Katrina's Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America

4. The Ship of State: Framing an Understanding of Federalism and the Perfect Disaster

The first images from New Orleans of African Americans stranded on highway overpasses and rooftops waiting to be rescued, and of black bodies decaying in filthy water below them, suggested that historic and structural racism had produced vulnerability by devaluing lives and devaluing a city. This initial story, discussed in detail in this part of the book, also suggested that Hurricane Katrina could happen in other places in America where structural racism has produced similar inequitable settlement patterns. But media images correlating race, class, and vulnerability could not, by themselves, reveal why government institutions that have no obvious relationship to race made these horrors possible . This chapter weaves the problem of race and structural racism into a broader discussion of federalism, arguing that the incrementalism that is characteristic of federalism in the United States produced inaction and confusion at all levels of government during and after Hurricane Katrina. As other chapters in this section of the book demonstrate, incrementalism, as applied to policies on infrastructure, economic development, health, and transportation, meant that some suffered horrifically because they were unable to evacuate or to receive prompt aid, and that many have been unable to recover economically since then. The hallmarks of American federalism are (1) multiple jurisdictions with overlapping authority and control and (2) incremental policymaking. Policymaking is often driven by limited information, scarce resources, and selfinterest on the part of organizations and individuals inside and outside the government who are pressing for or against policy change. The system is not set up to manage long-term ecological and social challenges. Keith Wailoo’s chapter on dialysis patients in the wake of Hurricane Katrina provides a pointed example of this, showing how some diseases have been singled out for incremental policies, rather than being addressed in a comprehensive national 45 4 VVVVVVVVVVV The Ship of State Framing an Understanding of Federalism and the Perfect Disaster ROLAND ANGLIN ROLAND ANGLIN 46 health policy. In this case, dialysis received exceptionally generous funding from the federal government because the prospect of poor patients dying for lack of government-guaranteed treatment became politically defined as unacceptable. While the preceding chapters in this section describe how long-term environmental and transportation policies, among others, created a range of social inequalities and how those inequalities have made some populations more susceptible to a disaster, the examination of federalism, herein, argues/ demonstrates that even competent and nonracist officials could not, and perhaps cannot, compensate for the effects of large-scale social problems like inequality, poverty, and segregation. Our government, in part owing to the structural attributes of federalism, cannot respond quickly and effectively to the vulnerabilities that inequality, poverty, and social isolation have created, and which William Rodgers outlines in his later chapter. Viewing vulnerability in this light forces us to reexamine our thinking about what government can and cannot do to protect the American public. Forensic analyses characterize Katrina as a “perfect disaster.” As the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs observes in Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared, the suffering that continued in the days and weeks after the storm passed did not happen in a vacuum; instead, it continued longer than it should have because of—and was in some cases exacerbated by—the failure of government at all levels to plan, prepare for, and respond aggressively to the storm. These failures were not just conspicuous; they were pervasive . Among the many factors that contributed to these failures, the Committee found that there were four overarching ones: 1. Long-term warnings went unheeded and government officials neglected their duties to prepare for a forewarned catastrophe; 2. Government officials took insufficient actions or made poor decisions in the days immediately before and after landfall; 3. Systems on which officials relied to support their response efforts failed; and 4. Government officials at all levels failed to provide effective leadership. These individual failures, moreover, occurred against a backdrop of failure, over time, to develop the capacity for a coordinated, national response to a truly catastrophic event, whether caused by nature or man-made.1 Failures occurred along the fault lines of the federal system. Indeed, I would argue that the system was designed to be flexible and to disperse duties across many government agencies, and it performed accordingly. THE SHIP OF STATE 47 This Senate report fixes on nonstructural variables that policymakers might manipulate: lack of...