Definitions
Although the concept of environmental racism is highly tied to the concept of environmental justice- and often the term is interchanged with the term environmental racism- they have different meanings. Environmental racism is a term referring to the concept that institutions implement policies that disproportionately expose minority communities to environmental risks. (Martinez 2005). This term has been expanded to include issues such as inequality in access to municipal services and the negative effects of tourism (Martinez 2005). Environmental justice refers to the “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws regulations, and policies” (EPA 2017). Both terms should be explored together to fully understand their meanings.
Environmentalism’s Racist Background
The same group of environmentalists who pushed the creation of the national parks and preservation of nature during the Roosevelt era held derogatory views of minority ethnic groups. The environmentalist movement was a movement for whites and stayed that way for many years as evidence by a 1972 poll conducted by the Sierra Club showing that forty percent of responding members were strongly opposed to addressing the conservation problems that would affect ethnic minorities (Purdy 2015). Due to the popularization of ecological ideas, the development of new hazards such as chemical pesticides, and the change in socioeconomic status of many Americans who “became less willing to accept environmental degradation as the price of progress” (Rome 2003), the environmental movement in the United States emerged from the conservationist movement following the end of World War II. These two movements overlap but have differences. The environmentalist movement focuses on bettering and protecting the natural environment through social and political means (Elliot 2017). The conservation movement seeks to preserve and conserve natural resources (Rome 2003). The conservation movement was created by a group of people who held racists viewpoints during the Roosevelt Era as shown by their involvement in eugenics and expressed sentiments toward nonwhite people. Gifford Pinochet, head of the National Conservation Commission and new Forest Service also served on the International Eugenics Congress and the American Eugenics Society (Purdy 2015). In these societies, eugenics, or the selection of desired traits, was “advocated as a system that would allow “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable”” (Wilson 2017). In this case, nonwhite people were viewed as the less suitable race. Racist feelings can be found in comments like those made by the founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir, when he assured the public in 1901 that most of the Native Americans were dead, and he deplored the life of the Native Americans still in existence (Purdy 2015). Even President Roosevelt himself exalted the white supremacist work “The Passing of a Great Race” by Maddison Grant, the book that Adolf Hitler declared his bible (Purdy 2015). All in all, this era was not one of equality or inclusion of nonwhite races.
Past Examples of Environmental Racism and Legislative
The environmental justice movement was brought to life when protestors staged a massive protest to prevent a toxic waste dump from being established in a small, primarily black community in Warren County, North Carolina in 1982 (US Department of Energy 2017). The protest prompted two major studies which examined the relationship between race and the placement of hazardous waste sites. The first study, conducted by the General Accounting Office (GOA), analyzed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) decisions and found that population in communities where hazardous waste landfills are located usually have a black majority (US Department of Energy 2017). The second study was a scathing report issued by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice released in 1987 which said “the nature of the environmental movement…[which] has historically been white and middle upper class in its orientation” (Commission for Racial Justice 1987:11) contributed to the little involvement of racial and ethnic communities in environmental action. This report, titled “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States”, investigated the “the extent to which African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans and others [were] exposed to hazardous wastes in their community” (Commission for Racial Justice 1987:9). The study found that hazardous waste facilities were disproportionally found in communities with high minority populations. Since the report suggested that race was a contributing factor in the location of these facilities, the commission called on governmental agencies to address these conditions (Commission for Racial Justice 1987:15). In the report, the commission particularly pointed at the Reagan Administration’s “reduction of domestic programs to monitor the environment and protect public health” (Commission for Racial Justice 1987:9) as detrimental. This reduction referred to the administration’s cuts to the EPA’s budget, the selection of EPA leadership who intentionally avoided intervention, and the appointment of members to the judiciary who would form future federal environmental policy (Kovacic 1991:674-76).
However, opponents of both studies argued that factors other than race lead to the high prevalence of proximity between minority communities and hazardous waste sites (US Department of Energy 2017). Some argued that hazardous waste placement decisions are based on low cost of land which creates favorable business climates while others suggest that poor- minority people move into areas already hosting such facilities because the land is cheaper (US Department of Energy 2017). Nevertheless, the findings of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice and other environmental studies lead to a meeting between the EPA and the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss the environmental risks facing this population (Geltman, Gill, and Jovanovic 2016). Finally, President Clinton issued the Executive Order 12898, or Federal Actions To Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations, along with the “Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Environmental Justice and Executive Order 12898” to address environmental racism (Geltman, Gill, and Jovanovic 2016). The MOU “required federal agencies to ensure that all health and environmental programs receiving federal financial assistance did not discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin” (Geltman, Gill, and Jovanovic 2016). During the Bush administration, opponents of EO 12898 argued that the legislature was detrimental to the economy and had failed to address poor economic growth in minority communities which they saw as the true cause of the disparity. (Geltman, Gill, and Jovanovic 2016).
