Environmental Racism Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Environmental racism is intentional or unintentional racial discrimination in environmental decision-making, systematic exclusion of people of color from the mainstream environmental movement, negligent enforcement of environmental protections, laws and regulations along racial lines, and disproportionate distribution of environmental burdens on racial and ethnic minorities where they live, work, and play.

Environmental racism has been endemic throughout U.S. history as a parallel story deeply rooted in the ideological constructions of race, nature, and society. Environmental racism can be traced to colonial dispossession of Native American homelands to their expulsion from national parks and wilderness areas for the benefit of 19th century white, middle-class tourists and environmentalists, such as John Muir. For the African-American community, slavery’s expropriation of environmental knowledge, reconstruction-era land loss, and consequent rural exodus to segregated urban centers, forcibly reconfiguring the community’s relationship to the natural world. In the 20th century, racial and ethnic minorities have faced increasing environmental hazards as they represent large percentages of the urban working class exposed to the toxic threats of industrial society in the workplace to neighborhoods yet excluded from the mainstream environmental movement.

Within these larger trends in American history, key moments further refined the meaning of environmental racism as part of the contemporary movement for environmental justice. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United Farm Workers’ Union (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, mobilized the first labor movement to address an environmental injustice-the hazards of pesticide exposure of Latinos and Filipinos in the fields of California. By the early 1970s and early 1980s, waste-facility siting controversies rose to national attention as the Love Canal incident transformed the question industrial contamination and toxics into a political issue. But in 1982, popular protest and mobilization against the planned hazardous waste dump for 40 thousand cubic yards of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB)-contaminated soil in Warren County, a predominantly African-American community in North Carolina, is widely viewed the transformative event in the environmental justice movement.

During the Warren County struggle over the planned waste dump, church activists and the nationally recognized civil rights leader Reverend Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. drew widespread attention to the unequal burden of African Americans to hazardous waste storage sites and the community’s marginalization in environmental decisionmaking. As a direct result of grassroots mobilization in Warren County, Dr. Chavis commissioned the United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice (UCCCRJ) to examine race and location of toxic waste sites. The groundbreaking report Toxic Waste and Race in the United States (UCCCRJ 1987) was the first national study to document the strong correlation between race and hazardous landfill locations at a national level. Moreover, Dr. Chavis first articulated the term environmental racism for a national audience during the presentation of the UCCCRJ report at the National Press Club in Washington D. C.

Expanding the Scope

Since the first use of the term environmental racism by Chavis, activists and scholars have expanded the meaning and scope of the term. Initially, “environmental racism” only addressed explicit racist acts in hazardous wastes storage unit locations and the consequent distributive inequities of environmental burdens and toxic exposures. Over the past decade, the grassroots environmental justice movement and academic community, to a lesser degree, have expanded the application of “environmental racism” to include institutional discrimination in decision-making process and procedure of environmental policy making. In 1991, grassroots activists led the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. The Summit resulted in the acceptance of 17 Principles of Environmental Justice that expanded claims of communities of color to participate as equal partners in environmental planning, policy implementation, and enforcement. Moreover, the Summit broadened the scope of environmental justice to include concerns from all vulnerable groups-such as women, children, and the poor.

Social science has explored environmental racism in research since the early 1990s, marked by the seminal publication of Robert Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie (1990). Drawing from strong quantitative and geospatial approaches, social scientists have attempted to “prove” statistically racial discrimination. However, critics have strongly underscored the “racial pitfalls” of highly empiricist approaches that assume racism and discrimination are discrete, overt acts or social artifacts that can be measured through quantitative analysis. Critics argue that this position belies any attempt to examine racism as an ideology operating in a particular political economic system. Recent academic study and mobilization against environmental racism has begun to address how environmental racism operates at the global scale, paying particular attention to toxic trading, global electronics industry, and climate change.

Bibliography:

W. Bowen, “An Analytical Review of Environmental Justice Research: What Do We Really Know?” Environmental Management (v.29, 2002);
R. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality (Westview Press, 1990);
C. Merchant, “Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History,” Environmental History (v.8, 2003);
N. Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (MIT Press, 2004);
L. Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (University of Arizona Press, 1996);
L. Pulido, “A Critical Review of the Methodology of Environmental Racism Research,” Antipode (v.28, 1996);
United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice, Toxic Waste and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice, 1987).