CHAPTER 1

Ecologies of Inequity

This ecology emerges due to destruction of structures and the placement of makeshift disaster response centers that reorganize mobility and the use of space. Similarly, the influx of thousands of volunteers and the dislodging of disaster survivors from their residences structure the frequency, tenor, and content of relations. Networks of family, friends, and churches reconfigure and change functions as they too are impacted by disruption in transportation and destruction of infrastructure and buildings.

—Sancha Doxilly Medwinter, the author

We know from disaster research that non-White and economically deprived disaster survivors are far less likely to recover losses from disaster than those who are White and economically privileged (see Fothergill and Peek 2004). We can attribute this lower prospect for recovery among those who are already socially and economically deprived to their being at the highest economic and psychological risk (Adeola and Picou 2012; Fothergill and Peek 2004; Cutter, Mitchell, and Scott 2000). The disaster literature attributes these stark disaster disparities to the social vulnerability of these populations.

William Julius Wilson (2012) argues that the urban economically deprived Black population is spatially segregated from both White and Black middle classes, leaving them in a condition of concentrated disadvantage. The racially minoritized and new immigrants concentrated in urban areas become socially vulnerable because of segregated opportunities, along the axes of race and class, in housing, employment, and financial capital (Donner and Rodriguez 2008; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Massey and Denton 1993).

While pre-disaster inequities create an uneven playing field going into disaster, we also need to examine pathways of inequity during the disaster response period. We know from the disaster literature that the racially minoritized and the economically deprived receive less institutional aid (Bates 1982; Drabek and Key 1984). The execution of official disaster response amplifies long-standing race and class inequalities among disaster survivors (Barnshaw 2005; Oliver-Smith 1986; Peacock, Gladwin, and Morrow 1997).

In order to uncover the inequitable pathways to race and class inequality during disaster response, we need to make visible structures and processes that perpetuate race and class inequality before disaster. (I present a lengthier explanation of why the United States is a racial capitalist state in the prologue.) The first step in this process is recognizing that race is baked into the foundational structures and institutions that continue to exist today. Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986) argue that in the United States, “every state institution is a racial institution” (83). This means that even state organizations and laws that manage disaster response “allocate differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines” (Bonilla-Silva 1997, 474). This means that the institutional logic of the racial (capitalist) state also permeates the practices of well-meaning disaster response organizations and volunteers (Hoelscher 2003; Omi and Winant 1994). Furthermore, institutional logics that permeate urban space and organizations and that animate community relations play a significant role in manufacturing inequality during disaster response.

Ecology of Inequity as Nested Structures and Processes

I argue that recognizing that an ecology of inequity emerges during disaster response is important to our understanding of how disaster response creates disaster inequality. First, I explain what I mean by the term “ecology.” My specific articulation of “ecology” builds off of Eric Klinenberg’s (2015) conceptualization in his book Heatwave. Klineberg (2015) invokes the concept of ecology in describing North Lawndale, where elderly African Americans disproportionately died of heat-related deaths. According to Klinenberg, North Lawndale was a “dangerous ecology of abandoned buildings, open spaces, commercial depletion, violent crime, degraded infrastructure, low population density, and family dispersion” (91).

Klinenberg (2015) illustrates that the lack of informal networks of family, friends, watchful neighbors, and churches and the lack of service and institutional support led to the racial disparity in rates of heat-related death from 100-degree temperatures in the 1995 Chicago heatwave. My conceptualization of ecology similarly captures the spatialized social network and social capital dynamics.

Unlike Klinenberg’s ecology, the ecology of spatialized networks of organizational and interpersonal relations that I describe is an emergent one. This ecology emerges due to destruction of structures and the placement of makeshift disaster response centers that reorganize mobility and the use of space. Similarly, the influx of thousands of volunteers and the dislodging of disaster survivors from their residences structure the frequency, tenor, and content of relations. Networks of family, friends, and churches reconfigure and change functions as they too are impacted by destruction in transportation, infrastructure, and buildings.

Next I explain what I mean by the term “inequity.” My emphasis on the inequity aspect of this emergent ecology points to the cumulative privilege and abundance stemming from the presence of a disaster response machinery in one disaster area, and how this necessarily means cumulative socioeconomic resource disadvantage and deprivation to another disaster area from its absence. One aspect of privilege is spatial privilege. In understanding the racial significance of this spatial privilege, I draw on Pulido’s (2000) conceptualization of White privilege as a “structural and spatial form of racism” (12).

Similarly, my emphasis on socioeconomic resource deprivation relies on Galtung’s (1969) conceptualization of structural violence, which emphasizes the psychological and physical suffering meted out by unjust institutions. Galtung (1969) emphasizes that these conditions that impact marginalized segments of society are not only unjust but preventable because of the current institutional capacity and technological advancement. Furthermore, the needed resources are available, as they are already enjoyed by the more privileged groups in society (Galtung 1969).

