ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM

If you think Black people are just blowing smoke when we say racism is everywhere, you’d be sadly mistaken. Environmental racism is a silent killer: policies, regulations, and corporate decisions often target Black, and minority communities for “locally undesirable land uses,” exposing them to “toxic and hazardous waste.” Go outside, take a deep breath, and look all around, and it’s unlikely you will see any visual cues or red flags. You’re unlikely to find a Klan robe on your porch, but racism can impact your life all the same. Compared to White Americans, Black Americans are “75% more likely to live near facilities that produce hazardous waste.” Environmental racism is not an accident — it’s by design. Developers are making racially selective decisions, diminishing the land, water, and air quality in Black communities.

This should go without saying, but everyone needs access to a clean environment to be healthy. However, unjust policies contributed to a silent wave of racial violence. Epidemiologist Sharrelle Barber said, “you can’t understand environmental racism without understanding the legacy and the history of residential segregation.” Discriminatory lending practices and racial redlining limited the communities Black people could live in, making it easy for corporations to target them, strategically averting pollution away from majority-White communities. It would be nearly impossible only to target Black communities without racial segregation.

A White person never has to utter a racist slur or engage in violence to harm Black Americans. The Flint Michigan Water Crisis is an example where “residents were exposed to dangerous levels of lead,” which caused “outbreaks of Legionnaire disease.” In addition, the city purposefully diverted Flint’s water supply away from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, which monitors water safety, to the Flint River to save money. Decisions like this contribute to poor health outcomes within the community and diminish trust in public representatives.

The United Nations, human rights experts, insisted that “environmental racism in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ must end.” Sadly, the state has been unwilling to facilitate change or raise public awareness. Within the white-dominated power structure, the solution to environmental pollution is often confined to predominately Black communities. When speaking with my friend who lives in “cancer alley,” she didn’t even realize how dangerous her rural community was or why homes were more affordable in that area.

As the daughter of an environmental lawyer, terms like “cancer alley” were familiar to me. Since my father worked as a petroleum engineer, I learned how organizations like British Petroleum drill in Louisiana, often damaging our wetlands, killing wildlife, and harming coastal communities. Exxon, near Baton Rouge, became one of the top polluters in the United States, continuously pumping toxic fumes into the air that babies, children, women, and men need to survive. Louisiana makes $62.6 billion from oil and gas refineries. While some will brag about the nearly quarter-million jobs the industry produces, we’re not having the conversation we should be having — about the human cost of these profits.

Take, for example, this one facility called Denka Performance Elastometer LLC. Their facility emits “chloroprene, dichloro-2-butene, 1,4-, butadiene, 1,3- and six more carcinogens” and contributes “93.2% of the estimated excess cancer risk here.” While the organization claimed to invest in emission reduction projects in 2018, a 2022 Pro Publica report shows they are one of the worst polluters in Louisiana. Across the country, Black Americans, regardless of income level, “are subjected to higher levels of air pollution than White Americans.” Studies indicated that “dirty air is associated with lung disease, including asthma, as well as heart disease, premature death, and now COVID-19.” We’re living in a society that has systematically prioritized profits over the health of our communities, corporate freedom over the rights of individuals, and tommorowisms instead of engaging in solutions for the here and now.

“Racism is all around you, even in the air you breathe” sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true. And by supporting policies and politicians who deprioritize environmental protections, many White Americans, even those who never took a step in an oil refinery, have contributed to a public health crisis that impacts Black Americans more than any other group. The United Nations called for the end of environmental racism, noting that Black Americans, “descendants of the enslaved people who once worked the land are today the primary victims of deadly environmental pollution that these petrochemical plants in their neighborhoods have caused.”

Environmental racism is a silent killer. The question is, in a society where many people demand to see racial injustice to believe it’s occurring, can scientific data, and urging from the international community make a difference? Perhaps. We should always keep an open ear and heart for solutions, but as long as our government allows these companies to set up shop in Black communities, dumping pollution freely like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, we can expect more of the same.

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