The Racial Realities of Hurricane Displacement

By Willy Blackmore Originally appeared in Word in Black Even with the ever-lengthening wildfire season in the West,& hurricanes are the leading cause of displacement& due to natural disasters in the United States. That’s according to new data published only for the second time by the Census Bureau. It provides rare insight into how disasters affect American lives since it added questions about displacement to its Household Pulse Survey.& In total, 2.5 million people had to leave their homes in 2023, and with hurricanes in the Southeast forcing the bulk of those displacement, the people having to flee are disproportionately Black and Latinx, and people who are poor end up being displaced for longer periods of time. Both the Census Bureau and analysts note that there are limitations to the data, which is gathered through a voluntary survey, and leaves phrases like “natural disaster” and “displacement” broadly defined. But having any large-scale sense of who goes where after major disasters is both new and incredibly useful. Displacement “has a really big cumulative cost that’s hard to capture,” Andrew Rumbach of the Urban Institute told the New York Times. “This, at least, gives us a snapshot of that.”  When it comes...