quarter and made the Wall Street areas “vibrant and dynamic 24-hour communities,” respectively, to the neglect of the lower ninth ward and Chinatown (45).

Katrina taught us to pay attention to the recovery divide across local geographies. Cutter et al. (2014) describe Mississippi’s recovery after Hurricane Katrina as a “recovery divide” (13). They argue that the political elites, the business community, and the wealthy recovered the fastest, while Black and economically deprived disaster survivors suffered the greatest impact from both Hurricane Katrina and Camille, yet saw the slowest recovery. Katrina also taught us that State-funded disaster response prioritizes property over people. Most of the federal rebuilding funds allocated to Mississippi rebuilt federal buildings, coastal facilities, and ports, while the vulnerable populations were not able to access much of this funding (Cutter et al. 2014).

Katrina exposed how important racializing narratives around deservingness and undeservingness are to race and class inequality in the allocation of disaster aid. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funding disproportionately went to Mississippi versus New Orleans (Weber 2017). This was due to party politics and racial and class assumptions around Mississippi being deserving and New Orleans being undeserving (Weber 2017). Elected officials argued that New Orleans suffered an unnatural disaster due to a poorly maintained levee system. Therefore New Orleans’s claims to recovery funds were unmerited. They simultaneously argued that Mississippi was deserving because its damages were due to the hurricane (Weber 2017).

Superstorm Sandy presents continuities to Katrina. Studying post-Sandy New York City also gave me the opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of how race and class structures and processes intervene in disaster response. Through my fieldwork in Brooklyn and The Rockaways, with primary focus on Canarsie, Westville, and Eastville, I gained intimate knowledge and insight about what it means for urban, Black, Latino, Native American, and economically deprived White disaster survivors to have to navigate a complicated ecology of disaster response of unfamiliar nonlocal organizations, agencies, and responders.

Through this project, I have now personally seen the underbelly of disaster response at the person-to-person, block-by-block level. In the wake of disaster, it may seem that existing inequalities become less important, as everyone reels from the experience of acute crisis. However, I witnessed the persistence of race and class inequality and how it shaped disaster response. This is why I can no longer breathe that collective sigh of relief that we do after hearing on the news that a plethora of governmental and nongovernmental agencies have finally arrived in disaster areas. I now understand that when FEMA and nonlocal, large NGOs finally do get to economically deprived urban areas, far from disrupting long-standing race and class inequality, they help reproduce them.

Disaster response merely serves up old wine in new bottles. Old race and class logics of urban spaces combine with the color-and class-blind institutional logics of nonlocal organizations. These combined logics create an ecology of unequal networking opportunities that privileges the disaster resource capture of White middle-class and affluent disaster survivors and their communities. The emergence of this skewed ecology allowed White economically privileged Westvillers to out-pace their Black, Latino, Native American, new immigrant, and White economically deprived neighbors in the adjacent impoverished community of Eastville.

Part of this disaster response ecology is the institutional logic of color and class blindness. These logics helped displace the services-dependent chronically economically deprived of Eastville. These logics also increased the bureaucratic burdens of Black, immigrant Canarsie disaster survivors and the racially diverse, economically deprived of The Rockaways. Furthermore, these logics excluded the undocumented immigrants, basement renters, and the self-employed disaster survivors with whom I spoke from recovering their disaster losses.