The Other Side of the Diaspora: Race, Threat, and the Social Psychology of Evacuee Reception in Predominantly White Communities

Abstract

This article provides a social psychological framework for understanding the reception of Hurricane Katrina evacuees in predominantly White relocation communities. According to this framework, racial prejudice and perceptions of economic and social threat are likely to have an important influence on residents' reactions to the evacuees. In the "Katrina in my Community Study," the authors surveyed 532 residents from Colorado Springs, CO, Salt Lake City, UT, and San Antonio, TX-three cities that had African American populations well below the national average and that received large numbers of Katrina evacuees. The respondent's evaluations of and judgments about the evacuees, including overall attitudes and support for continued assistance, were explained to a greater extent by perceived threat and prejudice than by their actual experiences with the evacuees. Thus, at least in predominantly White communities, race and subjective feelings of threat may frame decisions about helping newcomers to a community, even when need is salient.

Attitudes Toward Mass Arrivals: Variations by Racial, Spatial, and Temporal Distances to Incoming Disaster Evacuees*

“…For example, in a study of three receiving cities with considerable white populations, Hunt et al. () found that racial distance and subjective feelings of threat informed overall attitudes toward evacuees. They concluded that prejudice in white communities may frame and limit help to nonwhite evacuees, even if need is apparent.…”

“…To make sense of this possibility, Hunt et al. () distinguish between symbolic threat and realistic threat in their study of receiving communities shortly after Katrina. Symbolic threat, they explain, challenges established residents’ general values and beliefs, whereas realistic threat challenges immediate, objective well‐being.…”

“…Symbolic threat, they explain, challenges established residents’ general values and beliefs, whereas realistic threat challenges immediate, objective well‐being. Regarding the latter, they found that “[c]ommunity members who viewed the evacuees as a source of competition for local resources (i.e., who scored high in realistic threat) had more negative attitudes toward the evacuees, believed that they had a more negative impact, and were less likely to support continued assistance” (Hunt et al., :442). Along these lines, it is quite possible that variation in evacuee reception might stem from different types of perceived threat.…”

“…On the other hand, newly arrived evacuees can also induce a sense of symbolic threat to existing values and beliefs as well as realistic threat to scarce social resources, generating negative or otherwise unwelcoming attitudes toward them. Sociological research offers expectations for both scenarios as well as for how they are likely to vary according to incumbents’ perceived social distance from the arriving group, most notably along lines of racial similarity and difference (Hunt et al., ). Yet, we contend that this type of social distance is not the only one operating in times of mass arrival and reception.…”