"So Poor and So Black": Hurricane Katrina, Public Administration, and the Issue of Race
Camilla Stivers. Public Administration Review. Washington: Dec 2007. Vol. 67 pg. 48, 9 pgs.
The Impartial Administration of Justice is the Foundation of Liberty.
- Inscription on the Orleans Parish Courthouse
You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals ...so many of these people... are so poor and they are so black.
- Wolf Blitzer, CNN, September 1, 2005
- Inscription on the Orleans Parish Courthouse
You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals ...so many of these people... are so poor and they are so black.
- Wolf Blitzer, CNN, September 1, 2005
[Note: I edited it down to its core points/arguments - highlighted them for your reading convenience]
This essay argues that the story of Hurricane Katrina suggests that racism may have shaped policy and bureaucratic decision making and magnified the death, destruction, and misery the storm produced. Images of desperate black New Orleanians juxtaposed with massive government failures raise, even for skeptical observers, issues of race and racism that must not be ignored. Clearly, racism is not the only potential source of government breakdown in the face of pressing need. The argument is not intended to be reductionist; it aims simply to introduce a neglected factor, worth pondering in a field whose track record on the issue is mediocre at best.
Racism as an Ideology
Racism is a loaded word and one not to be used lightly. Most American public administrators are white, and few, if any, would agree that they are racists. They would insist that they hold no personal animosity toward any person or group. The argument accepts this without question. It does not suggest that during Hurricane Katrina administrative actions were warped by deliberately malign intentions.
According to powell [sic] et al. (2006, 60), American thinking "requires there to be a racist actor in order for there to be a racist action." On the contrary, racism is as much systemic as it is individual. This does not mean, however, that we can dismiss concerns about individual responsibility. Shelby argues that racism is an ideology, an "illusory" system of belief that works to maintain "structures of social oppression" (2002, 415).
Throughout American history, the idea of race based on biological characteristics has set black people apart and justified their exploitation. The belief that members of a certain race are inherendy inferior-less intelligent, less ambitious-has rationalized discriminatory treatment as fitting, proper, and without evil intent.
Shelby argues that a society's racist beliefs can infiltrate an individual's viewpoint and lead him or her to actions that "perpetuate oppression ... whether or not they are performed with a racist heart" (2002, 419). Beliefs, therefore, can also infect official decision making. Over time, patterns of discriminatory treatment harden into structural differentiation, even after the legal basis for it has been removed.
For example, in his history of urban crisis, Sugrue (1996) notes that 20th-century white Americans widely assumed that African Americans were less intelligent than whites, fit for physical labor, lazy, sexually promiscuous, and prone to dependence. These beliefs produced and supported race-based policies and practices in urban renewal, welfare, public housing, and government-backed mortgage lending. Such policies put in place racial discrimination that persists despite the removal of official policy language.
The focus on racism parallels Adams and Balfour's (2004) discussion of "unmasking administrative evil." They draw attention to the ways in which technical rationality leads administrators to redefine evil as good, as when Nazi administrators took pride in the efficiency with which they carried out the so-called final solution to the Jewish question. Similarly, administrative practices can be infected with racism even though individual administrators do not bear conscious animus toward people of color. In this respect, racism, like administrative evil, is masked. The current essay stresses the extent to which racist beliefs, tacitly validated by surrounding administrative structures, led administrators to redefine appropriate action and, in particular, to renounce the exercise of discretion in favor of adhering to the letter of the law.
Critics of the government response to Katrina have pointed out that its differential impact was not a "natural" disaster but the almost inevitable result of race-based policies that had worked against African Americans over decades. Prior to Katrina, the black poverty rate in New Orleans was three times that of whites (Hartman and Squires 2006). "It is no accident that African Americans in New Orleans [were] disproportionately poor" and lived in areas of the city most vulnerable to storm damage (Strolovitch, Warren, and Frymer 2005, 2). As in other American cities, practices of racial segregation concentrated middle- and upper-income whites in outlying suburbs (in New Orleans, literally on higher ground) and blacks in the central city, where flooding was the worst (Hartman and Squires 2006). Conditions linked to past oppression played a major role in people's ability to evacuate: "[O]nly 17 percent of poor whites lacked access to a car, while nearly 60 percent of poor blacks did" (Lavelle and Feagin 2006, 7). As a Brookings Institution report puts it, "Blacks and whites were living in quite literally different worlds before the storm hit" (quoted in Hartman and Squires 2006, 3).The catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina cannot be understood without reflecting on the place of African Americans in American policy and administration.2
Katrina and Public Administration
At the end of 2006, scholarly analyses of governments' failed responses to Katrina focused on issues identified by Congress and the White House: communications breakdowns; information gaps; lack of coordination across agencies, between levels of government, and between government and the private sector; failure to initiate action; and management failures (Ink 2006; Jenkins 2006; Menzel 2006; Schneider 2005; Wise 2006).3 These well-informed analyses caution against relying too heavily on restructuring and reorganizing as remedies for what happened. For example, Ink notes,
I have a deep concern that many of the recommendations would move our response and recovery machinery toward an organizational structure and response mechanism that is overly complex... . n a disaster, imaginative people can work far outside the box in a way we would not otherwise accept. I fear the current trend, as reflected in the White House report, is to build more boxes within which people are constrained to operate. (2006, 802, 806)
This perspective reflect a long-standing theory-in-use in public administration: No amount of structure-laws, regulations, protocols, plans, chains of command, interagency agreements, or contracts-will get governments to do what the public wants them to do without the wisdom, good judgment, imagination, initiative, commitment, responsiveness, and skillful interaction of public servants. Administrators cannot be made to do what the people want them to do. Laws, plans, and chains of command provide crucial guidance, but none is so unambiguous that there is no room for interpretation. Ultimately, we have to trust (and verify) that administrators will do the right thing as best they can figure it out. The problem, as indicated earlier, is that scholars take for granted that public servants are able to set aside their prejudices, biases, and emotions and to act as "men of reason."
