Sins of Omission

Rather than outright hurting others, racism often encourages not helping those in need.   

Just how needy are those in need? That depends on the giver’s attitude towards the recipient’s race, says a study from Kansas State University that surveyed attitudes of undergraduate students one year after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and wiped out homes of thousands of victims, many of whom were black. Would participants’ racial attitudes affect how they judged the government response to the crisis, and their view of the victims?

Yes, says study leader and associate professor of psychology Don Saucier, PhD, and colleagues Sara Smith and Jessica McManus.

Saucier, whose research focus is on helping behavior, says that “when discrimination shows up, it is usually not anti-social, it shows up as lack of pro-social behavior.” 

Hurricane Katrina and other disasters involving diverse racial and ethnic groups may reveal how prejudices affect helping behavior.   

“With Katrina, we wanted to see if people’s belief systems were contributing to perceptions of the victims,” he explains. “Those who said that the victims of Katrina were lazy, sinful, or to blame for their situations were more racist; their levels of racism contributed to their perceptions of the victims and the situation overall.”

Most unexpected was the strength of racial attitudes and long-term perception of the disaster; the researchers surveyed participants just a couple of weeks after the year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The relationship between racial attitudes and victim-blaming surprisingly strong, Saucier says.

Measuring study participants’ levels of conservatism, empathy and racism, results indicated that the greater degree of racism, the more likely participants were to blame the victims, claim they received adequate help at the time, and that they did not need anymore help today. Racist respondents were more likely to judge Katrina victims as sinful, lazy, and stupid.

Those with greater levels of empathy and lower levels of racism were more likely to characterize Katrina victims as unlucky, say that they did not receive adequate aid, did not have the means or resources to escape before the worst came, and that they still deserved help today.

As with sexism, the tendency to blame the victim is greater when racist sentiment is high, Saucier says. For example, when a woman is raped, she is more likely to be blamed by those who hold strong sexist views.

“Sometimes in an attempt to make sense of the situation, people may say it was deserved,” he notes.

What can we learn from these study findings in light of the Haiti disaster?

“What is unfortunate is that people don’t make an objective assessment of the emergency when deciding whether to help,” he explains. “There always seem to be an attempt to politicize.”

Despite the enormous outpouring of compassion and aid to Haitian survivors, there is a disturbing undercurrent of negativity, most extreme of which have been highlighted by comments from Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh.

The danger of their comments, and even milder sentiments like, “We have to give at home before we help others," is that they may “encourage people not to do anything. If some people are already not doing good work, they don’t need to more excuses to not do good work,” he notes.

In a crisis, it is impossible to predict who will give and who will not, Saucier concludes. “Those who are most likely to help are those who most easily empathize with the situation; whatever it is about an individual that allows them to empathize more will help."