Disasters Do Discriminate: Black Land Tenure and Disaster Relief Programs

Centuries of discrimination and economic exploitation have ensured that marginal lands-those most likely to flood during natural disasters-are overwhelmingly inhabited by poor people and Black people. [...]poor and Black North Carolinians find it far harder to recover from disasters, in large part because disaster relief programs do not accommodate nontraditional forms of land tenure.1 These failures effectively amount to a state intervention in property markets on behalf of the well-off and white, and at the expense of the poor and Black, contributing to the expropriation of Black land and the dislocation of Black people. Again and again, the state itself has expropriated land from Black and poor people.10 So too has the market for real property tended to siphon land away from Black people, who were routinely coerced into selling or prevented from buying land-both by the state (through oppressive law and administrative action) and by private activity.11 Still today, Black and cash-poor people routinely lose their land both to direct forms of state action (tax foreclosure, for instance) and to market transactions conducted under coercive pressures (such when a family sells land because they are denied the credit that they need to farm it, or because they did not receive government disaster assistance to repair structures on it). [...]North Carolina's modern history shows how life on the margins has become less tenable, both because the ambit of the state has grown and because the concentration of land in corporate agriculture and tourist development has limited the economic utility of marginal land to its occupants: fishing, hunting, and farming there have all been made harder.12 The declining productivity of this land is part of the coercive pressure on market transactions. [...]some of the very methods that people invented for living on the margins-notably, the encoding of land rights in heir property-today present obstacles to their full and equal treatment by the state.13 Now, climate change means the acceleration of flood events and hurricanes-yet another blow to those living on marginal land in North Carolina.14 Increasingly, state officials understand the need to redesign policies that enable people to survive, rebuild, and when necessary relocate after these events.