CHAPTER 6

A Crisis of Trust: Race, Policing, and Emergency Management in the United States

Rashawn Ray, Monica Sanders, and Scott Gabriel Knowles

In May 2020, the runaway spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States provoked the Trump administration to name the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as the lead agency in charge of coordinating the federal response. Just over a week later, George Floyd—himself a COVID sufferer—was murdered by a policeman in Minneapolis, and the Black Lives Matter movement rose up, with millions of people in America and around the world demanding a long overdue reckoning for the structural racism built into law enforcement. With a pandemic raging and protestors in the streets, all Americans were shown what African Americans have known for a very long time, that disaster is an engine of inequality. The conjunction of these two events has been treated as unconnected, but deep connections exist. The very structures of racism that define what constitutes public safety are not separable from disaster preparedness or disaster recovery in the United States. This chapter brings together into the same frame an analysis of structural racism in disaster preparedness and policing. Sometimes the violence lasts for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, and at other times the violence persists across generations in communities living with poor infrastructure and limited access to capital.

Modern emergency management in the United States owes its origin to the Cold War. This was a time when civil defense officials across the United States were actively planning for nuclear disasters—laying up supplies, training volunteers, and writing plans for the continuity of life after massive death. When FEMA was created in 1979, a descendant of Cold War disaster planning efforts, it was tasked with also preparing for all of the normal disasters that were happening, such as floods, fires, and nuclear accidents. One consistent theme—or missing theme, we might say—of all of the volumes of Cold War planning was any discussion of racial inequality. This inattention to the reality of American racism before and throughout the 1960s–1970s civil rights movement leaves a persistent lack of diversity in the profession of emergency management. It also leaves a legacy of structural racism in the ways that emergency preparedness and responses unfold, especially in racist patterns of relief payment disbursements.

It has long been documented that renters and communities of color are at higher risk for disproportionate disaster harms. FEMA has been cited in recent years for overseeing unequal disbursements of postdisaster relief funds as well.1 A 2020 internal FEMA study is revelatory. At that time the agency had begun to scrutinize its own reports of bias in the workplace and in the disaster zone and to assess its legacy of inequality in recovery funds. But the report is also a warning as to the limits of this reflexivity. The report confesses that “while it is not the role of FEMA to dismantle a series of systems that cause inequity, it is within the role of FEMA to recognize these inequities (and the disparities caused by them) and ensure that existing or new FEMA programs, policies, and practices do not exacerbate them.”2 In other words, FEMA may work toward “equity” going forward, but there can be no looking back. Historians of race, policing, and disaster know that there is no postdisaster future without understanding the deep structures of racism in lending, zoning, housing, environmental protection, and policing. To build trust going forward, we must be empowered to look back as well.

Police Violence as a Socially Induced Disaster

Historically and currently, an overwhelming majority of predominantly Black, low-income communities are plagued with what some scholars, such as Joseph Richardson Jr., call “structural violence.”3 Violence and harm that persists over time, punctuated by specific moments of terror, overwhelming society’s ability to address the underlying causes—is a workable definition of “disaster.” Structural violence highlights how the normal functioning of societal institutions benefits some while perpetuating violence against minority groups. Disasters often lead to violence, and some neighborhoods are what many might consider a disaster zone. It is the structural decay of neighborhoods that lead to some people living in normalized, socially induced disasters. It is long past time to stop segregating disaster studies from research into structural racism.

The literature on systemic racism documents how communities that face more severe heat waves, flood destruction, and pollutants are the same neighborhoods exposed to violent crime and overpolicing.4 Lead exposure lowers cognitive development among children. A higher indoor temperature is related to lower standardized test scores and more exposure to violent crime.5 Less regulated indoor temperatures lead people to spend less time indoors and more time outdoors, which increases their exposure to violent crime. In densely populated areas, engagement in public space can lead to more police contact and exposure to profiling.

Many predominantly Black low-income neighborhoods are simultaneously plagued with over- and underpolicing. Regarding overpolicing, Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people.6 Troublingly, the racial gap in police killings actually increases when factoring in whether someone was attacking or had a weapon.7 Moreover, Black people are even more likely to be killed by police when they do not have a weapon and are not attacking. For Black male teenagers, they are twenty-one times more likely than white male teenagers to be killed by police. Black men, specifically, have a one in one thousand chance of being killed by police.8 Research documents that explicit and implicit racial bias contribute to these racial disparities. Police violence is indeed a crisis. It is structural violence and a form of a societal and socially induced disaster.

