Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T12:05:21.736Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

RACIAL APATHY AND HURRICANE KATRINA: The Social Anatomy of Prejudice in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2006

Tyrone A. Forman  and
Amanda E. Lewis
Tyrone A. Forman
Affiliation:
Department of African American Studies and Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago
Amanda E. Lewis
Affiliation:
Department of African American Studies and Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

During the crisis that followed Hurricane Katrina, many Americans expressed surprise at the dramatic levels of racial inequality captured in the images of large numbers of poor Black people left behind in devastated New Orleans. In this article we argue that, to better understand both the parameters of contemporary racial inequality reflected in the hurricane's aftermath and why so many were surprised about the social realities of racial inequality that social scientists have known about for decades, it is essential to recognize the shifting nature of Whites' racial attitudes and understandings. There is widespread evidence that in the post-civil rights era the expression of White racial prejudice has changed. In fact, during the post-civil rights era subtle and indirect forms of prejudice have become more central to the sustenance and perpetuation of racial inequality than are overt forms of prejudice. We draw on both survey and qualitative data to investigate current manifestations of White racial attitudes and prejudices. Our results indicate that racial apathy, indifference towards racial and ethnic inequality, is a relatively new but expanding form of racial prejudice. We further show that Whites' systematic “not knowing” about racial inequality (White ignorance), which was manifest in the reaction to the crises after Hurricane Katrina, is related to this racial indifference. Racial apathy and White ignorance (i.e., not caring and not knowing) are extensions of hegemonic color-blind discourses (i.e., not seeing race). These phenomena serve as pillars of contemporary racial inequality that have until now received little attention. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and the practical implications of our results for understanding racial dynamics in the post-Katrina United States.

Keywords

Racial ApathyHurricane KatrinaRacial AttitudesPrejudiceRacismColor-blind
Type
STATE OF THE ART
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 175 - 202
Copyright
© 2006 W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This research was partially supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-0317740). We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of several seminar participants at Brown University and Duke University.

