Pollution politics

A brief history of environmental racism and injustice in America

From vast oceans reclaiming isolated island nations to varied natural disasters of intensifying magnitude, the effects of climate change are undeniable. In the midst of everyday conversation about the climate change debate, there has been very little mainstream media coverage of a decades-long, insidious trend: environmental racism and injustice.

Environmental racism refers to the placement of low-income or minority communities in close proximity of environmentally hazardous situations, such as toxic waste and pollution. In turn, environmental injustice operates much in the same way institutionalized racism functions, except it focuses on the infrastructure of the communities in direct relation to environmental racism.

Environmental injustice was an overlooked (or, more accurately, forgotten) aspect of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike of 1968 was largely a fight for economic empowerment for black men working for low wages in dangerous conditions. It was also an early inspiration for the environmental justice movement of the 1980s. The main event of that movement took place in a predominantly African-American community in Warren County, N.C., in 1982. It centered on the “community [being] designated to host a hazardous waste landfill … [that] would accept PCB-contaminated soil that resulted from illegal dumping of toxic waste along roadways,” according to the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Office of Legacy Management page. It resulted in a protest involving hundreds of environmentalists and community activists.

Although the protest was ultimately unsuccessful, the momentum was contagious, and multiple scientific studies investigated possible connections between toxic dump sites and the racial and socioeconomic makeup of neighborhoods. The vast majority of these studies concluded that low-income communities of color were significantly more affected by hazardous waste sites and the resulting pollution because of the communities’ proximity to these sites. On the heels of this revelation, environmental rights organizations in communities of color, like the Indigenous Environmental Network and the West Harlem Environmental Action coalition, began to form.

In the ‘90s, federal initiatives and programs (including the EPA’s Office of Environmental Equity and President Clinton’s Executive Order 12898) were crafted to minimize these racial disparities. According to a 2012 American Bar Association study by senior attorney Albert Huang, environmental justice communities in the early ‘90s “turned to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … as a means to address racial discrimination in the permitting and siting of facilities that release hazardous pollutants and cause environmental health risks.”

Now the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is leaving communities of color behind through their lack of urgency in addressing complaints. Huang notes that the EPA “has failed to take meaningful action on Title VI complaints, leaving a long list of unresolved complaints reaching back to 1993.” Even when the OCR investigates a complaint, underserved communities of color often still continue to languish. In a 2015 study, the Center for Public Integrity found that “in its 22-year history of processing environmental discrimination complaints, the office has never once made a formal finding of a Title VI violation.”

The detrimental health outcomes for low-income communities of color in our nation, state, and city are staggering. According to a study published in March 2018 in the American Journal of Public Health:

“Non-Whites were exposed to 1.28 times more pollution. Blacks faced the greatest amount of such pollution, being exposed to 1.54 times more particulate matter than the overall population. In another study from the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment, it was found that “hydraulic-fracturing oil wells are more likely to be sited in those neighborhoods ... the presence of benzene and other dangerous aromatic chemicals [are] linked to race … [and] strong racial disparities are suspected in the prevalence of lead poisoning.”

It should come as no surprise then that black, Latino, and Native American communities in Tulsa and Oklahoma experience the worst health outcomes.

The Center for Climate Change & Health states:

“As the impacts of climate change become more frequent and extreme, Oklahoma is likely to see warming temperatures and increased variability of precipitation events and storms, which will significantly impact the … respiratory health, food security, and the local agricultural economy of Oklahomans.”

For low-income communities of color in Tulsa—which already contend with substandard housing conditions, higher air pollution rates due to polluting facilities near neighborhoods, and lack of healthy food options—the situation is even more dire.

According to a 2016 Community Health Needs Assessment study by St. John Medical Center, “in Tulsa County, black/African-American, Hispanic/Latino families, and older adults are more likely to live in poverty and experience poorer health outcomes than their white neighbors… [and] two north and south Tulsa ZIP codes (74126 and 74137) less than 25 miles apart had a 10 year difference in life expectancy in 2015.”

In addition to the Trump administration’s attacks on the environment, EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s ongoing work to dismantle the agency he leads, and our local officials’ indebtedness to industry—racist ideologies often support the convictions behind these efforts. Concrete progress won’t occur until we elect officials who aren’t beholden to the industries that create these problems and who will address the underlying racism tied to  anti-environmental practices.