It is widely held that emergency managers provide services to anyone affected by a crisis. This belief carries with it the expectation that emergency managers will put aside their personal biases and prejudices and provide necessary aid regardless of the status of the victims. However, reality often falls short of this laudable goal and research suggests that our current system is skewed against those most in need. In a time when equity and diversity are receiving increased attention a re-examination of how we provide services is long overdue.
The fault does not actually lie with emergency managers but has its roots in society at large. Stanford law professor Michele Landis Dauber has coined the phrase "moral blamelessness” to describe the bias that affects the provision of disaster relief. The concept of moral blamelessness suggests that victims must prove themselves worthy of relief before they can receive it. The corollary to this is that there are victims who are not worthy of relief.
The concept of moral blamelessness is evident almost since the beginning of government disaster relief services in the United States. In the early colonial days people who chose to settle on the frontier were considered unworthy of government compensation for damage from attacks by hostile tribes as they had chosen to put themselves at risk. Following the American Civil War, the use of the Freedman’s Bureau to provide famine relief to Southern States was strongly resisted in Congress because it was held that their act of rebellion disqualified them from any government assistance.
The situation has not changed. During the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, there was considerable discussion as to what to do with the large number of undocumented people who were affected by the disaster, particularly in the Watsonville area. Many of these victims were Hispanic migrant agricultural workers. The problem was twofold. Being undocumented, the victims were often unwilling to seek contact with any government agency, fearing deportation. Secondly, there were many in government who felt that people in the United States illegally should not be eligible for assistance. To its credit FEMA opted to provide the needed assistance.
While decisions about undocumented victims is an obvious issue, moral blamelessness can be much more subtle. Research by Dr Junia Howell suggests that disasters do not just reveal wealth inequity but in fact create it and that government relief is skewed against low-income minorities who need it the most. One of the principal causes is the inequity in housing appraisal of similar homes in different neighborhoods. While the root causes of this inequity are historical, the result is that some neighborhoods are considered “less worthy” than others and the lower property value affects the amount of assistance provided to the victims. This creates a situation in which government assistance increases wealth inequity in the area affected by the disaster and fails to provide relief to lower income and minority communities.
In many ways an emergency manager’s hands are tied when addressing this problem of inequity in disaster relief. They seldom make policy but are instead responsible for implementing it. But this is cold comfort when community outrage is focused on us, or lawsuits are brought against our communities. This is no longer a problem that local emergency managers and government officials can ignore but rather one in which we must serve as a catalyst for change. We don’t make policy, but we can influence it if we engage our community’s political infrastructure, mobilize community support, and work through our professional organizations.
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