In addition to police killings, people in predominantly Black neighborhoods experience “trickledown policing” and the “illness spillovers” of police violence.9 Black boys and men are more likely to be surveilled, stopped, questioned, frisked, and brutalized by police. At the height of stop-and-frisk policies in New York City in 2011, the New York Civil Liberties Union found that Black males constituted over 50 percent of the nearly seven hundred thousand stops.10 Force was used in a high number of these stops. However, contraband was found in only 2 percent of these stops, and less than 10 percent of the people stopped were ultimately arrested (mostly for resisting arrest). In 2020, Washington, D.C., had a similar pattern.11 Black people represented over 90 percent of the individuals stopped by the police where force was used and no one was ultimately arrested. And even for people who are not brutalized by police, living in neighborhoods with overpolicing impacts their health. Men report worse mental health outcomes, such as depression and anxiety, while women report worse physical health outcomes, such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.

Regarding underpolicing, violent crime is less likely to be solved. Across the United States, nearly 40 percent of murders go unsolved every year.12 This is coupled with other forms of violent crime with low solve rates (or what police call clearance rates). Nearly 50 percent of aggravated assaults, 70 percent of robberies, and two-thirds of rapes go unsolved every year. The unsolved rate is even higher in low-income neighborhoods. This is not only because people are less likely to trust the police and participate in investigations (partly because they do not think police can protect them when providing information) but also because resources are less likely to be funneled to these communities to solve violent crime.

Additionally, response times are slower for ambulatory and emergency services in predominantly Black neighborhoods.13 This means that when a health crises or emergency related to fires, floods, or other natural disasters occurs, Black neighborhoods normally receive less resources. For example, in Washington, D.C., in 2014, seventy-seven-year-old Medric Cecil Mills Jr. died of a heart attack after his daughter ran across the street from his home to a fire station, only to be turned away because the fire station said she did not call 911.14 It took twenty minutes for ambulatory services to arrive only after a police officer flagged down an ambulance. Mills had worked for the city in parks and planning for over four decades.

Geographic location also matters in exposure to disasters. Because of racial segregation and the historical legacy of redlining, restrictive covenants, and Jim Crow laws, Black neighborhoods are normally closer to landfills, sewage, and land that is more exposed to hurricanes and flooding. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, Louisiana. However, it was the predominantly Black Lower Ninth Ward that was most exposed to flooding and winds. Many people lost their homes, and some neighborhoods still have not fully recovered. Hurricane Katrina is the costliest and one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history.

In St. Louis, Missouri, the Delmar Divide is named after a street that literally separates Black St. Louis from white St. Louis. St. Louis has one of the starkest income disparities between Blacks and whites in the United States. Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb within St. Louis County, is where eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was killed by former police officer Darren Wilson. Brown’s body was left in the street for hours. His death is largely credited with sparking the Black Lives Matter movement.

Altogether, police violence as well as the lack of timely first responder support contributes to the socially induced disasters of marginalized communities. Police officers and politicians talk a lot about the importance of trust to build better police-community relations. In the vein of James Baldwin, “I cannot believe what you say because I see what you do.”15 Media soundbites fall short when the collective memories of over- and underpolicing lead to disastrous outcomes for people living in predominantly Black low-income neighborhoods. Trust must be earned, and to earn that trust, transparency, accountability, and equity must be prioritized. It begins with grappling with the realities of structural violence and the way these realities increase the likelihood of disasters continuing to disproportionately ravage the lives of marginalized groups.

Over- and underpolicing, disparities in response, and inequity of service are not issues unique to law enforcement. Nor are they bygone vestiges of the emergency management profession’s past. All are intertwined but not inextricably. Where there is intention to create structures, there can be intention to dismantle them. One place to start is understanding that emergency management’s roots in civil defense have a way of leaning too much on the defensive side, even taking a security focus or threat-response approach. That is not accidental. In addition to the profession’s historical roots, many of those in the profession come from a law enforcement or military background. Combine these elements with the fact that the lead agency on emergency management in the United States, FEMA, is nestled within the Department of Homeland Security, a counterterrorism and law enforcement organization, and you have a firm foundation for inequity and disparate responses rooted in prioritizing threat analysis over community service.

