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for whites; African Americans and Puerto Ricans are three times more likely than whites to die from asthma-related causes; and African Americans account for 13 percent of the U.S. population but 26 percent of asthma deaths.
Lack of zoning and poor land-use planning created a pollution nightmare for children living along the petrochemical corridor. The vast majority of residents and school children living along the Houston Ship Channel are Hispanic and African American. Children living within two miles of the channel had a 56 percent greater chance of developing lymphocytic leukemia (Houston Department of Health and Human Services, 2005). This pattern of over-polluting children of color also occurs in cities with zoning. A 2006 California study found that areas that suffer from increased respiratory hazards from air toxics tend to have schools with larger percentages of poor students and students of color (Pastor et al., 2006, p. 337).
The problem of schools near polluting facilities was thrust on the national stage in the USA Today special report Toxic Air and America’s Schools (Morrison, Heath and Jervis 2008). In mapping the nation’s 127,800 public, private, and parochial schools, the investigative reporters found that 20,000 schools—about one in every six—are within a half-mile of a major industrial plant. Nationally, one in three U.S. school children is at risk from a chemical catastrophe. In 2011, a team of University of Michigan researchers found that students of color are more likely than their white counterparts to attend schools in heavily polluted areas (Mohai et al., 2011, pp. 852–862). In Michigan, for example, whereas 44.4 percent of all white students in the state attend schools located in the top 10 percent of the most polluted locations in the state, 81.5 percent of all African American children and 62.1 percent of all Hispanic students attend schools in the most polluted zones.
The University of Michigan researchers also found that air pollution from industrial sources near Michigan public schools jeopardizes children’s health and academic success. Schools located in areas with the highest air pollution levels had the lowest attendance rates and the highest proportions of students who failed to meet state educational testing standards. California researchers found a clear link between toxics near schools and student academic performance in Los Angeles (Pastor, Morello-Frosch, & Sadd, 2006). In El Paso, Texas, residential exposure to air toxics was linked to lower grade point averages among school children (Clark-Reyna, Grineski, & Collins, 2016).
Students of color are hit especially hard by transportation pollution. One in every 11 U.S. public schools, serving roughly 4.4 million students, lies within 500 feet of highways, truck routes, and other roads with significant traffic; 15 percent of schools where more than three-quarters of the students are racial or ethnic minorities are located near a busy road, compared with just 4 percent of schools where the demographics are reversed (Hopkins, 2014). White children make up almost 52 percent of U.S. public school students, yet only 28 percent attend high-risk schools. Black students, by contrast, make up just 16 percent of the total public school population, with 27 percent attending high-risk schools. Latinos constitute 24 percent of public school students, and 34 percent attend high-risk schools (Grineski & Collins, 2018).
This systematic overexposure of African Americans to air pollution was borne out by a 2018 U.S. EPA study that found race was more powerful than poverty in predicting exposure to air pollution (Mikati et al., 2018). In 46 states, people of color live with more air pollution than whites. African Americans are exposed to 1.54 times more fine particulate matter than whites, Hispanics are exposed to 1.2 times more than whites, and those below the poverty line are exposed to 1.35 times more than those above the line. The overall pattern reveals that a disproportionate share of places where people of color live, work, play, and learn are toxic “hotspots” with dangerous operations that pose elevated health threats—especially to vulnerable children of color.
A New Generation Fighting to Make Black Lives Matter
Blacks lives matter less than white lives because of systemic racism that is baked into every institution in America—whether in voting, education, employment, health, the environment, or the criminal justice system. The environmental racism you will read about in this text, such as the Flint water crisis, is no fluke. In the United States, some people and communities have the “wrong complexion for protection” (Bullard & Wright, 2012). The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement emerged in response to the 2012 death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin and the 2013 acquittal of his vigilante killer, George Zimmerman. The unpopular verdict sparked outrage, protests, and the Black Lives Matter hashtag posting on social media by three black women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. BLM co-founder Alicia Garza gave a succinct overview of what the Black Lives Matter movement stands for: “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (Garza, 2014).
The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag used social media to effectively shine the national spotlight on racialized state-sanctioned killings of unarmed black men. Black Lives Matter activists exploited social media through videos and testimony where African Americans were recorded being shot, beaten, choked, and/or killed by police or vigilantes (Pellow, 2016). The movement gained national attention for its street demonstrations and mass protests following the 2014 police killing of two African American males: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City (Day, 2015; Luibrand, 2015). BLM protests expanded into dozens of chapters in the United States with a primary focus on addressing racial profiling, racial inequality, and racism in the U.S. criminal justice system (Cullors-Brignac, 2016). The BLM network developed 13 core principles to guide their work; among them are diversity, empathy, restorative justice, being unapologetically black, and intergenerationality (Barre, 2016, p. 2).
Systemic policies of police violence and killing, racial profiling, overpolicing, overticketing, arresting, and jailing in the criminal justice system all emanate from the same systemic forces that target, overpollute, and poison black people where they live, work, play, and attend school. Just as black people are special targets of state-sanctioned police violence, black communities and their inhabitants are also targets of state-sponsored permits to pollute and of pollution violence (poisoning men, women, children, and unborn babies is a form of violence) by industries that cause premature illnesses and deaths in the black community.
Social media and videos taken on smartphones have allowed Americans to see in living color how racialized policing kills blacks with impunity. Racism in the criminal justice system kills and denies black people equal justice and equal protection under the laws guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Environmental racism kills more slowly (without the vantage point of videos) and harms a disparate share of black people. Racism denies them the same rights of equal protection and equal justice by targeting black communities for environmentally risky and polluting facilities—resulting in elevated rates of cancer and respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses such as heart disease and stroke. Racism is making Black America sick.
Dismantling systemic racism is a core guiding principle of both the environmental justice movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. In the final analysis, there is only one movement—the movement that fights for an American society that values black lives the same way it values white lives. Erasing American racism from our society will make us a much healthier, safer, and more just nation.
Deepening Our Understanding
1 This chapter has reviewed a voluminous quantity of evidence that people of color endure more than their fair share of environmental burden, at root due to structural racism.Where are the environmental burdens in your own community (where you are from or where you go to school)? For example, where is garbage taken? Where are toxic substances transferred, stored, or dumped? Where are industries that produce air or water pollution located?Who lives close to these facilities? Does it fit with the dominant national trend that this chapter describes?
2 Video taken on smartphones has aided awareness of Black Lives Matter in terms of police violence. In what ways do you think technologies do or could enable more significant exposure of and activism around environmental justice concerns today?