Thus, the workings of government-its "performance," to use the current buzzword-hang on an element that can be influenced but not controlled: personal and interpersonal interpretation and action. Two pillars in the literature document this amply and persuasively: Michael Lipsky's Street-Level Bureaucracy (1980) and Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno's Cops, Teachers, Counselors (2003).
Lipsky observes that frontline workers are significant because their decisions have a direct impact on the lives of their clients and because they "make policy.... [Their] policy-making roles ... are built upon ... relatively high degrees of discretion and relative autonomy from organizational authority" (1980, 13). Public managers depend heavily on the performance of frontline employees without being able to intervene decisively in the work itself.
Maynard-Moody and Musheno's research documents the practical texture of street-level discretion. The work stories of police officers, teachers, and vocational rehabilitation counselors reveal moral judgments that sort clients into three categories: those worthy of extraordinary help, those who get what the rules say and no more, and those who get no help. Are they hardworking and responsible, striving to overcome their circumstances? Are they in the fix they're in through no fault of their own? These judgments are in constant tension with the law, which sets out objective guidelines for how clients are to be assessed and treated.
Maynard-Moody and Musheno argue that much of the public administration literature focuses on how to constrain street-level workers' judgments by means of stricter rules and tighter supervision. They note,
This is especially true during a crisis.... [W]hen discretion leads to scandal or public concern, the inexorable response is to enhance bureaucratic control. In the aftermath of the Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King, more and more police cars have video cameras installed to increase supervision. Police abuse in New York City has led to new guidelines for interacting with the public, even including pocket-sized script cards to prompt good manners. (2003, 13-14)
Both books suggest that racism plays a part in the discretionary judgments of frontline workers, but Lipsky is more pointed. He argues that major influences include (1) prevailing beliefs about the poor, such as "the deep conviction that poor people at some level are responsible for the conditions in which they find themselves," and (2) racism, which "affects the extent to which public employees regard clients as worthy" (1980, 181-82). Lipsky argues that street-level decisions reflect conflicting tendencies in American society. On one hand, the bureaucrat's job is to lighten the burden imposed by a capitalist economy that inevitably leaves some people at the bottom; on the other hand, American ideology relies on the belief that people who are at the bottom are there because of some character flaw or inherent inability.4
In sum, public administration relies heavily on the wise and unbiased exercise of discretion, yet there is considerable evidence not only that judgment is often exercised according to the personal morality of the individual bureaucrat but also that, when examined more broadly, there is a pattern to such judgments that is biased against African Americans and the poor.
In the Katrina story, a puzzling aspect is the bureaucratic lack of initiative (at all levels, not just the front line): the failure to step outside the rules and act to save lives and to succor those in dire need. This pattern is mysterious in light of a strong theme in the literature on discretion: that, on balance, it is an asset rather than a problem. The "legitimacy" literature has argued that, by and large, public administrators follow their own and their agencies' sense of the broadest public interest (see, e.g., Wamsley et al. 1990; Wamsley and Wolf 1996). The events of Katrina suggest a need to probe the extent to which, and the circumstances under which, personal judgments might be skewed by race bias. In this instance, many decided to adhere strictly to bureaucratic rules. They decided to toe the line rather than help those in need. In New Orleans, those in need were disproportionately African American.
Where Do We Go from Here?
In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., said that "genuine integration will come when men are obedient to the unenforceable." He believed that laws and vigorous enforcement were crucial; but a large part of what is necessary to bridge the racial divide cannot be codified in law. It must be "written on the heart." Something must touch people so that they come together in "the conviction that all men are brothers" (King 1968, 100-101).
In public administration, we must end our avoidance of the part that racism plays in hampering effective public service. King's call for obedience to the unenforceable is virtually identical to the notion that is advanced in public administration classes and professional societies across the country: Administrators must use their best judgment together with their sharpest technical skills and deepest sense of what the law demands-the best mind joined with the best heart. This notion is, like racial integration, an unenforceable obligation, and one that cannot be solved by diversity or preparedness training.
We have supposed that the cure for bureaupathology is to hollow out the state and run government like a business. The Katrina story suggests there is more to it. Martin Luther King called white people to empathize with African Americans. Cornel West (1993) has said the challenge for America is "learning to talk of race." Can the public administration community learn to do this? The time is now.
[If people are interested in the full article, I can post it.]
