If Blacks Have Worse Health Outcomes than Whites, It’s Because of Their Own Poor Choices
The Intentionality of Environmental Injustice (Myth 3, Part I)
(This is my longest post yet, so pour yourself a cup of coffee and tea and get started!)
Where people live in America matters.
More specifically, where Black people live throughout our history matters (if we care to understand the past) … or, frankly, has never mattered enough in America. Many areas where Blacks were forced to live historically—and (for many) continue to live today—have been heavily compromised, with significant implications for the health of the Black community.
In recent decades, environmental justice has become a relatively popular field of study (and practice). Still, like me, until recently, it was hard to decipher what it really meant. Whereas the field focuses, in part, on promoting greater justice around environmental problems and challenges, the environmental injustices activists attempt to address have been with us for more than a century.
Environmental racism and injustice are all about where people live, predominantly where people of color live, and for the past century, specifically where Black people live.
Landmark Supreme Court Case
A 1926 landmark Supreme Court case, Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Corp., “provided a legal basis for local municipalities to disproportionately place polluting facilities in black neighborhoods while keeping such facilities out of white neighborhoods.”[1]
Yes, that’s right, our U.S. Supreme Court. For more than the first half of U.S. history, the court was a force for the continuation and perpetuation of White supremacy.
As a result, starting in the early twentieth century, local White governments could effectively place whatever they wanted into Black neighborhoods. These neighborhoods became the prime location for landfills, incinerators, factories, and power plants, essentially until today. Meanwhile, “white neighborhoods were consistently protected from intrusive traffic, noise, and pollution generated by such nonresidential uses.”[2]
One of the leading lights of the environmental justice movement, the University of California, Riverside professor Robert Bullard, cuts to the heart of the issue:
“Communities of color have been systematically targeted for the siting of toxic facilities such as sewer treatment plants, garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators, hazardous waste disposal sites, lead smelters, and other risky technologies, thereby exacerbating existing inequities. African Americans are especially hard hit by environmental racism, as they are by other forms of institutionalized discrimination.”[3]
African Americans, when they became aware of the waste and pollution sites and the potential health consequences, fought this politically corrupt system when they could. In fact, Black environmental justice activists mobilized across the decades, from Warren County, North Carolina, to Houston, Texas, to East Los Angeles, California, to Harlem, New York (and many places well beyond), to battle against the government and corporate powers. Despite their battles brought on by the Supreme Court case, they saw nearly a century’s worth of disproportionate placement of such facilities in and near Black, Brown, and lower-income neighborhoods, placing millions at significant risk.[4]
I’ll share a couple of examples that demonstrate the level of intent of these sitings in the first two decades after the court’s decision.
From the mid-1920s to the late 1970s, Houston’s White leaders located all five of the city’s landfills in deep-rooted African American neighborhoods.[5]
In the 1940s, White Los Angeles leaders changed zoning codes for industrial and commercial facilities in Black neighborhoods, enabling junkyards and other polluting facilities to proliferate in South Central. “In 1947, an electroplating plant explosion in this newly developing ghetto killed five local residents (as well as fifteen white factory workers) and destroyed more than one hundred homes.”[6]
1987 Commission for Racial Justice: Toxic Wastes and Race
A high-water mark for the movement came in 1987 when the Commission for Racial Justice published its landmark report, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” which opened the eyes of many to the widespread practice of environmental racism and the widespread damage it caused to Black and other communities of color. Dealing with toxic waste was not new to these communities. For decades, many Black neighborhoods and communities have struggled with the ripple effects of these waste facility sitings.
The report put a spotlight on the issue like never before. It concluded, in part, that “race was so strong a statistical predictor of where hazardous waste facilities could be found that there was only a one-in-10,000 chance of the racial distribution of such sites occurring randomly and that the percentage of minorities living near incinerators was 89 percent higher than the national median.”[7] (emphasis added)
The Commission’s report showed that:
nationally, three out of every five Black and Latino residents lived in neighborhoods with uncontrolled toxic waste sites.
more than fifteen million Black people (just over half of the total Black population in the U.S. at that time) lived in communities with one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites.