Uncivil Defense

Disaster relief funding in the United States was always handled on an ad hoc basis through congressional action before a raft of legislation began to create what we see now as the modern emergency management administrative system after World War II.16 Unsurprisingly, this haphazard approach to federal care benefited those with the political power to demand it, leaving minoritized communities largely to fend for themselves and rely on scant charity and mutual aid. US federal civil defense planning in the early Cold War marked the first time that systematic planning for disaster was funded and executed with a national point of view. Volume after volume of plans filled the shelves of civil defense offices in Washington, D.C., and in state capitols and city halls across the nation. The threat was conceptualized as external, and the goal was survival and victory in war. With these three concepts at work, planning emphasized surveillance, shelter, stockpiling necessities, and planning for the continuity of key infrastructure and governance functions such as water, electricity, and, above all, policing. Making time to build history and social context into their plans was a luxury that the civil defense planners could not or would not afford themselves. The result was that by the early 1950s the United States was girded for nuclear war, prepared with plans that bore little connection to the real lives of the Americans whom civil defense was created to protect. And in no way was this more demonstrable than the lack of understanding that the United States was a segregated nation—North and South—suffering under the weight of racist structures in every corner of institutional life.

Early civil defense planners adopted a sheltering strategy, theoretically keeping citizens close to home and safe underground while fire and radiation destroyed their cities. These citizen warriors would emerge unscathed and get back quickly to the business of winning World War III. On paper this made sense, but how would such a system work in segregated cities, especially in states that held dearly to Jim Crow segregation in public facilities? President Harry Truman, who was already seen with suspicion by southern Democrats for his efforts to desegregate the armed forces, left this kind of decision-making to state and local authorities. To tamp down fears among southerners in his party, Truman named former Florida governor and ardent segregationist Millard F. Caldwell Jr. as the first head of the Federal Civil Defense Administration over the objection of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The result, according to historian Andrew D. Grossman, was that “in the American South, community bomb-shelter programs could be developed within a framework of Jim Crow legal structures and, equally important, with a minimum of central-state expansion and oversight. By 1953, Southern civil defense planning produced both segregated bomb shelters and a segregated civil defense corps.”17 The segregated bomb shelter program was never significantly enacted, nor was any sheltering programming enacted on a large scale, not because of its structured racism but because it was too expensive and because citizens largely rejected the idea that survival underground was a type of survival they wanted.18

Sociological models of the postattack environment gained nuance by the 1960s as a direct result of Federal Civil Defense Administration funding for social science research into disasters of all types, especially disasters such as tornadoes and earthquakes, that most closely seemed to reflect what a nuclear attack might look like (little warning, cutting across all infrastructure sectors). This is the context in which the nation’s first disaster research center was founded, at Ohio University, with a legacy of scholarship discernible all the way through to the COVID-19 pandemic.19

By the late 1960s, disaster sociologists told civil defense planners two concrete things about the projected postattack nation: First, the impacts of a nuclear war would be horrific at every level (no “new normal” was coming). Second, people tend to be very resourceful and provide mutual aid during disaster without waiting for authority figures to take command. Civil defense planners liked neither lesson, committed as they were to realizable postattack survival and continuity and to a planning mode that demanded a rigid, centralized command and control structure. By the 1960s it was clear that federal civil defense planning was producing paper but not much more—it certainly was not producing confidence among state and local officials who were regularly facing real disasters in their communities. And what’s more, civil defense planning assumed that local law enforcement would be at the front line of postattack recovery, reliant on the trust of their communities. This assumption was deeply flawed, as evidenced by televised Jim Crow police violence across the South in the early 1960s and also in Watts, Newark, Detroit, Baltimore, and everywhere across the urban North, South, West, and East by 1968. The civil rights movement rejected the national Cold War geopolitics of nuclear war not only because it took money away from addressing structural racism in education, housing, and environmental protection but also because it rested on the fallacy that a nation of cold warriors would willingly submit to white authority in the midst of a nuclear war. As the nuclearist civil defense fantasy ebbed and “professional” emergency management emerged in the 1970s, the bureaucratic inheritance of Jim Crow and white authority was never addressed.