Spatial inequality has also been a focus in the fields of critical environmental justice and disaster studies. These point to the race and class spatial inequality in exposure to environmental risk and timely receipt of disaster response. Black, Latino, and Native American economically deprived residential areas, when compared to adjacent majority White areas, expose these inequalities across space (United Church of Christ 1987; Bullard 1983; Brunsma, Overfelt, and Picou 2007; Bullard and Wright 2012).

Segregationist policies in response to the Great Migration of approximately two million African Americans between 1910 and 1950 from the South has left a blueprint for the unequal development of northern cities such as New York City (Taylor 2014). Parting with the vantage point of most environmental justice scholarship, Laura Pulido (2000) reverses the emphasis on the disproportionate pollution in majority Black areas. Instead, she asks: “How did Whites distance themselves from both industrial pollution and non-Whites?” (2000, 14). I ask and answer a similar question in my study in The Rockaways: How does a White economically privileged community help exclude an adjacent racially and ethnically diverse, economically deprived community from pertinent disaster information and resources during disaster response?

Ecologies of inequity, the spatialized networks of urban spaces, organizations, managers, volunteers, and staff, shape the chances of receiving timely access to disaster resources. These disaster response ecologies configure relational inequities that span the nested structures. In order to trace the emergence of ecologies of inequity, we need to simultaneously examine both networking and racializing processes across the levels of urban spaces, organizations, and communities (see figure 2). In the following section I describe how each of these levels contributes to the formation of ecologies of inequity.

Racializing Urban Spaces

At the macro level, the boundaries inscribed in urban space make visible the racial and class hierarchy in the local context. This can be in the form of physical structures and infrastructure that restrict residency and movement of certain classes of residents (Blumer 1958; Bobo and Hutchings 1996). We see how racial hierarchy can be inscribed in space, by understanding that notions of racial difference are tied to a sense of group position relative to others within a specific context (Blumer 1958; Bobo and Hutchings 1996). For these reasons, I capture the rank ordering of the local racial, ethnic, and class groups through the accounts of The Rockaway and Canarsie disaster survivors and responders.

Urban space also sets the stage upon which social categories of race and ethnicity are contested (Barth 1969; Lieberson 2000). Jonathan Rieder’s (1985) study of the territorializing of New York City informs my understanding of how urban space animates ethnic group relations (Sidanius and Pratto 1999). An analysis of the territorial nature of urban space is crucial for understanding the power relations, influence, and privilege wielded by community members within and across their residential clusters.

Racializing Organizations

Connecting the macro level to the meso-level, the race and class topography of urban spaces help structure the distribution (Gotham and Greenberg 2014) of disaster response organizations across disaster areas. Disaster response organizations are important actors in creating ecologies of inequity. Organizations are both racialized and racializing. On the first point, I draw on Victor Ray’s (2019) conceptualization of organizations as “meso-level racial structures” (31). They legitimate resource inequality across White and non-White organizations (27). Therefore, rather than assuming race neutrality, we should understand organizations as being White or non-White.

According to Ray (2019), White organizations are institutions that benefit from institutional support of White dominance. White organizations have large endowments of private resources that far outnumber the resources of Black and non-White organizations (Ray 2019; Wooten 2015; Frazier 1957). Organizational segregation also ensures that while Black people patronize White organizations in White spaces, the reverse is seldom true (Ray 2019; Baradaran 2017). On the second point, as racializing conduits, organizations accept, transform, and transmit external racializing logics of institutional fields and urban places and spaces.

I draw on an organizational capital inequality approach (Small 2009b) in the ethnographic design of this study. I also draw on Nan Lin’s (2001) conceptualization of social capital inequality as resulting from relational ties with contacts whose social capital stems from their unequal positioning within a status hierarchy. I integrate these perspectives to arrive at a conceptual framework that allows me to understand disaster response centers as high or low resource sites of interaction, information, and resource exchange. These are capable of forming social network/social capital ties both among embedded actors and among organizations themselves.

A more recent publication by Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Dustin Robert Avent-Holt (2019) confirms the importance of this relational interpretive framework for explaining how organizations help broker inequality. I further conceive of organizational sites as forming network ties with urban spaces and their communities. Drawing on Melissa Wooten and Andrew J. Hoffman’s (2016) theorizing of organizational fields, Daniel Bolger (2021) also argues that these organizations follow an institutional logic of place and space that orients toward their stakeholders within an organizational field, not just service recipients.

Bolger (2021), in his study of two faith-based organizations in Houston, Texas, finds that these neighborhood service organizations assign their target service community a “Brown” signifier to the exclusion of “Black” racial signifiers. This designation mimics the “safe” versus “unsafe” understanding of spaces (Bolger 2021; Gotham and Brumley 2002). Such designations allow these organizations to attract White donors and volunteers who live in nearby wealthier areas (Bolger 2021). I also draw on Ray’s (2019) discussion of racial segregation as a cultural schema, made real in its ability to restrict organizational resources from marginalized groups. These insights on organizations help explain why certain ecologies emerge in some urban disaster areas and not in others.