Black people were heavily overrepresented in metropolitan areas with the most significant number of uncontrolled toxic waste sites. Every city I list here—Memphis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta—had at least 90 sites and as many as 173.[8]
21st Century: Same Old Unjust Story
Yet, not enough changed after the uproar from the report died down. A follow-up report from the Commission 20 years later (2007) showed that the statistics from the above three bullets had changed little over time.
That report recounted that:
Racial disparities for people of color exist in nine out of the ten EPA regions nationally.
Forty of the forty-four states with commercial hazardous waste facilities had disproportionately high percentages of people of color in the neighborhoods where those facilities were located.
States with disproportionately high numbers of Black residents in neighborhoods with toxic waste sites included Alabama, Michigan, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.[9]
In 2021, Bullard wrote about a 2021 study (34 years later) published in Sciences Advances journal, which found that Black, Indigenous, and Other People of Color (BIPOC) communities “are exposed to disproportionately high levels of ambient fine particulate air pollution, the largest environmental cause of human mortality.” (emphasis mine)[10]
We hopefully remember George Floyd’s final words before a Minneapolis policeman murdered him: “I can’t breathe.” But the pollution so many African Americans face in intentionally disinvested neighborhoods leaves so many in those communities saying those same silent words, ‘We can’t breathe.’
Black and Latino neighborhoods are generally more subjected to and more impacted by airborne pollution than those of any other race. For many, chronic exposure to airborne pollution leads “a host of heart and lung issues.” Studies show that, annually, air pollution causes more than 30,000 deaths, and a disproportionately high number of those are African Americans.
The Legacy of Redlining
Many environmental injustices point back to the 1926 Supreme Court decision. Still, there’s an equally racist architect of these injustices: White-led redlining and protracted residential segregation laws, policies, and practices throughout the 20th century. (In fact, more than half of the eight myths in my book have direct ties back to these.)
The ubiquitous redlining of Black neighborhoods from the 1930s to the 1970s (and the ongoing more implicit practices after that) meant a profound lack of investment and intentional disinvestment in those neighborhoods. In turn, disinvestment caused deteriorating housing, infrastructure decline, concentrated poverty, declining employment, and inferior school quality—to name a few—in these same neighborhoods.
All while White leaders directed investment as well as ongoing development, maintenance, repair, and upkeep in majority-White neighborhoods (both urban and suburban).
Because of the Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Corp decision, countless polluting facilities—landfills, fossil fuel plants, new highways, etc.—were also sited in Black neighborhoods.
What are some other consequences of these policies and decisions?
It’s In the Water
You probably remember the Flint, Michigan, lead-in-the-water crisis a decade ago. A Republican-appointed emergency manager (the city was under receivership at the time) switched the city’s drinking supply from a water system originating in Detroit to one coming from the highly polluted Flint River. Flint, just so you remember, is a majority African American city where 45% of the residents live below the poverty line.
What could possibly go wrong?
A Flint pediatrician found that the “incidence of elevated blood-lead levels in children citywide had nearly doubled since 2014—and nearly tripled in certain neighborhoods.” And she noted, “Lead is one of the most damning things you can do to a child in their entire life-course trajectory.” In Flint, nearly 9,000 children were supplied lead-contaminated water for 18 months.”[11]
This would never happen in a wealthy, majority-White community.
Yet, as I write in my book, similar disturbing water crises have cropped up elsewhere in the decade since in places like
Newark, NJ: In 2019, 10% of Newark’s drinking water was 4x the level that requires the federal government to act (the city is roughly 48% Black and 37% Hispanic). Tragically, Newark has the highest number of children with elevated blood-lead levels anywhere in New Jersey.[12]
Jackson, MS: in 2022, the entire city of 150,000 residents (83% Black) didn’t have clean water and were under multiple boil water advisories for as long as 40 days. In 2020, the Republican governor vetoed bipartisan legislation to address the city’s aging water infrastructure; then, in 2021, the state legislature blocked $44 million for water and sewer repairs.[13]
But these are not isolated incidents. In her research, Kristi Pullen Fedinick from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found that “drinking water protections are not fairly distributed across all communities. Our analysis found that a number of communities shouldered a heavier burden: communities of color, low-income communities, and communities that don’t have access to adequate housing and transportation options.”[14]
There’s significant overlap across those three demographics.
