Enacting Privilege in Disaster Recovery Volunteerism

• In Event: 390 - Section on Race, Gender and Class Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. The Politics of Race, Gender and Class

Abstract

Following Hurricane Katrina, volunteers, mostly white nonlocal volunteers poured down to New Orleans, where they largely served socioeconomically disadvantaged black residents (Luft 2008). This paper addresses the potential downsides of volunteer work through examination of the (re)production of social inequalities on the part of volunteers through their interactions with individual service recipients and the communities they claim to serve. Based on interviews with volunteer coordinators, I find that volunteers reproduce race, class and gender inequalities through insensitivity towards recipients and communities with regard to disaster trauma and cultural differences, poor quality of labor due to assumptions about “free” services, condescension and judgment of recipients’ decisions, identification of recipients as (un)worthy of services, and punishment of recipients deemed unworthy. These findings shed light on the not so pleasant underbelly of the largely celebrated bastion of whiteness that is volunteerism, which has implications not only for scholarship but for the policies and practices of volunteer based organizations.

Author

• Ian Breckenridge-Jackson, University of California-Riverside