References

REFERENCES

Almaguer, Tomas (1994). Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Alter, Jonathan (2005). The Other America. Newsweek, September 19. 〈http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287641/site/newsweek〉 (accessed February 18, 2006).
AAPOR (2004). Standard Definitions: Final dispositions of case codes and outcome rates for surveys. 3ed. Lenexa, KS: American Association for Public Opinion Research.
Bachman, Jerald, Johnston Lloyd, and Patrick O'Malley (1996). The Monitoring the Future Project after Twenty-two Years: Design and Procedures. Monitoring the Future Occasional Paper 38. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research.
Bar-Tal, Daniel (1990). Causes and consequences of delegitimization: Models of conflict and ethnocentrism. Journal of Social Issues, 46(1): 65–81.Google Scholar
Bartky, Sandra Lee (2002). Sympathy and Solidarity and Other Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Berinsky, Adam (1999). The two faces of public opinion. American Journal of Political Science, 43(4): 1209–1230.Google Scholar
Berinsky, Adam (2002). Political context and the survey response: The dynamics of racial policy opinion. Journal of Politics, 64(2): 567–584.Google Scholar
Billiet, Jaak, Michael Philippens, Rory Fitzgerald, and Ineke Stoop (2006). Estimation of response bias in the European Social Survey: Using information from reluctant respondents in round one. Unpublished Manuscript, Department of Sociology, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.
Blumer, Herbert (1958). Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position. Pacific Sociological Review, 1: 3–7.Google Scholar
Bobo, Lawrence (1999). Prejudice as group position: Microfoundations of a sociological approach to racism and race relations. Journal of Social Issues, 55(3): 445–472.Google Scholar
Bobo, Lawrence (2004). Inequalities that Endure? Racial Ideology, American Politics, and the Peculiar Role of the Social Sciences. In Maria Krysan and Amanda E. Lewis (Eds.), Changing Terrain of Race & Ethnicity, pp. 13–42. New York: Russell Sage.
Bobo, Lawrence, James Kluegel, and Ryan Smith (1997). Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology. In Stephen Tuch and Jack Martin (Eds.), Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change, pp. 15–44. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Bobo, Lawrence and Mia Tuan (2006). Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (2001). White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (2003). Racism without Racists. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo and Tyrone Forman (2000). I'm not a racist, but … : Mapping white college students' racial ideology in the USA. Discourse & Society, 11(1): 50–85.Google Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, Tyrone A. Forman, Amanda E. Lewis, and David Embrick (2003). It wasn't me!: How will Race and Racism work in 21st Century America. Research in Political Sociology, 12: 111–134.Google Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, Amanda E. Lewis, and David Embrick (2004). “I did not get that job because of a black man…”: Storylines and Testimonies of Color Blind Racism. Sociological Forum, 19(4): 555–581.Google Scholar
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). 347 U.S. 483.
Brown, Rupert (1995). Prejudice: Its Social Psychology. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Butler, Judith (1997). The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Carr, Leslie (1997). Color-Blind Racism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Chesler, Mark (1976). Contemporary Sociological Theories of Racism. In Phyllis Katz (Ed.), Towards the Elimination of Racism, pp. 21–71. New York, NY: Pergamon Press.
Dollard, John (1937). Caste and Class in a Southern Town. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Dovidio, John (2001). On the Nature of Contemporary Prejudice. Journal of Social Issues, 57(4): 829–849.Google Scholar
Dovidio, John and Samuel Gaertner (2000). Aversive racism and selection decisions: 1989 and 1999. Psychological Science, 11(4): 319–323.Google Scholar
Feagin, Joe R. (2001). Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. New York: Routledge.
Fine, Michelle and Lois Weis (1998). Unknown City. Boston, MA: Beacon Books.
Forman, Tyrone A. (2001). Social Determinants of White Youths' Racial Attitudes. Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, 8: 173–207.Google Scholar
Forman, Tyrone A. (2004). Color-Blind Racism and Racial Indifference: The role of Racial Apathy in Facilitating Enduring Inequalities. In Maria Krysan and Amanda E. Lewis (Eds.), Changing Terrain of Race & Ethnicity, pp. 43–66. New York: Russell Sage.
Fredrickson, George (2002). Racism: A short history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gabe, Thomas, Gene Falk, Maggie McCarty, and Virgina Mason (2005). Hurricane Katrina: Social-Demographic Characteristics of Impacted Areas. November 4. Congressional Research Service. Washington, DC: The Library of Congress.
Gallagher, Charles (2003). Color-blind Privilege: The social and political functions of erasing the color line in Post Race America. Race, Gender, and Class, 10(4): 1–17.Google Scholar
Goldberg, David Theo (2006a). Racial Europeanization. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29(2): 331–364.Google Scholar
Goldberg, David Theo (2006b). The Global Reach of Raceless States. In Donaldo Macedo and Panayota Gounari (Eds.), The Globalization of Racism, pp. 45–67. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Gonzalez, David (2005). From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy. New York Times, September 2, A1. 〈http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/national/nationalspecial/〉 (accessed September 2, 2005).