Present Environmental Racism and Legislative Action
Environmental hazards continue to disproportionally affect minority groups. However, the definition of hazard has been expanded past exposure to toxic waste treatment plants. One such example is case of the water crisis in Flint Michigan. Although the nation became aware of this crisis in January 2016 when the mayor, governor, and President Obama instituted a state of emergency for the city, the citizens of Flint had been supplied contaminated water for more than a year as shown by a boiling water advisory water warning issued by the county in August of 2014 (Michigan Civil Rights Commission 2017:1). Although many have focused on how the technical aspects of monitoring the water and decisions made at different levels of management contributed to the crisis, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission(MCRC) has found that the underlying issue in the case of Flint Michigan is historical, systemic race segregation (Michigan Civil Rights Commission 2017). During the era of Jim Crow Laws, discriminatory laws existed in Flint that restricted African Americans in to live in two neighborhoods which lead to overcrowding. African Americans in Flint were also limited to working the most demeaning jobs in the GM corporation which provided employment for the majority of the town (Michigan Civil Rights Commission 2017: 39). However, during World War II when most white men were shipped out to battle, African Americans were hired to fill the shortages in the factories and had access to higher paying positions in the company which lead to a huge growth in the black population. They, however, were still limited to segregated housing (Michigan Civil Rights Commission 2017: 40) It was not until after a violent protest during the Civil rights movement in 1967 that fair housing was established (Michigan Civil Rights Commission 2017: 66). During what is known as “white flight”, the majority of white members of the Flint community left the city with their wealth to move to the suburbs while blacks stayed inside the inner city (Michigan Civil Rights Commission 2017: 68). In short, the racial housing policies lead to the “creation of a majority black city with an outsized and decaying infrastructure and mostly white suburban communities” (Michigan Civil Rights Commission 2017: 85). Meanwhile, the Flint River was being polluted by GM and its suppliers (Columbia University: Mailman School of Public Health 2016). Thus, when the state-appointed emergency manager decided to switch the water supply to the Fling river because of pressure to cut spending, the chemicals in the water eroded the city’s lead pipes leaking lead into the water supply and poisoning the black-majority communities of Flint (Columbia University: Mailman School of Public Health 2016). The Michigan Civil Rights Commission’s report states “a legacy of discrimination… has brought the City of Flint to where it now finds itself – with a majority of its residents being people of color, and their complaints, along with those of their white neighbors, largely ignored” (Michigan Civil Rights Commission 2017: 3).
The conclusions of recent reports attest to a continued need for further improvement of government response to environmental racism. Nevertheless, unlike in the past, a lack of legislation of is not the problem. Simply, governmental agencies fail to implement such environmental justice policies. In 2003, a report titled “Not in My Backyard: Executive Order 12,898 and Title VI as Tools for Achieving Environmental Justice” issued by the United States Commission on Civil Rights “found that federal agencies had not yet fully incorporated environmental justice into their core missions, or established accountability outcomes for federally funded programs” (US Commission on Civil Rights 2016: 1). This failure was due to lack of enforcement and inconsistency across the federal government agencies (Geltman, Gill, and Jovanovic 2016). In 2011 President Barak Obama signed another “Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Environmental Justice and Executive Order, 12898” to address environmental justice in policies. His administration also composed the draft for “Plan EJ 2014” to “create a systemic, cross-agency approach to incorporating environmental justice into federal activities” (Geltman, Gill, and Jovanovic 2016). Then in early 2016, the US Commission on Civil Rights held briefings on the EPA’s actions since the 2003 report and found that the EPA continues to “struggle to provide procedural and substantive relief to communities of color impacted by pollution… lack of substantive results that would improve the lives of people living in already overly-burdened communities…[and] does not take action when faced with environmental justice concerns until forced to do so. When they [did] act, they [made] easy choices and outsource[d] any environmental justice responsibilities onto others.” (US Commission on Civil Rights 2016: 2). Additionally, the EPA failed to convict recipients of federal funding under violation of Title IV, the section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which “provides a statutory basis for seeking relief from discriminatory activity in federally funded programs or activities” (US Commission on Civil Rights 2016:10). In short, the Commission found that the EPA had failed to implement environmental justice and to address environmental racism. As a result, in October of 2016, the EPA released the EJ 2020 Action Agenda as the agency’s new plan for 2016-2020 to address environmental justice challenges (EPA 2017).
While legislature created under the Obama Administration held promise to address environmental racism, the current administration’s proposed policies have generated uncertainty as to future of the environmental justice movement and to the continuation of past advances. Scott Pruitt, the head of the EPA appointed by the Trump Administration, has vowed to cut the EPA budget and eliminate programs, including the environmental justice program (Marsh and Watkins 2017) (McKenna 2017). The response from environmental justice advocates has ranged from critical to outraged. The campaign director of the Sierra Club, John Coequyt, said “to cut the Environmental Justice program at the EPA is just racist” (Marsh and Watkins 2017). In response to the proposed budget cuts, Mustafa Ali, the head of the environmental justice program at the EPA, resigned and wrote a letter to Pruitt outlining the importance of the program (McKenna 2017). One administrator from the Obama administration stated that “the money that is involved is not noticeable…the only reason to eliminate it would be to send a message-they don’t care about the needs of most vulnerable communities” (McKenna 2017).
How Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice Relate to Politics of Health
Both environmental racism and environmental justice relate to politics of health because they are linked to the concepts of structural violence, racialization, and biological citizenship. Environmental racism is a result of structural violence. The case of Flint clearly shows how institutions and their policies target minority populations. This is evident in the actions of the housing sector with discriminatory laws forcing the African American populations to live in certain parts of the city leading to overcrowding. Second, the hiring policies of GM limited African Americans to living in low socioeconomic conditions. Additionally, GM polluted the water because the population did not have a voice. All of these actions made the citizens of Flint vulnerable to the actions of state officials more concerned with balancing budgets than protecting those at risk.
Not only are they related to structural violence, but they promote racialization. As primarily minority communities suffer because of hazardous waste exposure, the negative impacts of hazards waste in the United States are now associated with certain races, primarily African Americans, Hispanics, or Native Americans. Thus, it has become a racialized issue. The detrimental health effects associated with this issue are not seen as problems for white America.
Finally, environmental racism opens the door for biological citizenship. The exposure to toxic materials detrimentally effects health as shown by the lead poisoning in the Flint water crisis. Potentially, those affected can use their exposure to receive attention from the rest of the country through the media and receive supplies and healthcare from the government. In other words, they can use their damaged bodies to receive benefits. In short, environmental racism and environmental justice embody key concerns of politics of health study.
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