by Erin Flynn Jay and Jodi L. Miller
Can the environment be racist? While the environment may not be racist, government rules and policies, put in place decades ago, have perpetuated what is known as environmental racism.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines environmental racism as “the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. It is a form of systemic racism that occurs when corporate or government decisions intentionally disadvantage minority communities, such as by exposing them to toxic waste sites or industrial facilities.”
The term “environmental racism” was coined in 1982 by Dr. Ben Chavis, an environmental activist who was leading protests to stop the illegal dumping of toxic waste in Warren County, North Carolina, an area that was 60% Black at the time.
Higher levels of air pollution
According to EPA data, a Black child is twice as likely as a white child to be hospitalized for asthma due to air pollution. In addition, according to a 2021 Clean Air Task Force study, African Americans are exposed to 38% more air pollution than white Americans and Black Americans are 75% more likely to live in a community near a factory.
In 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice released a report titled “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States.” It was the first major study to address environmental racism. The study found that across the nation race was “the most significant among variables tested in association with the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities.” More than 15 million Black Americans, the study showed, lived in communities “with one or more uncontrolled toxic waste site.”
In his book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, author Richard Rothstein, a researcher with the Economic Policy Institute, noted that zoning laws had two purposes.
“One face, developed in part to evade a prohibition on racially explicit zoning, attempted to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods by making it difficult for lower-income families, large numbers of whom were African Americans, to live in expensive white neighborhoods,” Rothstein writes. “The other attempted to protect white neighborhoods from deterioration by ensuring that few industrial or environmetally unsafe businesses could locate in them. Prohibited in this fashion, polluting industry had no option but to locate near African American residences.”
A 2020 article in The New York Times Magazine describes a large refinery built on 1,300 acres of land in South Philadelphia’s Grays Ferry district. The article notes that South Philadelphia was redlined in 1934. Redlining was a practice instituted by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which created color-coded maps that assessed what U.S. neighborhoods were deemed worthy of investment—in other words where mortgages would be granted. The coding system went from green, which were the “best” neighborhoods, to red, which were labeled “hazardous.” The majority of Black neighborhoods were coded red.
“You can’t understand environmental racism without understanding the legacy and the history of residential segregation, which created the disinvestment that has happened in communities in Philadelphia like Grays Ferry for decades,” Sharrelle Barber, a research professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, told The New York Times Magazine.
An EPA study published in 2018 shows that low-income neighborhoods have 35% higher levels of air pollution compared to higher-income communities. The EPA report also shows that facilities emitting air pollutants are disproportionately located in low-income and African American communities.
“Greater attention needs to be paid to the long-standing racial injustices that exist because of little or no enforcement of environmental protections,” says Ayesha Bell Hardaway, a professor with Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland and director of its Social Justice Institute. “That lack of enforcement means that Black children are more likely to suffer from lead poisoning, that Black manufacturing workers disproportionately make up those sickened with industrial-related diseases, and that Black property owners carry the weight of low or no home equity due to the presence of blighted commercial factories and buildings in their neighborhoods.”
Are highways racist?
In 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act was signed into law. It allocated $26 billion to construct 41,000 miles of interstate highways that would connect the country from one end to the other. According to the U.S. Transportation Department, more than 475,000 households and one million people were displaced nationwide to make way for these highways. The families that were displaced by highway projects were overwhelmingly Black and poor.
Today, according to data from the National Air Toxic Assessment, 49 million Americans live within a mile of a highway and face increased health risks from traffic pollution, including increased cancer risk and high asthma rates.
“The passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956…buoyed both highway construction and the destruction of Black communities. Often under the guise of ‘slum removal,’ federal and state officials purposely targeted Black communities to make way for massive highway projects,” Deborah N. Archer, a professor at New York University School of Law and Co-Faculty Director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, wrote in a 2020 Vanderbilt Law Review article. “In states around the country, highways disproportionately displaced Black households and cut the heart and soul out of thriving Black communities as homes, churches, schools, and businesses were destroyed.”
Highways may not be racist but the plans of where to construct the highways were. For example, Robert Moses, an urban planner and public official, said in a 1954 statement submitted to the President’s Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program that the expressways “must go right through cities and not around them.” Most of those cities were where Black communities existed.