Racializing Networking Environments

Moving from the meso-level to the micro level, the racialized and classed access to organizations leads to unequal opportunities for networks and networking among disaster survivors and responders. Informal networks play a significant role in accessing disaster assistance. Social networks and their attendant resources, social capital, are crucial to bouncing back from the loss and harm associated with disasters (Picou, Marshal and Gill 2004; Aldrich 2012).

We know that during disasters informal networks link disaster survivors to housing, disaster aid, and psychological support (Dynes 2002; Fritz 1961). We also know that social networks help reduce inequities in the distribution of disaster aid (Barnshaw and Trainor 2010; Ritchie 2004; Peacock et al. 1997; Pelling 2003; Klinenberg 2004; Litt, Skinner, and Robinson 2012; Drabek and Key 1984). This means that if we want to make visible the pathways to disaster inequality, we need to analyze the loss, survival, and creation of social networks during disasters and disaster response.

Drawing on lessons from Hurricane Katrina, we see that the informal networks of Black women were an indispensable source of social support during the disaster. During the initial stages of Katrina, pre-disaster mutual aid among Black women morphed into evacuation networks that helped women flee the impending harm before Katrina (Litt 2012). Women provided and relied on “women-centered networks of care” that served as a source of emotional support (Weber and Peek 2012, 167). These social networks were especially important for economically deprived women who did not have the resources of middle-class women.

Pre-disaster networks, albeit vital, become fragile as a result of the disaster event. Research also shows that evacuation, long-term displacement, and depletion of needed physical resources erode the social networks of disaster survivors (Litt, Skinner, and Robinson 2012; Litt 2012; Elliott et al. 2010; Barnshaw and Trainor 2010; Barnshaw 2005: Peacock et al. 1997; Pelling 2003). For instance, Elliott et al. (2010) found that displacement compromised the capacity of disadvantaged lower ninth ward residents to “tap translocal ties.” Because we know that the State’s execution of evacuations disproportionately disrupted pre-disaster networks of urban economically deprived Black survivors, it is crucial that we examine the connection between governmental organizations and the social networks of survivors. We especially need to pay attention to the possible impact on the social networks of the racially minoritized and the economically deprived.

Social networks are important to disaster recovery, largely because they bridge the gap between disaster survivors and organization mediated disaster resources. In other words, social networks provide access to social capital. Social capital theory considers the role of familial and friendship ties and contacts as yielding expressive and psychosocial benefits, contrasted with the instrumental and material benefits linked by an NGO responder (Lin, Woelfel, and Light 1985; Granovetter 1973).

I adopt a network theory of social capital, which emphasizes the information and resources informally accessed and mobilized by individuals by virtue of their social ties (Lin 2001). A social capital-yielding tie is an interpersonal connection with an actor linked to resources through wealth, status, or high resource organizations (Lin 2001; Small 2009a). The social capital value of this connection hinges on conferring information or resources to a tie without a direct connection to such resources (Lin 2001; Bourdieu 1986).

In order to fully interpret the micro-level interpersonal relations, I also rely on the work of social psychologists who have pointed to less tangible aspects of interaction. Emotional and affective displays, meanings, and attachment in dyadic, group, and community relations mediate interactions (Lawler, Thye, and Yoon 2009). This perspective allows me to move beyond merely a transactional view of disaster assistance and examine the informational, resource, and affective exchanges among survivors and responders, who are the custodians of disaster resources in the context of disaster response.

My approach to social capital as a networking process, rather than a static characteristic of social ties in a social network, gives me leverage in ethnographically uncovering its role in the process of inequality. The status attainment branch of social capital theory has focused exclusively on quantitative studies of the utility of social capital in securing socioeconomic advantages (Lin, Ensel, and Vaughn 1981; Coleman 1990; Granovetter 1973). Research studying the utility of network social capital has also primarily focused on the role of high-status contacts on the outcomes of low-status job seekers in a competitive labor market. These studies tend to highlight the importance of informal job attainment strategies (Lin, Fu and Hsung 2001). I extend this conceptualization of social capital to seeking disaster assistance in an environment of scarcity.

Divergence in the process of social (network) capital across survivors and communities sheds light on the pathway to disaster inequality. Other relational processes may interrupt the relational process of social capital. Charles Tilly’s theory of durable inequalities (1999) informs my relational analysis of the reproduction of race and class inequality. According to Tilly (1999), beliefs, symbols, and practices are central to unequal distribution of resources across social groups. I extend this insight to investigating beliefs of responders and community members, symbolic meanings in narrative accounts, and practices of disaster response organizations.

Finally, we should understand these levels as nested structures that provide an opportunity to trace a longer process of inequality by connecting shorter mechanisms occurring at each level. More specifically, a network perspective of social capital has tremendous leverage for uncovering informational and resource inequities that span urban spaces, organizations, and social groups (Breiger 1974; Granovetter 1985; Lin 2000; Lin, Cook, and Burt 2001; Small 2009a).