Narratives of vulnerability under racial capitalism bracket out disabled individuals further exacerbating ableism

3 Why Not Social Vulnerability? In the second edition of their 1994 book on hazard vulnerability, Wisner et al. (2004) define social vulnerability as the “set of characteristics of a group or individual in terms of their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard” (p. 9). While they discuss the root causes of vulnerabilities and note that socially vulnerable groups are often treated as victims, the definition they provide reflects the uncritical nature of much subsequent literature on social vulnerability. Social vulnerability literature is rife with discussions that attribute vulnerability to the supposed intrinsic characteristics of individuals and groups instead of the structural causes that force communities of color, poor, disabled, elderly, and health-compromised folks to bear the brunt of disasters (Bolin, 2006; Jacobs, 2019). The social vulnerability literature in urban planning and related fields is dominated by studies that map so-called vulnerable populations. This mapping essentially amounts to counting non-white, disabled and poor people, households without access to a vehicle and single womanheaded households, along with other characteristics. Once all these so-called destitute populations are added up, they are mapped in red and called “hot spots” (Cutter et al., 2000; Cutter & Finch, 2008; Finch et al., 2010; Van Zandt et al., 2012). There are few social vulnerability mapping studies that include conversations with these “vulnerable” populations or critical conversations about the root causes of vulnerability. These hot spots are largely treated as passive populations that magically became vulnerable, or, even worse, by their own faults (Jacobs, 2019). Fortunately, there are fields that do better jobs of unpacking and critiquing the term “vulnerability” than hazards and disaster literature in urban planning. Development studies scholars critique the notion of vulnerability. Bankoff (2001) discusses vulnerability as a western construct imposed on the developing world that construct the Global South as dangerous with little consideration of how colonialism and imperialism produced and continue to exacerbate said vulnerability. The concept is also critiqued as overused and paternalistic to those designated as vulnerable (Chambers, 2006). A critical disabilities scholar, Burghardt (2013) contends that vulnerability is “a social construct that limits the lives of people with disabilities due to its implication of weakness and need and its inattention to socially imposed barriers” (p. 557). Burghardt (2013) also points out that the designation of vulnerable imposes contradictory roles on populations both assuming that they need charity-like protection from the state and its systems and also denying them the right to participate in systems, and to some extent, society. This critique of vulnerability becomes even more salient when we consider how ableism and other forms of oppression intersect with racial capitalism, shaping, impacting, and reinforcing each other, as will be discussed in a subsequent section of this essay. In a critique of social vulnerability within disaster studies, Bolin (2006) insists that the study of disasters “requires a historically informed understanding of the particularities of racial formations in specific places and times and how those shape the environmental risks to which people are exposed” (p. 116). Bolin (2006) encourages the use of an environmental justice lens instead of social vulnerability for hazards as it makes visible the “complex mechanisms by which certain ethnic (and racial, gendered and classed) categories of people are disadvantaged” (p. 117). Hardy et al. (2017) echo this in an a study of racial coastal formation, insisting that if “deeply racialized history goes unrecognized, what [they] label colorblind [climate change] adaptation planning is likely to perpetuate the”slow violence” of environmental racism” (p. 62). While there are valid critiques of environmental justice activism and scholarship taking a less critical turn (Harrison, 2015; Pulido, 2000), there are many environmental justice scholars who explicitly take racism and white supremacy to task (Bullard, 2008; Pellow, 2017; Pulido, 2015; Taylor, 2000). In the next section, I take cues from Pulido (2016a & 2016b) who contends that environmental racism — the antithesis of environmental justice — is but a component of racial capitalism. I argue that racial capitalism, and its intersections with sexism, ageism, and ableism, can help us understand the root causes and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.