Tragedy and social behavior: how Morning’s conceptualization of race relates to Hurricane Sandy

Photographing the social world the last two weeks has been a strange experience. Spending my time on the south shore of Staten Island, an area seriously devastated by Hurricane Sandy, I witnessed the transformation of my hometown from a relatively typical American city to an unrecognizable war-zone. Houses, restaurants, and businesses that stood for years, concrete community fixtures, were flooded, destroyed, some to the point of complete collapse. It’s been pretty impossible for me to focus any of my attention and efforts on anything other than recovery from this storm.

Still, while tragedies such as this are atrocious, it is often in these moments of incertitude that the saliency of social psychological phenomenon is heightened. It took the Holocaust for Milgram’s research on obedience to authority, or Zimbardo’s work on social roles in the Stanford Prison Experiment, or Hannah Ardent’s banality of evil theory to surface. It takes war to study the “rally-around-the-flag effect.” While Sandy was bad to Staten Island, it did highlight interesting sociological trends.

Staten Island is consistently rated one of the rudest American cities in the United States. It’s one of the most conservative voting districts in the state of New York. It’s steeped in racial prejudice. There is a literal distinction between the black and white sides of Staten Island, with the “north shore” being a more urban, black area and the south shore being a more suburban, white area. But as I watched the reaction from my fellow Staten Islanders to the storm, I noticed an increase in emotional energy and group solidarity that showed no socioeconomic borders, no racial lines. At first to me, this seemed strange. Isn't it in times of hardship, deprivation and paranoia that we cling to our in-group and show greater rates of out-group hostility?

My theory is that our subconscious conceptualization of in-group changed. The blacks vs. Italians dichotomy that dominated Staten Island social behavior for the last 70 years became temporarily resolved, and in the face of this struggle, we were united as “Staten Islanders.” Was there still out-group hostility? Absolutely. Some of the most troubling arguments occurring over social media were ones regarding which areas got hit the hardest in an almost competitive sort of way. Staten Islanders scolded city-dwellers and Long Islanders for complaining about no power when so many residents of our area were killed. Those on the south shore of Long Island complained their area was just as devastated and under covered in the media. Conflict became both materialist and idealist. Each regional area wanted more emotional and economic support for their recovering areas.

What does this say about the conceptualization of race and ethnicity? Clearly, its strength as a social construction is large enough that it causes people to believe race is an impermeable boundary. But if times of stress show there can be shifts in our interracial social interactions, can we shift these patterns without total destruction?

I’m eager to explore my social world through the lens of Ann Morning’s research on conceptualization of race. Just as I thought the houses in my neighborhood were concrete fixtures, Morning highlights how many conceptualize race as if it impermeable, with biological boundaries. Morning’s different findings on conceptualization of race, and theory on race for hundreds of years, has established race as a social construction. Just as divine right was accepted as unchangeably dictating the limits of human behavior, race becomes one of these seemingly objective characteristics. My research this semester will examine Morning’s ideas and seek to explain how one comes to an understanding of race, what social conditions foster certain ethnic attitudes, and more importantly, how can we use this knowledge to facilitate less hostile inter-ethnic and interracial social interactions while maintaining a sense of cultural identity?


Post-note: Of course, racial depiction in the media is completely separate from on-site solidarity. While I haven't studied or noticed issues in coverage of Sandy, Katrina--as many already know--produced horribly racially biased coverage.

(Picture taken from http://pavanvan.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/looters-in-chile/ )