Funders Together staff members, Lauren Bennett and Michael Durham, reflect on the aftermath of the recent hurricanes and the role racialized capitalism plays in disaster recovery, especially for Black and Indigenous people, and other communities of color in the affected areas.

By Lauren Bennett, Chief of External Affairs and Michael Durham, Director of Networks  

As Funders Together recently mourned, Hurricanes Helene and Milton both ushered in autumn with widespread destruction throughout the South – including East Tennessee and Western North Carolina, the states where we raise our respective children. We love our home states and the vibrant people who make up the diverse communities we live in, so witnessing the destruction caused by climate-related events makes us reflect in a different way. Thankfully, neither of us experienced any damage that would threaten our housing stability, and we’re privileged with resources and support networks to nearly guarantee our security. But that does not describe many whose lives have been upended by climate-change-intensified natural disasters across the country. 

Contrary to popular tropes, the supermajorities dominating Southeastern states’ legislatures do not represent all people they govern, particularly constituents who are Black and Brown organizers tracing their roots to Civil Rights and abolitionist traditions. Indeed, we contend, the most radical of organizing belongs to the South because so does the most oppressive of governments. As Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson pointed out, the South is already living Project 2025. We have already witnessed, and will continue to see, therefore, how poor and especially unhoused Black and Brown people will suffer the consequences of racist government responses to Hurricane Helene.  

In fact, this stigma is legal. Read FEMA policy: “FEMA does not provide Housing Assistance (Rental Assistance, direct assistance, Home Repair Assistance, or Home Replacement Assistance) to applicants experiencing homelessness because the need for housing was not caused by the disaster.” We’re reminded of how, in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, federal officials requested Houston homelessness services providers to come identify their unhoused clients among those taking refuge in emergency shelters in order to exclude them (fortunately, organizations like Health Care for the Homeless - Houston refused to do so). The policy implies that homelessness is a type of person rather than an experience and that the events that led to someone experiencing homelessness were not a type of any disaster. It differentiates between those whose housing was destroyed by weather from those destroyed by racialized capitalism, insinuating that the latter group bears responsibility for their conditions. Because the majority of people who experience homelessness in affected areas are people of color, and racial capitalism rooted in colonization and enslavement produced mass homelessness in the first place, we should call this policy what it is: racist.  

As we monitor how people who were experiencing homelessness before the hurricane survive the coming months of recovery, we also lament the future effects on the housing market characteristic of disaster capitalism. In 2020, for example, a tornado snaked through Middle Tennessee, wreaking the most damage in historically Black North Nashville. Hundreds of residents (mostly renters) were displaced, and in place of their homes now stand three-story sanctuaries for white gentrifiers. Now, North Nashville housing is unaffordable to those struggling paycheck to paycheck, which only exacerbates our homelessness crisis. Natural disasters fuel the market forces that were only ever designed to expand and protect white property. Following Helene and Milton, we must guard against the weaponization of recovery.  

FEMA’s policy also reflects the fragmentation of government relief programs that philanthropy too often emulates. Housing justice values demand that we break through these silos to meet people’s needs on their own terms. We have assembled a webpage of recommendations and resources to offer our members a starting point.  

We thank all of you who checked on us during and after the storm and ask you to direct that sentiment into a commitment for racial and housing justice, in the South and everywhere else.