Emergency Management

President Jimmy Carter created FEMA in 1979 via Executive Order 12127 to have a dual mission of emergency management and civil defense.20 In its earliest stages the manner in which those concepts manifested with different populations was evident. For instance, in the 1930s, managing emergencies was part of Depression-era economic reconstruction. Disaster relief was packaged into legislation related to highways and other infrastructure—a concept not far removed from some current concepts of resilience. The benefits of this resilience-building work tracked the racially tinged decisions associated with the practice of redlining.21 White neighborhoods were outfitted with flood retention infrastructure and evacuation routes alongside the development of the convenience of the US highway system. Black and immigrant neighborhoods were boxed into the increased risk of hazards by virtue of being on the wrong side of the road.

When Hurricane Betsy, which many consider the keystone event of comprehensive emergency management, hit the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans in 1965, the contours of the response shifted. Because there was not yet a national emergency management agency, the US Navy responded. Survivors report seeing supplies going to white neighborhoods, while Black neighborhoods received no supplies and were guarded as though presenting a threat.22 Other residents were more blunt; they believed that the government risked their lives and blocked them out of recovery benefits because they were Black. For context, it is worth pointing out that this was during the period when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were implemented. The year 1965 was also the year in which Bloody Sunday took place in Selma, Alabama.23 The US Navy “responded” to Hurricane Betsy in ways not unlike the way police and guardsmen responded to civil rights events. The context of history and the perceptions of what constitutes an emergency versus a threat interacted in odd ways that year. The same proved to be true during Hurricane Katrina and later Hurricane Ida, both amid renewed protests for civil and social justice.24 History would repeat itself nearly twenty years later during the COVID-19 pandemic. The management of the crisis was a catastrophe, particularly for Black people. According to statistics cited by Maritza Vasquez Reyes, “Approximately 97.9 out of every 100,000 African Americans have died from COVID-19, a mortality rate that is a third higher than that for Latinos (64.7 per 100,000), and more than double than that for whites (46.6 per 100,000) and Asians (40.4 per 100,000).”25 The Government Accountability Office would criticize FEMA for not resourcing equitably—again—and more pointedly for not having systems to manage “lessons learned” or to analyze and implement data from previous responses.26

FEMA, as the lead federal agency in the emergency management space, is (because of the Stafford Act of 1988) the template for the profession. Most states also have state- or local-level emergency management agencies with a similar structure that interacts with FEMA. At times, staff members migrate between state and local agencies and FEMA. State and local agencies will often go to FEMA for training and development. So, when discussing the “faces” of emergency management, it is not unfair to use FEMA as an exemplar for the profession.

The makeup of the profession is overwhelmingly monolithic. Speaking to a House of Representatives committee, a lead emergency management official from Virginia said, “In FEMA, 44 percent of its 20,000 employees are minorities, and 30 percent of its 1,900 supervisors are minorities, Office of Personnel Management records show. Roughly 37 percent of the federal workforce and 40 percent of the US population is a racial or ethnic minority.”27 Going further, the Government Accountability Office says that obstacles to promotion for minorities (people of color, women, etc.) exist not just in FEMA but also throughout the agency that oversees it: the Department of Homeland Security. The Government Accountability Office revealed in a 2019 report that the Department of Homeland Security and its agencies have identified failures in their Equal Employment Opportunity programs but lack policies and procedures for developing action plans to resolve them.28 For example, problems with supervision and management and lack of advancement opportunities cause more white females and several ethnic and racial groups to quit than is normal.29 One has to wonder how much of this is caused or at least exacerbated by the idea that emergency management has traditionally been a white man’s profession, following a typical progression from military officer, law enforcement officer, firefighter, or fire chief to emergency manager.30 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 80 percent of the emergency management profession comes from this background, with some maintaining ties to law enforcement or the military, and 60 percent identify as white.31

The makeup of FEMA and the overall practice of emergency management is reflected in its inability to relate to and serve diverse populations. As mentioned earlier, many of the agency’s practices have had a disparate impact on communities. For example, when looking at updates to the National Flood Insurance Program, researchers at the Urban Institute found that the benefits were skewed vis-à-vis based on race. They focused specifically on New Orleans and learned that for the most part, households in census tracts where more than 50 percent of the homeowners were white received more funding on their National Flood Insurance Program claims and encountered a lower rate of unpaid claims than households in tracts where more than 50 percent of homeowners were people of color.32 Another study came to similar conclusions but went on to note that “nonwhite populations were deprioritized” both during flooding events and in claims.33 We could look at FEMA’s role in managed retreat projects and other programs and find similar patterns. While FEMA and some state agencies have participated in equity dialogues, released guides, and training, the true correction of these ills has to start internally.

