Racial Attitudes and Views of Disaster

As disasters become more frequent and costly, understanding attitudes toward government disaster policy becomes critically important. Scholars have explored the racialized nature of specific disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. But studies of general disaster policy preferences have not attended much to race, focusing instead on dimensions like partisanship and perceived deservingness. We use two original national surveys to assess the role of racial attitudes and ethnoracial identification on support for disaster spending. We find that racial attitudes are among the most powerful predictors of disaster spending preferences. They also strongly condition support for racially-targeted reasons justifying disaster spending. We also find that support for disaster spending is highest among Black Americans and lowest among Whites. Racial attitudes account for much of this racial gap, and strongly predict preferences even with controls for political attitudes, experience with disaster, and demographics. Our findings hold across question wordings and time. Racial attitudes are important in understanding general preferences about disaster policy, beyond responses to the specific racialized disasters on which scholars of race and disaster have focused.