Urban Heat Islands
In a 2020 study conducted by the Virginia Commonwealth and Portland State universities, researchers found that in almost every one of the 108 urban areas they analyzed nationally, the temperature in originally redlined areas was far higher than those that were not. In some cases, the difference in temperature in a city was thirteen degrees.[15] A separate University of California-San Diego study found significant disparities in nearly three-quarters of more than 1,000 urban counties nationwide.
This is known as the urban heat island effect, and it occurs because of the legacy of redlining and other race-based disinvestment. These neighborhoods typically have far fewer trees and fewer parks, which means more open pavement to absorb and retain the sun’s rays, exposing Black and Brown and low-income residents to more dangerous heat extremes than people in more affluent and Whiter urban neighborhoods. An example? In Richmond, VA, trees and parks cover 42% of the land in wealthier, Whiter neighborhoods compared with only 12% in poorer and majority-Black neighborhoods.[16]
How do urban heat islands impact health? For example, in New York City, “Black residents die from heat stress at double the rate of white residents.”[17] However, it doesn’t just occur in New York City; the same is true in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, or any urban area around the country. Many households in these neighborhoods either don’t have air-conditioning or those systems don’t function well enough to keep the home cool. Health problems due to heat exposure can begin when the inside temperature reaches the mid-eighties.
In the majority-Black neighborhood of Gilpin in Richmond, heat worsens what are already high rates of asthma, diabetes, and blood pressure for residents living there.
Does this mean that White communities and neighborhoods are never subject to the same pollution exposures? Broadly, they are not. However, you certainly will find similar siting of hazardous and polluting facilities in areas of high poverty that are predominantly White. So, these issues have had a race-based (more so) and a class-based dimension for at least a century.
I could go on here, but instead want to leave you with some optimism that this dynamic can shift.
Seeds of Change
In May of this year, President Biden announced a $3 billion lead pipe replacement initiative as part of the recent Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Implementation will span 2024 to 2026. Half of the funds will focus investment in communities that we have disadvantaged in the past. The funds will be distributed across many states to replace 1.7 million lead pipes. Illinois is slated to receive the largest share ($240 million) due to a March study that found “more than two-thirds of children under the age of 6 in Chicago may have been exposed to lead-contaminated water.”[18]
Houston lawmakers passed an ordinance to prioritize neighborhoods we have marginalized for flood protection
“Denver has passed a new sales tax to fund parks and tree-planting, and city officials say they would like to add more green space in historically redlined areas.” [19]
Richmond is making racial equity the core focus of its new climate action and resilience plan and the city’s long-term master plan stipulates increased tree canopy in its hottest neighborhoods (almost all in Black neighborhoods).
Grassroots efforts in Baltimore are advancing numerous environmental equity practices across numerous community-based organizations such as Fight Blight Bmore, Black Yield Institute, Baltimore Tree Trust, Green & Healthy Home Initiatives, and Bikemore.[20]
And the list of impressive environmental justice and equity projects runs far longer than the six examples.
Yet, let’s return to why these initiatives must happen—in thousands of locations across the nation and through policies at local, state, and federal levels.
The painful fact is that all the racist policies I’ve covered here embraced a belief system and viewpoint that—as subconscious as it may be now—African Americans and the many neighborhoods where they live are not genuinely worthy of life-enhancing investment. That is painful to write and eminently true.
So, we have never really invested in African American neighborhoods for most of our nation’s history and rarely do, still today, meaning many of these neighborhoods bear far more significant environmental burdens than the average American.
Nor have we as a nation cared to ascertain the health consequences of these practices on Black people or Black communities. Those consequences pile up year by year in terms of lower life expectancy, high rates of asthma, heart disease, and stroke, and increasing cancer rates, which is why, in my next post, I will explore the health consequences of these policies.