The emergency management profession has divorced itself from its history rooted in policing and inequitable practices. FEMA could lead the way by undertaking an agency-wide examination of its hiring practices. Emphasis should be placed on not just racial and gender diversity but also recruiting from programs focused on emergency management as a profession rather than transitioning staff from the same kinds of backgrounds. At all levels, there needs to be a review of promotion and professional development policies as well as retention trends to resolve the gaps between whites and other groups within the ranks of emergency managers.

For its part, Congress could do a better job of oversight in this particular area. In two hearings about equity in disaster management during the 117th and 118th Congresses, a federal panel issued a rebuke to FEMA and its inequitable practices. In 2020, the National Advisory Council issued a fifty-two-page report outlining how FEMA and emergency management generally often leaves communities of color in worse shape after their work than before.34 The National Advisory Council would repeat much of the same concerns about equity and support to households with the most need in a 2021 post-COVID report.35 The Committee on Homeland Security in the House of Representatives has held several informational hearings on the topic but not an oversight or legislative hearing. A first step would be to hold hearings based on the National Advisory Council report, with representatives from FEMA and state and local emergency management present. If at the federal level proper congressional oversight and internal agency leadership happens, then the rest of the profession will follow suit. Researchers can help with this process by choosing projects that examine inequitable and racist practices in emergency management but do so with an intention of reviewing the connection between historical narratives. These narratives represent learned behaviors and legacies that influence current and future impacts on communities. Unveiling these intricacies is essential to advocating for change from other stakeholders in the field.