Harding, John, Harold Proshansky, Bernard Kutner, and Isidor Chein (1969). Prejudice and Ethnic Relations. In Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology, Volume 5, pp. 1–76. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing.
Hodson, Gordon, John Dovidio, and Samuel Gaertner (2002). Processes in racial discrimination: Differential weighting of conflicting information. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(4): 460–471.Google Scholar
Katz, Daniel (1960). The functional approach to the study of attitudes. Public Opinion Quarterly, 24(2): 163–204.Google Scholar
Katz, Michael (1990). The Undeserving Poor. New York: Pantheon.
Katznelson, Ira (2005). When Affirmative Action was White. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Kelley, Robin D. G. (1998). Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Kenny, Lorraine D. (2000). Daughters of Suburbia: Growing up white, middle class, and female. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1963). Why we can't wait. New York, NY: Mentor Book.
Kingsley, G. Thomas and Kathryn L. S. Pettit (2003). Concentrated Poverty: A Change in Course. Neighborhood Change in Urban America Series, Paper No. 2. Washington, DC: Urban Institute. 〈http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=310790〉 (accessed January 20, 2006).
Kish, Leslie (1965). Survey Sampling. New York, NY: Wiley.
Kozol, Jonathon (1991). Savage Inequalities. New York: Harper Perennial.
Lehtonen, Risto and Erkki J. Pahkinen (1995). Practical methods for design and analysis of complex surveys. New York, NY: Wiley.
Lewis, Amanda E. (2001). There is No “Race” in the Schoolyard: Color-blind Ideology in an (Almost) All White School. American Educational Research Journal, 38(4): 781–812.Google Scholar
Lewis, Amanda E. (2003). Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the color line in classrooms and communities. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Lewis, Amanda E. (2004). What Group?: Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of Colorblindness. Sociological Theory, 22(4): 623–646.Google Scholar
Lewis, Amanda E., Mark Chesler, and Tyrone Forman (2000). The impact of color-blind ideologies on students of color: Intergroup relations at a predominantly white university. Journal of Negro Education, 69(1/2): 74–91.Google Scholar
Lippman, Walter (1922). Public opinion. New York, NY: Macmillan Company.
Loewen, James (1996). Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone.
Loury, Glenn (2002). The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Massey, Douglas and Nancy Denton (1994). American Apartheid. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McKinney, Karyn D. (2004). Being White. New York, NY: Routledge.
Mills, Charles (1997). The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mills, Charles (2000). Race and the social contract tradition. Social Identities, 6(4): 441–462.Google Scholar
Mills, Charles (2006). White Ignorance. Unpublished Manuscript, Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Myers, Kristen and Passion Williamson (2001). Race talk: The perpetuation of racism through private discourse. Race & Society, 4(1): 3–26.Google Scholar
Myrdal, Gunnar (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers.
New Orleans Times Picayune (2002). Washing Away. Five-Part Series published June 23–27, 2002. 〈http://www.nola.com/hurricane/?/washingaway/〉 (accessed February 16, 2006).
Obama, Barack (2005). Statement of Senator Barack Obama on Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts. 〈http://obama.senate.gov/statement/050906statement_of_senator_barack_obama_on_hurricane_katrina_relief_efforts〉 (accessed October 15, 2005).
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant (1994). Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960's to the 1990's, 2ed. New York: Routledge.
Orfield, Gary and Nora Gordon (2001). Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation. The Civil Rights Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
Orfield, Gary and John T Yun (1999). Resegregation in American Schools. The Civil Rights Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
Payne, Charles (1984). Getting What We Ask For. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Perry, Pamela (2002). Shades of White. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Pettigrew, Thomas (1979). The ultimate attribution error: Extending Allport's cognitive analysis of prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 5(4): 461–476.Google Scholar
Pettigrew, Thomas (1980). Prejudice. In Stephen Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin (Eds.), Dimensions of ethnicity: Prejudice, pp. 1–29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pettigrew, Thomas and Roel Meertens (1995). Subtle and blatant prejudice in Western Europe. European Journal of Social Psychology, 25: 57–75.Google Scholar
Rieder, Jonathan (1985). Canarsie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Saenz, Rogelio (2005). Beyond New Orleans: The social and economic isolation of urban African Americans. Population Reference Bureau. 〈http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=PRB&template≠Content/ContentGroups/05_Articles/The_Social_and_Economic_Isolation_of_Urban_African_Americans.htm〉 (accessed October 26, 2005).
Sears, David and P. J. Henry (2003). The origins of symbolic racism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2): 259–275.Google Scholar
Shenkman, Richard (1992). Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History. New York: Harper.
Sue, Derald Wing (2005). Racism and the conspiracy of silence. The Counseling Psychologist, 33(1): 100–114.Google Scholar
Sugrue, Thomas (1996). The Origins of the Urban Crisis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Takaki, Ronald (1993). A Different Mirror. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.
U.S. Bureau of the Census (2006). Statistical Abstract of the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.