Environmental racism
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In short, “environmental racism” is a phenomenon by which environmental legislation/practices/consequences have a disproportionately large (negative) impact on certain races/ethnic groups. This may be because factories which produce toxic pollutants/emissions are disproportionately built in minority areas, or because areas prone to flooding or other natural disasters tend to have more minorities living there, but can also be on a more global scale such as the impact of electronics recycling and electronic waste management which is mostly felt by China, where the rest of the world outsources it to.
Basically it’s when environmental factors disproportionately affect a certain minorty group. This is, of course, is caused only by racism and abosolutely no other factors.
Consider this – There is a correlation between a lack of wealth and the locations of energy production sources (and by extension, pollution sources). This correlation is based upon the availability of cheap land located in the proximity of production sources.
As the immediate areas around pollutant sources is considered to be undesirable, the low cost of entry and the urbanization of the US throughout the 20th century led to a significant number of disadvantaged people (whether minorities or just poor) to settle in these areas.
Utilities and factories, for the most part, were built away from residential and commerce areas as cities began to grow. But through urbanization, sprawl, and density growth, the cost of living in the *old town* areas of a city became more expensive. For the poor, the cost of living in the city, or city adjacent, was paid for through the decisions to accept the environmental conditions associated with the cheaper land near the industrial centers. (Though this statement isn’t completely fair to put out there, as many people did not realize the inherent risk associated with living downwind of things like a factory or a smelter at the time.)
Business practices through regulation has changed drastically in the past hundred years, but the encroachment upon industrial areas have created neighborhoods next door to industry.
When the word *racism* is used, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And many average homeowners would scoff at the idea, as the individual homeowner doesn’t feel responsible for the value of land next to a refinery. It would be easy to write the whole term off as *disproportional levels of exposure to pollutant sources based upon wealth*, but there have been cases where skin color did make a difference. Consider the term, **Red Lining**. This was the practice that banks in some locations used to determine where a mortgage could be sold to a minority. And often times, the areas below the red line was adjacent to those industrial areas. So if you were a person of color and wanted to benefit from living in an urban center, you’d be driven to purchase in the less desirable locations.
While the process of red lining is illegal and (knock on wood) no longer practiced, the effects it had have been long term. It has created low value housing in areas where the lower working class are more likely to live. While industry has made great leaps and bounds to clean up their operations, the environmental damage has already been done. The damage is often long term, and not easily fixed, especially once you have people living in the areas of contamination.
Problem: Rich people make and influence laws. Rich people need to throw things away just like the rest of us. Rich people don’t want to live next to dumps.
Solution: Rich people that make laws build dumps next to poor people’s houses because none of the poor people have enough money or power to tell them no. These poor people are usually minorities, or all live in a certain low-income area.
(apply this to any other source of pollution, dumping, water quality, environmental threat, resource insecurity)
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