Environmental Racism
If you have been on social media at all over the past 6 weeks, I bet you have seen the phrase “environmental racism” pop up. It was probably on someone’s Instagram story that you tapped through really quickly and didn’t bother to figure out what it was actually talking about. I’m not blaming you here if you’ve done that! I’ve done that. But then an article popped up on my Twitter feed a couple of days ago that made me really do some looking into what it really means. And it’s pretty jarring. I am going to do my best to break this down into some tiny bite-size pieces so we can all get on the same page with how intense systemic racism really is.
When you first hear about systemic racism and start doing some research, you will mainly find articles on things like racism with schools, jobs, housing, and the medical field. These are all valid and big issues, but it goes even beyond that into things that are not man-made. The best definition I found for this topic is as follows “a type of discrimination where people of low-income or minority communities are forced to live in close proximity of environmentally hazardous or degraded environments, such as toxic waste, pollution, and urban decay." This has been a concept that has been around since the 70s when the term was coined, but was present even before then, like in the horrible, run-down, and dangerous “ghettos” Jewish people were forced to move to during the Holocaust. Another way we saw this happen was in the practice of redlining Black people after World War II. Black soldiers came back with money to actually help their families and purchase homes in predominately white areas, and white people were threatened by this. When a person was redlined, it meant they were denied loans, insurance, and other financial means based on their race or ethnicity and not based on the credit or other assets. It forced Black people and other minorities into more run-down neighborhoods in worse parts of town where it was harder to get jobs. This definitely did not begin the cycle of poverty, but it aided in making it so much worse and helped to keep pushing environmental racism forward (Investopedia). Below I have left a photo of an old redline map where you can see the key. It will explain it all, but the important take away is the red zones are where BIPOC were allowed to live.
Once people quit talking about it and the practice of redlining died down a bit, the damage had already been to a point people were stuck. In the 70s people began to talk about environmental racism and coined this term to try and show what was going on and how bad it was. It wasn’t just racism in the way most people assume it looks; it was putting Black people and other minorities away in dangerous neighborhoods they would then get potentially shoved out of anyway due to gentrification.
A more modern example of environmental racism is what has been happening in Flint, Michigan since 2013 when officials switched the water supply for cost-cutting measures. For those who don’t know, Flint’s water supply was found to be contaminated with high doses of lead when they switched the body of water they were getting their water from. As of 2020, nothing has really been done about this. People who were already sick from the lead have not been compensated for their medical care, and the only thing that has been done to try and help the residents is to give them purifiers to stick on their faucets to try and get some of the lead out. That’s it. Nothing substantial has been done to actually help those in Flint get clean water without the filters, and the main reason seems to be that the community is mainly Black. The community noticed a shift in their water pretty quickly but no one addressed the issues until late in 2015 when many people had already been poisoned (PhysOrg). Not only is it very clear that this is a racist move, but it is also a classicist one. Flint is one of Michigans’ poorest communities and it is clear that since the poor, Black people live there, the state and federal governments are not making it a priority to fix. If this had been a more affluent and white community, I would guarantee you that the switch would have been safer, and if there had been an issue it would have been handled before anyone got sick. Flint is 57% Black, and they are allowing these citizens to live with a level of lead that the EPA deems so high it is toxic waste (HuffPo).
Even though this is not a new topic or idea, it has been brought into the attention of the media with the recent protest, but also with Trump rolling back EPA regulations as soon as he got into office. In 2018 when Trump announced some of the things he wanted to repeal in the EPA, they did their study to show that Trump’s actions proved all things about environmental racism. Minorities are much more likely to live near pollutants and toxic waste zones this in this country, so with Trump rolling back protections and trying to make this country more polluted, minorities are going to be the ones who suffer the most. The EPA regulations were already not great before Trump, but he has made it several times worse by condemning people of color to live in even worse places then they were already being forced to live in. I am no expert on this topic, but the article I was pulling information from in The Atlantic that was extremely informative! I highly recommend it and I have linked it down below.
While I am no expert, I did my best to give the basics of environmental racism into bite-sized pieces, and lamens terms so those non-scientists, like me, can better understand. Look through the articles I have listed down below for more information and please leave any comments with more info if you have it!
Madey
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Cover art found here