Environmental Racism

Dear Friends,

There are people who claim that we are in a post-racism era now that we have a black President.  Of course that is utter nonsense.  In my view much of the hatred and disrespect shown to President Obama is racism pure and simple.  In any case, racism takes many forms some more subtle than others.

The current rumor is that the Justice Department is not going to take action against the police officer in Ferguson who killed Michael Brown.  If Michael Brown had been a white man from a wealthy family, the result certainly would have been different both in the reaction of the police and the reaction of our "justice" system.

Environmental racism is much less visible and can be too easily forgotten.  Charles Blow wrote today in The New York Times about the environmental racism his hometown faces in a piece entitled "Inequality in the Air We Breathe?" (here).  I am reprinting three of the closing paragraphs, but you should read the entire piece.

Fifteen years ago, Robert D. Bullard published Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. In it, he pointed out that nearly 60 percent of the nation’s hazardous-waste landfill capacity was in “five Southern states (i.e., Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas),” and that “four landfills in minority ZIP codes areas represented 63 percent of the South’s total hazardous-waste capacity” although “blacks make up only about 20 percent of the South’s total population.”
More recently, in 2012, a study by researchers at Yale found that “The greater the concentration of Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans or poor residents in an area, the more likely that potentially dangerous compounds such as vanadium, nitrates and zinc are in the mix of fine particles they breathe.”
Among the injustices perpetrated on poor and minority populations, this may in fact be the most pernicious and least humane: the threat of poisoning the very air that you breathe. 

I thought that it had been a long time since I had heard much about environmental racism and a quick google of the subject confirmed my suspicions.  There were many articles from 1970 through the late 1990s but very few since then.  The most recent report was from The New York Times in May, 2014 (here).  I have reprinted the entire item below.

Three environmental organizations released a study Thursday on the demographics of the 134 million U.S. residents living with the danger or “vulnerability” zones of 3,433 chemical facilities, and the 3.8 million living with the “fenceline” zones closest to potential harm, with the least time to react in the event of a catastrophe.
A key finding:
“The percentage of Blacks in the fenceline zones is 75% greater than for the U.S. as a whole, while the percentage of Latinos in the fenceline zones is 60% greater than for the U.S. as a whole.”

 How can we as individuals and as a society be so uncaring of our fellow human beings?  Racism in all its insidious forms is thriving in the United States and yet where is the outrage?

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal