Sacred Headwaters #17: Environmental Racism
Environmental racism manifests in many ways, including in the impacts of COVID-19 and climate change. But why does it exist, and why can't we seem to resolve it?
Sacred Headwaters is a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come. If you’re just joining us, consider checking out the first issue for some context and head over to our new table of contents to browse the whole library. The newsletters are not strictly sequential, but this exploration is meant to build on knowledge and understanding over time. Subscribe below if you haven’t already, and please share with friends, family, and colleagues who may be interested:
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Issue #17: Environmental Racism
The term “environmental racism” was defined in 1983 by Benjamin Chavis as follows:
Environmental racism is racial discrimination in environmental policy making, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of color from leadership of the ecology movements
In the mainstream modern discourse, it’s mostly limited to what we traditionally understand as “environmental” impacts — pollution and similar issues — but scholars often use it more broadly, incorporating all socioeconomic impacts of spatially differentiated policy.
Environmental racism manifests in many ways, but it’s important to note that in addition to the impacts it has on its own, it exacerbates the impacts of other crises, including notably both the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The mortality rate of COVID-19 for Black Americans is 3.6 times what it is for whites, adjusted for age, and within certain age groups, the difference is as high as 10 times. This, of course, is because of a huge range of “environmental” causes, including pollution exposure, inadequate access to health care, and more.
Environmental racism also extends beyond a country’s borders. In issue #11, we read (briefly) about e-waste; the global North, a predominantly white and wealthy segment of the world, sends unfathomable amounts of toxic waste to the global South (primarily, African countries), perpetrating a kind of international environmental racism that has very real health impacts. Climate change is another classic example of this: the environmental impacts of the affluent, predominantly white world are overwhelmingly felt by nonwhite countries and communities.
In this issue, we’re going to read some brief introductions to the realities of environmental racism, from “redlining” and its ongoing impacts to the prevalence of pollution (and resultant disease) in nonwhite communities. But we’re also going to ask why — why did this happen, and more importantly, why is it still happening? Are these “market failures” that can be fixed, or are these design features of a system that requires division and marginalization to succeed? Is environmental racism an ongoing manifestation of the concept of “racial capitalism” we read about in issue #16, something that can’t be fixed superficially?
“How Redlining’s Racist Effects Lasted for Decades” (5 minutes)
“Redlining” refers to lenders limiting access to credit based on race. Specifically, it refers to a nationwide practice beginning in the 1930s of using race to classify neighborhoods for “creditworthiness.” It’s also been used more recently to apply to other applications of the same principle, including “pizza redlining” — a refusal to deliver pizza to certain neighborhoods. Redlining (with respect to mortgages) was made illegal by the Fair Housing Act in 1968, but its realities live on in multiple ways. This article looks at a recent study that analyzed neighborhoods that were redlined by the federal government in the 1930s. The authors used statistical analysis and comparison to similar neighborhoods that were not subject to the same credit discrimination to isolate the impacts of redlining on the communities affected and found that today, nearly a century later, those impacts are still significantly discernible. This particular article doesn’t make this claim, but it’s important to recognize that redlining has continued in more subtle ways despite being illegal. A variety of studies argue that segregation and racially discriminatory lending practices were contributing causes of the 2008 financial crisis (video, study). It’s tempting to attribute historic redlining to overt racism and believe we are “moving past” that, but why does it continue to happen and why haven’t we been more effective in resolving what seem like past wrongs?
“Trump's EPA Concludes Environmental Racism Is Real” (10 minutes)
The headline of this piece is a bit of a red herring. In 2018, the EPA (yes, Trump’s EPA) released a study showing that there is compelling evidence that the relationship between environmental conditions and race extends significantly beyond the relationship between environmental conditions and poverty. This is a notable finding because it proves, essentially, that ongoing manifestations of environmental racism aren’t vestiges of past injustice, persisting due to structural poverty (a huge problem in its own right). Rather, ongoing environmental racism is explicitly race-based. Current application of policy and regulation produces racially differentiated outcomes. This conclusion is, hopefully obviously, not new, but it’s a strong statement from a federal agency that runs counter to many public voices on these issues. The article also includes a number of factoids and references that can give some perspective on what the real manifestations of environmental racism look like in the US today. The embedded video (two minutes) is a short, but succinct explanation of the realities of environmental racism.