Notes

1. 1.  Christopher Flavelle, “Why Does Disaster Aid Often Favor White People?,” New York Times, June 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/climate/FEMA-race-climate.html.
2. 2.  National Advisory Council, National Advisory Council Report to the FEMA Administrator, November 2020, Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20210204030812/https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_nac-report_11-2020.pdf.
3. 3.  Joseph Richardson Jr., “Using Storytelling to Explore Gun Violence and Trauma,” Safety in Numbers (blog), Everytown Research & Policy, May 27, 2021, https://everytownresearch.org/dr-joseph-richardson-jr-using-storytelling-to-explore-gun-violence-and-trauma/.
4. 4.  Hiroko Tabuchi and Nadja Popvich, “People of Color Breathe More Hazardous Air. The Sources Are Everywhere,” New York Times, April 28. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/climate/air-pollution-minorities.html.
5. 5.  Rachel Earl et al., “Low-Level Environmental Lead Exposure Still Negatively Associated with Children’s Cognitive Abilities,” Australian Journal of Psychology 68, no. 2 (2016): 98–106, https://doi.org/10.1111/ajpy.12096; and Joshua Goodman et al., “Heat and Learning,” Working Paper No. 24639, National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2018, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/w24639.pdf.
6. 6.  Rashawn Ray, “Bad Apples Come from Rotten Trees in Policing,” Brookings Institution, May 30, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/bad-apples-come-from-rotten-trees-in-policing/.
7. 7.  Rashawn Ray, “Potter and Goodson Cases Tell Us More About Why People Are Killed by Police,” USA Today, December 22, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2021/12/22/kim-potter-casey-goodson-police-killings/6509526001/.
8. 8.  Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race-Ethnicity, and Sex,” PNAS 116, no. 34 (2019): 16793–98, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116.
9. 9.  Alyasah Ali Sewell and Rashawn Ray, “The Collateral Consequences of State-Sanctioned Police Violence for Women,” Brookings Institution, June 11, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-collateral-consequences-of-state-sanctioned-police-violence-for-women/.
10. 10.  “Stop-and-Frisk Data,” New York Civil Liberties Union, March 14, 2019, https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data.
11. 11.  Nick Iannelli, “DC Police Should Reduce ‘Racial Disparities’ in Use of Force, Report Says,” WTOP News, April 27, 2021, https://wtop.com/dc/2021/04/dc-police-should-reduce-racial-disparities-in-use-of-force/.
12. 12.  Rashawn Ray, “What Does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean and Does It Have Merit?” Brookings Institution, June 19, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-and-does-it-have-merit/.
13. 13.  Ray, “What Does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean and Does It Have Merit?”
14. 14.  Peter Hermann, “Man, 77, Dies After Collapsing near DC Fire Station and Not Getting Immediate Aid,” Washington Post, January 29, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/man-77-dies-after-collapsing-near-dc-fire-station-and-not-getting-immediate-aid/2014/01/29/13b44662-88fe-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html.
15. 15.  James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966, https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/report-occupied-territory/.
16. 16.  Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
17. 17.  Andrew D. Grossman, “Segregationist Liberalism: The NAACP and Resistance to Civil-Defense Planning in the Early Cold War, 1951–1953,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 13 (March 2020): 477–97, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022918208104.
18. 18.  Lee Clarke, Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster (University of Chicago Press), 1999.
19. 19.  See Chapter 2, this volume.
20. 20.  “History of FEMA,” FEMA, last modified January 4, 2021, https://www.fema.gov/about/history.
21. 21.  Noel King, “A Brief History of How Racism Shaped Interstate Highways,” NPR, April 7, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways.
22. 22.  Kelby Ouchley, “Hurricane Betsy,” 64 Parishes, last updated November 1, 2022, https://64parishes.org/entry/hurricane-betsy; and Andy Horowitz, “Hurricane Betsy and the Politics of Disaster in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, 1965–1967,” Journal of Southern History 80, no. 4 (2014): 893–934, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43918106.
23. 23.  Christopher Klein, “How Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ Became a Turning Point in the Civil Rights Movement,” History, last updated, March 5, 2025, https://www.history.com/news/selma-bloody-sunday-attack-civil-rights-movement.
24. 24.  Arnold L. Sugg, “The Hurricane Season of 1965,” Monthly Weather Review 94, no. 3 (March 1966): 183–91, https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/mwr_pdf/1965.pdf.
25. 25.  Maritza Vasquez Reyes, “The Disproportional Impact of COVID-19 on African Americans,” Health and Human Rights 22, no. 2 (2020): 299–307, https://www.hhrjournal.org/2020/12/08/student-essay-the-disproportional-impact-of-covid-19-on-african-americans/.
26. 26.  US Government Accountability Office, COVID-19: FEMA’s Role in the Response and Related Challenges, July 14, 2020, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-685t.
27. 27.  Thomas Frank and E&E News, “Disaster Management Is Too White, Official Tells Congress,” Scientific American, July 29, 2020, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/disaster-management-is-too-white-official-tells-congress/.
28. 28.  Juliet Golf, “The White Elephant in Emergency Management,” Office of Preparedness and Response, University of Illinois Chicago, last updated February 3, 2021, https://ready.uic.edu/news-stories/white-elephant-2-2/.
29. 29.  US Government Accountability Office, Equal Employment Opportunity: DHS Could Better Address Challenges to Ensuring EEO in Its Workforce, July 14, 2020, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-19-573.
30. 30.  Jim McKay, “Emergency Management Profession Needs Diversity to Adapt,” Government Technology, May 14, 2021, https://www.govtech.com/em/safety/emergency-management-profession-needs-diversity-to-adapt.
31. 31.  See Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, “Emergency Management Directors,” last updated April 18, 2025, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/emergency-management-directors.htm; Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, “Emergency Management Directors: Similar Occupations,” last updated April 18, 2025, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/emergency-management-directors.htm#tab-8; and “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, last updated January 29, 2025, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm.
32. 32.  Peace Gwam, Ananya Hariharan, and Carlos Martín, “Federal Disaster Policy Reforms—Including Flood Insurance Treatment—Should Center Racial and Economic Equity,” Urban Wire (blog), Urban Institute, September 30, 2020, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/federal-disaster-policy-reforms-including-flood-insurance-treatment-should-center-racial-and-economic-equity.
33. 33.  Andrew Kruczkiewicz, Carolynne Hultquist, Maya Dutta, and Ryan Iyer, “Are Underserved Populations Left Out of National Flood Mitigation Efforts and Facing Greater Impact? A Method to Assess Racial Inequality at the Census Tract Level,” Journal of Climate Resilience and Justice 1 (2023): 78–92, https://doi.org/10.1162/crcj_a_00005.
34. 34.  National Advisory Council, National Advisory Council Report to the FEMA Administrator, November 2020.
35. 35.  National Advisory Council, National Advisory Council Report to the FEMA Administrator, December 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20230520172127/https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_nac-2021-report-211216.pdf.