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EXPLORE FURTHER
In addition to the articles I’ve footnoted above, there are others you might want to read to explore further.
“Principles of Environmental Justice,” https://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html.
Commission for Racial Justice, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites,” United Church of Christ (1987), pp. xiii–xiv, https://www.ucc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ToxicWastesRace.pdf.
Ivana Ramirez, “10 Examples of Environmental Racism and How it Works,” YES Magazine April 22, 2021, https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2021/04/22/environmental-racism-examples.
Emilia Calma, “The Geography of Environmental Toxins in the District of Columbia,” D.C. Policy Center, October 15, 2020, https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/environmental-toxins/.
If you want to dig even deeper, Chapter 3/Myth 3 of my book, It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field, recounts these issues in detail and includes 45 endnotes that can support your research further. The footnotes from this newsletter are directly below.
ENDNOTES
[1] Julia Mizutani, “In the Backyard of Segregated Neighborhoods: An Environmental Justice Case Study of Louisiana,” The Georgetown Environmental Law Review, 31:363 (2019), p. 367.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Robert D. Bullard, “Race and Environmental Justice in the United States,” Yale Journal of Environmental Law, 18:319 (1993), p. 321.
[4] Linda Villarosa, “Pollution Is Killing Black Americans. This Community Fought Back,” The New York Times, July 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/magazine/pollution-philadelphia-black-americans.html.
[5] Robert D. Bullard, “Environmental Racism and Invisible Communities,” West Virginia Law Review, Vol 96 (1994), p. 3, available at https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol96/iss4/9.
[6] Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law, New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018, pp. 55-56.
[7] Rothstein, p. 55
[8] Commission for Racial Justice, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites,” United Church of Christ (1987), pp. xiii–xiv, https://www.ucc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ToxicWastesRace.pdf.
[9] Bullard, et al., “Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: 1987–2007,” United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries, 2007, pp. 153–154, https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/toxic-wastes-and-race-at-twenty-1987-2007.pdf.
[10] Robert Bullard, “I Wrote About Environmental Injustice Decades Ago. It Hasn’t Changed,” The New York Times, June 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/opinion/biden-environmental-justice-pipelines.html.
[11] Melissa Denchak, “Flint Water Crisis: Everything You Need to Know,” National Resources Defense Council, November 8, 2018, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know.
[12] “The Truth About Newark’s Water,” Natural Resources Defense Council, https://www.nrdc.org/truth-about-newarks-water.
[13] “Jackson Water Crisis,” National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 2023, https://naacp.org/campaigns/jackson-water-crisis.
[14] “Unsafe Water More Common in Communities of Color: When it comes to safe drinking water in America, race still matters,” National Resources Defense Council, January 22, 2021, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/unsafe-water-more-common-communites-color.
[15] Meg Anderson, “Racist Housing Practices From The 1930s Linked To Hotter Neighborhoods Today,” NPR, January 14, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/01/14/795961381/racist-housing-practices-from-the-1930s-linked-to-hotter-neighborhoods-today.
[16] Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, “How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering,” The New York Times, August 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interacctive/2020/08/24/climate/racism-redlining-cities-global-warming.html.
[17] Ryan Doan-Nguyen, “How discriminatory housing policies of the past are shaping heat waves today in minority and low-income neighborhoods,” PBS.org, July 8, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-discriminatory-housing-policies-of-the-past-are-shaping-heat-waves-today-in-minority-and-low-income-neighborhoods.
[18] Betsy Klein and Michael Williams, “Biden unveils $3 billion for nationwide lead pipe replacement,” CNN, May 2, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/02/politics/biden-lead-pipe-replacement/index.html.
[19] Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, “How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering,” The New York Times, August 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interacctive/2020/08/24/climate/racism-redlining-cities-global-warming.html.
[20] Blake Wrigley, “Environmental Justice is Equity Work,” Baltimore Corps, March 2, 2020, https://baltimorecorps.org/press-and-media/2020/3/6/environmental-justice-is-equity-work.