The (continued) exposure of systemic racism in MN and NY (& US) the past couple days reminds me of a handful of conversations I've had with local emergency managers on their view of the value of scholarly research for their practice. 1/x

In those multiple conversations, the EMs (men) said that scholarly research focus on racism, root causes of social vulnerability, and equity isn't very actionable operational for them because of their job responsibilities to the "public" and elected officials. 2/x

In fact, they try to optimize their operations perpendicularly to goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion: to benefit the most people in the shortest amount of time with the most efficient use of resources. 3/x

This operational approach within in emergency management doesn't have much room for prioritizing (situational) vulnerable communities and antiracist goals. And so these particular emergency managers told me a large corpus of scholarly research to be pretty useful for them. 4/x

There's no other way to characterize this operational approach within emergency management than racist--promoting and sustaining centuries-old unjust imbalances of power and resources between majority white communities (currently best served by EM) & communities of color. 5/x

As long as emergency management measures success with aggregate measures like overall reduction in dollar losses or speed of recovery for entire jurisdictional populations the institution is actively sustaining historic & systemic racism embedded in our government & economy. 6/x

The priority of emergency management or at least the broader disaster profession should be to make disasters as equitable as possible. Secondary to that are the more institutionalized goals and measures of emergency management. 7/x

Emergency management can play a significant antiracist role as part of their preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery operations. To start requires checking privilege within the profession and organizations, as well as recognizing its operationalization of exclusion. 8/x

There's a large research literature to support this reflection that can ultimately inform operational, organizational, & institutional change in EM. There's also a growing community of researchers of color for EMs to engage thanks in part to @BAFFellows & @SurgeDisasters . 9/9.