“Environmental Justice in the 21st Century: Race Still Matters” (30 minutes)
Robert Bullard, the author of this paper, is one of the pre-eminent scholars of environmental racism and environmental justice. Here, he gives a sweeping overview of environmental racism, the legal attempts to resolve it, and the structural reasons they’ve failed, including many examples and statistics demonstrating ongoing (in 2001) environmental racism. More recently, Bullard has been a strong voice arguing that the climate change is a major driver of environmental racism and that its impacts are fundamentally racially differentiated. I like this piece both because it’s a broad conceptual and chronological overview of an issue that’s deeply rooted in history and because Bullard introduces a number of powerful ideas. In particular, he elucidates the idea of “economic blackmail” to explain the situation many marginalized groups find themselves in today, stuck between economic abandonment or hazardous investment that is damaging for their health and their community.
Poor people and poor communities are given a false choice of "no jobs and no development" versus "risky low-paying jobs and pollution."
It’s a perfect frame for understanding much of the ongoing resource exploitation in Indigenous communities in Canada, and of course applies throughout the United States and much of the rest of the world. Bullard also lays out an “environmental justice” framework as a proactive way to design and guide policy that works to mitigate and eliminate environmental racism, though he notes that federal agencies like the EPA may be structurally incapable of re-thinking their approach to these issues.
“Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence” (20 minutes)
In this paper, Laura Pulido draws the connection between the “racial capitalism” scholarship that we read about in the last issue and the environmental justice movement, or what the author calls the “environmental racism gap.” Environmental justice has been part of the mainstream dialogue for forty years now and advocates have had major wins in terms of legislation and specific battles against industry, but the author argues that these obscure a larger picture of failure: that overall, environmental conditions for marginalized groups have not improved, and more, the environmental racism gap — the differential between the environmental conditions of whites and nonwhites — has not improved. To explain this failure, Pulido looks to scholars who argue that racism is a necessary precondition of capitalism. Through that lens, environmental racism becomes less an “externality” or holdover from a time of widespread overt racism and more a matter of state policy. Pulido argues that the environmental justice movement needs to recognize the state’s agency in the perpetration of environmental racism and change advocacy strategies. This may sound fairly radical, but if you return to the previous article, you’ll see that Bullard makes subtly similar arguments in his exploration of an “environmental justice framework” and how existing government agencies and protocols are unable to operate within that paradigm.
…the production of social inequalities by race, class, gender, and nation is not an aberration or the result of market failures. Rather, it is evidence of the normal, routine, functioning of capitalist economies. Modern market economies are supposed to produce social inequalities and environmental inequalities. (David Pellow, Resisting Global Toxics, 2007)
Book Recommendation: Faces of Environmental Racism, Edited by Laura Westra and Bill Lawson
Faces of Environmental Racism is a collection of essays that explore practical and conceptual aspects of environmental racism both domestically and internationally. It caught my eye because of an essay by Charles Mills called “Black Trash.” Mills is the author of The Racial Contract, a book that looks at how traditional Western political philosophy (a la the “social contract”) actually defines a framework of European racialized domination, laying the moral groundwork for colonialism and capitalism. In “Black Trash,” he looks at how spatial characterization — the words and sentiments we use to describe places — are continued racial justifications for domination and colonization. Other essays in this book include a variety of case studies and perspectives on how environmental racism plays out in the global North/South dynamic, questioning whether traditional frames of sustainable development are actually appropriate or capable of resolving environmental injustice.
Runner up this week is Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World, a collection of works of all kinds from around the world focused on climate change and global inequality.
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