Sometimes the planners went out of their way to burden Black communities. For example, in The Color of Law, Rothstein notes that Florida’s I-95 highway could have utilized the route of an abandoned railway that would have limited the displacement of thousands of people. Officials decided to build the highway directly through Overtown, a district of Miami, which was a thriving African American community. When the highway was completed in the mid 1960s, the community of 40,000 African Americans was reduced to 8,000.
“In Camden, New Jersey, an interstate highway destroyed some 3,000 low-income housing units from 1963 to 1967,” Rothstein writes. “A report by the New Jersey State Attorney General’s office concluded: ‘It is obvious from a glance at the…transit plans that an attempt is being made to eliminate the Negro and Puerto Rican ghetto areas by building highways that benefit white suburbanites, facilitating their movement from the suburbs to work and back.’”
In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), Professor Archer maintains that some Black communities were able to stave off highway expansion. She points to resistance in New York, New Orleans and Washington, D.C. as examples of success.
“But I think it’s important to point out the most successful efforts to stop the highways were not those that focused on racial justice or those that were put in place to protect Black communities,” Professor Archer told NPR. “The people who were most successful were the ones that focused on environmental justice and protecting parks and their communities in that way.”
Make way for environmental justice
The EPA defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”
In 1978, the first lawsuit to challenge environmental racism using civil rights laws was brought against the health departments of Houston, Harris County and the state of Texas. The case—Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc.—alleged that locating a municipal landfill in Whispering Pines, a predominantly middle-class Black neighborhood constituted discrimation. Linda McKeever Bullard brought the lawsuit and asked her husband, a sociology professor at Texas Southern University to map out the locations of landfills, solid-waste facilities and incinerators in the city.
Professor Robert Bullard and his students took on the project and discovered that despite African Americans making up only 25% of Houston’s population at the time, all five municipal dumps, six of eight city-operated garbage incinerators and three of four private landfills were located in the city’s Black communities.
“What the data showed was a pattern of racist decisions over years and years by city officials,” Professor Bullard told The New York Times Magazine. “In the case of Whispering Pines, it was the height of disrespect compounded by the fact that the landfill was 1,300 feet from a high school in a Black school district and with at least a half-dozen elementary schools in a two-mile radius. It gets hot in Houston. How can kids learn if they’re smelling garbage? That’s the kind of racism that permeated that particular case.”
The plaintiffs lost their case; however, the environmental justice movement was born. Today, Professor Bullard is considered the father of environmental justice and has written 18 books on the subject, including the first book written on environmental racism—Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. He serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and served in the Clinton administration as well.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order stating: “In accordance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, each Federal agency shall ensure that all programs or activities receiving Federal financial assistance that affect human health or the environment do not directly, or through contractual or other arrangements, use criteria, methods, or practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin.”
“They [federal agencies] have to make sure they are not producing harm by encouraging or perpetuating discriminatory practices and behaviors,” says Dr. Yohuru Williams, founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas.
Dr. Williams notes that environmental justice often involves strategies centered around Title VI because “if you receive federal funding, then you have to comply with the dictates of [Title VI], which means that you can’t support anything that perpetuates discriminatory practice or you lose those federal funds.”
In January 2023, the Biden administration announced the allocation of $100 million for environmental justice grants for “underserved and overburdened communities across the country” and created the Office of Environmental Justice within the EPA to evaluate the projects applying for grants.
In March 2024 the U.S. Department of Transportation announced the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program and the Neighborhood Access and Equity Program, which is intended to address the communities that were destroyed by highways. The administration allocated $3.3 billion to fund projects that would “restore and reconnect communities that have been harmed, isolated, and cut off from opportunity by transportation infrastructure.”
Discussion Questions
- The article includes several examples of environmental racism. Select one example or select an example of your own and describe in detail how it affects people individually and as a community.
- Refer to the definition in the article for environmental justice provided by the Environmental Protection Agency. What issues do you think fall under environmental justice? Select an issue not covered in the article and explain in detail why you think it qualifies as an environmental justice issue.
Glossary Words
plaintiff — in a civil action, the person or persons bringing the lawsuit against another person or entity.
This article originally appeared in Respect’s Special Issue: Challenging Racism from Past to Present.