Environmental Racism

To address the disproportionate presence of pollutants in minority communities, activism addressing environmental racism brings strategies of the civil rights and anti-war movements—legal actions and civil disobedience, political action and public education. In 1979, sociologist Robert D. Bullard showed a pattern [Page 533]by the city of Houston, Texas, of placing waste in African American communities. Bullard served as an expert witness in Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, the first lawsuit to challenge environmental racism using civil rights law. Bullard's work, which inspired hundreds of grassroots organizations, shattered the myth that minorities and financially poor people are not concerned about environmental issues.

In 1982, more than 500 people were arrested for protesting the routing of chemical waste into predominantly African American Warren County, North Carolina. And the term environmental racism entered colloquial speech after a 1987 study by the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice pinpointed race as a key predictor for the placement of hazardous waste.

The 1990 Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards, held at the University of Michigan, galvanized public debate, and 1991 saw the first National People of Color Environmental Summit. The movement inspired the 1994 founding of the Office of Environmental Equity within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, formed to advise the EPA. An executive order signed by President Clinton in 1996, “Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations,” builds on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, forbidding racial discrimination in government-funded initiatives.

Industry representatives have argued that many sites were industrial first, and minority communities later. Activists countered that discrimination includes steering minority groups into contaminated areas and that racial discrimination does not occur in a vacuum. As poverty, age, sex, education levels, and unemployment are also implicated, environmental racism is addressed within the broader environmental justice movement. To augment diverse alliances, groups including Tennessee's Highlander Center, the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, and New York State's Labor and Environment Network consider the social and economic construction of sex, race, age, and disability. Increasingly, activists urge that the movement must ensure democratic participation in production decisions in order to challenge root causes of pollution and injustice.