{"id":2645,"date":"2019-01-17T16:49:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-17T16:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/?p=2645"},"modified":"2025-04-29T16:51:17","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T16:51:17","slug":"environmental-racism-killing-people-of-color","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/2019\/01\/17\/environmental-racism-killing-people-of-color\/","title":{"rendered":"Environmental racism killing people of color"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>WASHINGTON, D.C.<\/strong>&nbsp;\u2013 Decades ago, civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. BenjaminChavis Jr., who now serves a president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, coined the term, \u201cenvironmental racism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It not only proved a true term, but it also linked several eras to a present day that still harkens back to centuries of demeaning and demoralization of Black Americans since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade 500 years ago. Once the slave trade ended, other oppressive eras ensued \u2013 the Antebellum period, the Dred Scott decision, the American Civil War; Jim Crow; racial terrorism, the Civil Rights Movement and, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, environmental racism, which has kept an immovable wedge between African-Americans and the rest of America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In noting that environmental justice is an important part of the struggle to improve and maintain a clean and healthful environment \u2013 particularly for African-Americans, who have traditionally lived, worked and played closest to the sources of pollution \u2013 Chavis said that&nbsp;environmental racism is racial discrimination in environmental policy making and the unequal enforcement of the environmental laws and regulations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIt is the deliberate targeting of people-of-color communities for toxic waste facilities and the official sanctioning of a life-threatening of poisons and pollutants in people-of-color communities,\u201d he said.&nbsp;\u201cIt is also manifested in the history of excluding people of color from leadership in the environmental movement.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With President Donald Trump castigating the science of global warming, it\u2019s little wonder that today\u2019s environmental policies not only target people of color when it comes to the placement and operation of unhealthy facilities, they also exclude people of color from being a part of the policy making process \u2013 even though they are the ones who are usually most directly negatively impacted by environmental injustices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThe underlying message of&nbsp;environmentally&nbsp;racist tactics and strategies is that certain neighborhoods and certain&nbsp;people matter less than others, and that geographical vulnerability is inevitable, when in fact it is&nbsp;socially constructed to be this way,\u201d said Dr. Deborah Cohan, an associate professor of Sociology in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of South Carolina \u2013 Beaufort. \u201cThe message is that some groups of people and some neighborhoods are okay to be dumped on&nbsp;and treated as garbage. After all, garbage is trash; it is what we\u2019ve decided we no&nbsp;longer need&nbsp;or have any use for. It\u2019s what we wish to dispose of as we have decided it has no value.&nbsp;The problem with racism and society\u2019s response to it is that we have failed to see this most basic thing; that in order to do that much damage to a community, one must so thoroughly objectify and dehumanize the people&nbsp;in it that they become things that can be discarded and forgotten about. People\u2019s ability to thrive under these hostile&nbsp;conditions is greatly compromised.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While many celebrated the end of&nbsp;Scott Pruitt\u2019s&nbsp;time as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, others argued that his brief tenure could have a lasting impact on marginalized communities dealing with poor health, water contamination, or air pollution, because of environmental injustice. And, Trump\u2019s policies revealed that the president himself cares little if at all about environmental racism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Studies have shown that Black and Hispanic children&nbsp;are more likely to develop asthma&nbsp;than their white peers, as are poor children, with research suggesting that higher levels of smog and air pollution in communities of color is a factor. A&nbsp;2014 study, as reported by VOX, found that people of color live in communities that have more nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that exacerbates asthma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The EPA\u2019s own research further supported this. Earlier this year, a paper&nbsp;from the EPA\u2019s National Center for Environmental Assessment found that when it comes to air pollutants that contribute to issues like heart and lung disease, Blacks are exposed to 1.5 times more of the pollutant than whites, while Hispanics were exposed to about 1.2 times the amount of non-Hispanic whites. People in poverty had 1.3 times the exposure of those not in poverty. Even so, under Pruitt enforcement at the EPA has dropped considerably, with civil rights cases suffering in particular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cEnvironmental&nbsp;racism is real. As documented in Richard Rothstein\u2019s 2017 book,&nbsp;\u2018The Color of Law,\u2019 extensive federal, state and local government practices designed to create and maintain housing segregation also assured that polluting facilities like industrial plants, refineries, and more were located near Black, Latino and Asian American neighborhoods,\u201d said Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for The Greenlining Institute, a public policy advocacy group in Oakland. \u201cExtensive data show that low-income communities of color still breathe the worst air and have excessive rates of pollution-related illnesses like asthma and other respiratory problems. These problems won\u2019t fix themselves. As we move away from oil, coal and gas to fight climate change, we must consciously bring clean energy resources and investment into communities that were for too long used as toxic dumping grounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What\u2019s more, a scan of&nbsp;environmental&nbsp;boards, C-suites, foundations, campaigns and funding, reveals a pronounced lack of diversity within the&nbsp;environmental movement that results in a white progressive world view that still values science and the physical landscape more than people \u2013 especially Black and brown people \u2013 according to Felicia&nbsp;Davis, founder and CEO of the HBCU Green Fund and sustainability director at Clark Atlanta University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThese communities are also less affluent and more likely to be located near, and experience,&nbsp;environmental&nbsp;hazards. Katrina and Flint exemplify&nbsp;environmental&nbsp;racism addressed by&nbsp;environmental&nbsp;justice advocates,\u201d said Davis, who\u2019s also the author of \u201cAir of Injustice,\u201d and serves&nbsp;on the boards of Green 2.0, The Chattahoochee River Keepers, and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation. \u201cThere is simply no denying the difference in response to predominantly Black compared to predominantly white communities.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>WASHINGTON, D.C.&nbsp;\u2013 Decades ago, civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. BenjaminChavis Jr., who now serves a president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, coined the term, \u201cenvironmental racism.\u201d It not only proved a true term, but it also linked several eras to a present day that still harkens back to centuries of demeaning [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1666,1425,1653],"class_list":["post-2645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-civil-rights-leader","tag-dr-benjamin-f-chavis-jr","tag-national-newspaper-publishers-association","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2646,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2645\/revisions\/2646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexsamplework.com\/insightnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}