Who decides what counts as a crisis?
From the fentanyl crisis and the inflation crisis to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, a steady thrum of crisis messaging runs through our culture. These days, a crisis declaration is tantamount to a call for action — “crisis” signifies not just a pressing problem but one that can be solved with enough effort and political will. When President
Obama called American gun violence a crisis in The New York Times in 2016, he also called on Americans to reverse it. “All of us need to demand that governors, mayors and our representatives in Congress do their part,” he wrote.
But however consumed we are with the latest crisis, what most people never discuss — or even consciously register — is how we decide what counts as a crisis in the first place. In “When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People,” Yale political scientist Dara Strolovitch argues that we tend to apply the “crisis” label to problems faced by those higher on the social ladder, while other equally dire problems go unaddressed.
“Whether or not something is treated as a crisis,” Strolovitch writes, “is itself a political outcome.”
Though English speakers have used the word “crisis” for hundreds of years, the political aura that surrounds it is newer. Before the late 19th century, when US leaders spoke about a crisis “it was usually to describe a pretty narrow set of issues,” Strolovitch says. “Mostly, [it was] about war — conflict in or with other countries — and to some degree economic recessions.”
That usage shifted as racial and social equality movements gained traction. Activists started applying the term “crisis” to problems like racial discrimination, evoking one of the word’s oldest meanings: a critical turning point when a change must take place. They hoped to pull off a kind of alchemy — to convince people that social injustices were not unchangeable givens but policy failures that ought to be addressed through collective action.
This alchemy worked better than its practitioners could have hoped. By the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, Americans were embracing the idea that once-immovable background realities could be tackled and solved through political action, which ultimately helped minorities and women gain more freedoms. Yet once crisis designations took on political freight, government leaders and power brokers began to take up the term to serve their own ends. Like activists, they deployed crisis messaging to recast longstanding problems as solvable, which wasn’t problematic in itself. The problem turned out to be the biased logic that fed into their crisis pronouncements.
Strolovitch’s research charts what she calls the “selective application of crisis” leading up to the US subprime mortgage meltdown of the late 2000s. Predatory lenders had offered women and minorities unfavorable loan terms for years before the meltdown, and not surprisingly, many of these borrowers defaulted on their loans, unable to pay sky-high interest. Yet in her analysis of media archives and congressional records from the late 20th century, Strolovitch contends that those in power didn’t frame the problem as a crisis the country could solve. Instead, public discourse often blamed loan defaults on homeowners, citing their low credit scores or presumed irresponsibility. “The ongoing problems of these borrowers,” one 1999 New York Times article stated, “have contributed disproportionately to the nation’s growing foreclosure rate.”
The calculus changed in 2007 and 2008 when more privileged Americans began defaulting on predatory loans. “As these problems are clearly spreading — both to different kinds of borrowers, white male head-of-household borrowers, and also [to] financial institutions — the framing starts to shift,” Strolovich says. “The language of crisis spikes, but we also see a huge decline in language blaming borrowers and their credit.” Suddenly, in other words, homeowners’ struggles to pay up were no longer their fault, just evidence that the system needed fixing. The crisis framing had fully kicked in — and so, in short order, did mortgage debt relief policies.
While Strolovitch’s research has focused on the subprime mortgage debacle, the “selective application of crisis” principle holds up in other realms as well. US leaders widely called COVID-19 a crisis and crafted national policy to stem the fallout, fast-tracking antivirals and COVID vaccines to market. Yet a separate pressing problem, that Black Americans were dying of COVID at higher rates due in part to preexisting conditions, was discounted by comparison.
“We’re very concerned about that. It’s very sad,” White House COVID czar Anthony Fauci said in the spring of 2020, adding, “There’s nothing we can do about it right now, except to try and give them the best possible care to avoid those complications.” Though Fauci had no ill intent, his words implied that conditions causing unequal death rates were outside the reach of government intervention, much the way minority borrowers’ struggles had been perceived to be a generation before.
With problems that affect less privileged people, “the tendency is to normalize, dismiss the idea that it can be changed or fixed,” Strolovitch says. “This is one of the underappreciated underlying mechanisms that is at work.”
Similarly, when crack cocaine ravaged poorer communities in the 1980s and ’90s, the problem drew less public concern than the current opioid crisis, which affects a broader swath of Americans and has spurred massive drug policy changes. And many Americans treat conflicts in the Middle East — a region often featured in Western media — as crises while overlooking humanitarian disasters in other parts of the world.
Strolovitch’s is a political study, not a psychological one, and it does not delve deeply into why crisis judgments often favor the privileged. For years, however, group dynamics research has shown that people care more about (and shower more resources on) those similar to them, neglecting those they consider different. From this standpoint, the selective application of crisis feels like a failure of empathy, the kind that German pastor Martin Niemoller pegged after World War II: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist . . . . Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.”
What’s so insidious about the politics of crisis is how ingrained and unthinking this failure of empathy can be. When opinion-makers lament that there’s little to be done about things like unequal COVID outcomes or faraway genocides, it’s easy to silently absorb what they’re saying — not because we’re moral monsters but because pushing back doesn’t always occur to us. Exposing the hidden social mechanisms at work, how we elevate some problems to crisis level while glibly dismissing others, is one way of approaching crisis as Progressive Era activists did: as a turning point from which justice can proceed.
Elizabeth Svoboda, a writer in San Jose, Calif., is the author of “What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness.”