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Were
whites really more likely than blacks to die in Katrina?
A
re-analysis of data on race and the casualties of Hurricane Katrina
By Pat Sharkey In the months since Katrina swept through New
Orleans, conservatives have been on a mission to convince us
that our initial impressions were wrong, that the hurricane had
nothing at all to do with race.
This effort to deny a link between race and Hurricane
Katrina gained steam with the release of a recent report
claiming that whites, not African-Americans, seem to have been
disproportionately likely to die in Hurricane Katrina.
The report, conducted by staff from Knight
Ridder Newspapers, appears to show that blacks represented only
a slight majority of those who died in the storm, despite the
fact that they comprise a substantial majority of the population
in the areas hit hardest by Katrina.
This finding compelled one columnist to write that
suggestions of a link between race and the effects of Hurricane
Katrina are driven by nothing more than “racial
paranoia.”
The problem with these claims is that they
are based on an analysis of the data that is seriously flawed.
After re-analyzing the data, I find that
African-Americans died in numbers that equaled or exceeded what
would be expected given their population and age distribution in
the affected parishes. (The full
report is available at www.newvisioninstitute.org.)
This becomes apparent when one considers two
essential factors that are overlooked by the Knight Ridder
analysis: 1) old age is the single most important factor in
determining who fell victim to Katrina; and 2) the white
populations in the affected areas contain a much larger share of
the region’s elderly than the corresponding black populations.
Put simply, the elderly were much more likely
to die in Katrina, and whites living in the areas hit hardest
were much more likely to be elderly than blacks.
When one takes into account the size of the elderly
population of whites and blacks in the three parishes hit
hardest by Katrina, it becomes clear that whites were actually
under-represented among Katrina’s casualties.
Specifically, I find that the actual number
of white deaths in each of the three parishes is lower than
would be expected based on the size and age of the white
population in the affected areas; by contrast, the actual number
of black deaths is larger than would be expected.
Thus, the impression that this storm took the
largest toll on New Orleans’ black population appears to be
validated empirically. And
while race is clearly not the only story here, these findings
confirm that it is deeply implicated in this and every aspect of
the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.
When Katrina swept through New Orleans, it exposed the
hidden racial inequalities that characterize urban America.
Americans saw with their own eyes what urban
scholars have long known: relative to whites of similar
socio-economic status, racial and ethnic minorities live in
communities that are severely disadvantaged.
These communities have fewer economic opportunities and
less political influence, they are poorer and more violent, and
they are more vulnerable to a disaster such as Hurricane
Katrina.
By recognizing Katrina as both a social and a
natural disaster, we reinforce the role that public policy can
play before a disaster occurs.
In particular, policies designed to de-concentrate
poverty and create viable, safe communities have the potential
to mitigate the vulnerability of any single population to the
dangers of a tragedy such as Katrina.
On the other hand, if conservatives are
successful in denying the importance of race and portraying
Katrina as a random, purely “natural” disaster, it becomes
much easier to ignore the needs of the black population that was
disproportionately impacted by Katrina, to leave their
neighborhoods in rubble and to forget that they ever were a part
of the city.
* *
* * *
Pat Sharkey is a doctoral student in
Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University.
He is also a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary
Program in Inequality and Social Policy. His
research examines the stratification of urban neighborhoods by
race, and the consequences of residential stratification for
youth development.
posted 20 February 2006 |
