Environmental Racism

Environmental racism is intentional or unintentional racial discrimination in environmental decision-making, systematic exclusion of people of color from the mainstream environmental movement, negligent enforcement of environmental protections, laws and regulations along racial lines, and disproportionate distribution of environmental burdens on racial and ethnic minorities where they live, work, and play.

Environmental racism has been endemic throughout U.S. history as a parallel story deeply rooted in the ideological constructions of race, nature, and society. Environmental racism can be traced to colonial dispossession of Native American homelands to their expulsion from national parks and wilderness areas for the benefit of 19th century white, middle-class tourists and environmentalists, such as John Muir. For the African-American community, slavery's expropriation of environmental knowledge, reconstruction-era land loss, and consequent rural exodus to segregated urban centers, forcibly reconfiguring the community's relationship to the natural world. In the 20th century, racial and ethnic minorities have faced increasing environmental hazards as they represent large percentages of the urban working class exposed to the toxic threats of industrial society in the workplace to neighborhoods yet excluded from the mainstream environmental movement.

Within these larger trends in American history, key moments further refined the meaning of environmental racism as part of the contemporary movement for environmental justice. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United Farm Workers' Union (UFW), led by César Chávez, mobilized the first labor movement to address an environmental injustice—the hazards of pesticide exposure of Latinos and Filipinos in the fields of California. By the early 1970s and early 1980s, waste-facility siting controversies rose to national attention as the Love Canal incident transformed the question industrial contamination and toxics into a political issue. But in 1982, popular protest and mobilization against the planned hazardous waste dump for 40 thousand cubic yards of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB)-contaminated soil in Warren County, a predominantly AfricanAmerican community in North Carolina, is widely viewed the transformative event in the environmental justice movement.

During the Warren County struggle over the planned waste dump, church activists and the nationally recognized civil rights leader Reverend Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. drew widespread attention to the unequal burden of African Americans to hazardous waste storage sites and the community's marginalization in environmental decisionmaking. As a direct result of grassroots mobilization in Warren County, Dr. Chavis commissioned the United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice (UCCCRJ) to examine race and location of toxic waste sites. The groundbreaking report Toxic Waste and Race in the United States (UCCCRJ 1987) was the first national study to document the strong correlation between race and hazardous landfill locations at a national level. Moreover, Dr. Chavis first articulated the term environmental racism for a national audience during the presentation of the UCCCRJ report at the National Press Club in Washington D. C.