Toxic Inequality: Investigating Environmental Racism

Before 2018, a metal-shredding business named General Iron was based in Lincoln Park, a predominantly white and wealthy Chicago neighborhood. When the business began receiving emails from the mayor’s administration summarizing complaints from residents, General Iron was forced to move to Chicago’s Southeast Side neighborhood, which housed mostly Latine, low-income, working-class people. Southeast Side residents were largely left out of the decision to move the metal-shredding facility to their neighborhood. General Iron’s relocation is just one of many examples of environmental racism in America. 

Environmental racism is a form of systemic racism defined as the disproportionate exposure of communities of color to environmental hazards. Though members of these communities began pushing back on this issue in the 1960s, the widespread problem of environmental racism did not receive substantial national attention until 1982, when a Black neighborhood in North Carolina was made a disposal site for carcinogenic* soil. Civil rights activists led marches and protests in Afton, North Carolina, yet the site was still implemented and dangerous compounds made their way into the neighborhood’s drinking water. Nonetheless, the demonstrations began to turn heads toward the larger environmental justice movement. The next year, a study was conducted which found that 75% of hazardous waste sites in 8 states were placed in communities populated by low-income people of color. The report that followed showed that this pattern existed across the entire country.  

Communities affected by environmental racism have been proven to be disproportionately exposed to toxic waste, air pollution, and contaminated water due to dangerous facilities placed in their neighborhoods. They face increased risks of health issues such as cancer, respiratory illness, and developmental disease. The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America reported that Black and Puerto Rican Americans have a higher rate of asthma than white Americans, which is largely due to their physical environment and structural inequities. Environmental racism also has mental health impacts, as the stress and anxiety it causes strains community relationships and prevents collective action in affected neighborhoods. 

In addition, residents of affected areas have reduced social and professional opportunities; businesses tend not to invest in environmentally hazardous communities, resulting in a lack of economic development in these neighborhoods. 

Environmental racism is not an accident, but rather a result of biased policies. Our country’s long-standing preference to protect the health and well-being of wealthy, white communities over all others can be traced back to discriminatory practices like the displacement of indigenous tribes and the refusal to provide enslaved people with safe living conditions. Laws from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that allowed segregation and redlining* pushed people of color into poor neighborhoods and kept them there. To save money, industries typically place their facilities where the value of land is low. 

Another reason why environmental racism exists, and has persisted through a number of decades, is because of the historically expansive lack of representation of people of color in leadership positions. Those living in affected neighborhoods were not given any say in decisions made about their own communities and lifestyles, resulting in an unfair system. 

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In the fall of 2020, two years after the metal-shredding company General Iron relocated to Chicago’s Southeast Side, the neighborhood filed a civil rights complaint against the city with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Two years later, in July 2022, an environmental justice analysis showed that Chicago has engaged in a pattern of civil rights violations by repeatedly relocating polluting business from white communities to African American and Latine ones. Last year, the city announced that they were committing to a set of reforms related to their history of environmentally racist policies. 

Though it’s true that environmental racism requires a largely systemic response, the steps taken by the Southeast Side community demonstrate that a lot can be done locally to encourage change on a higher level.  

Learning about environmental hazards in your neighborhood, town, or city, and noticing if they have disproportionate effects on people of color can enable you to contact your local government and demand change. Reading about the environmental justice movement and supporting organizations, some of which are listed below, can also be extremely beneficial to affected communities.    

Organizations to support or volunteer with: 

• Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (​​https://dscej.org/)

• Movement Generation (https://movementgeneration.org/) 

• WE ACT for Environmental Justice (https://www.weact.org/)  

Environmental racism has extremely detrimental impacts on people of color throughout the country. By staying informed on the environmental justice movement and holding local governments and corporations accountable, we can work together to build healthier communities and more equitable environmental practices. 

*carcinogenic: having the potential to cause cancer

*redlining: the discriminatory practice of denying services—typically financial—to residents of certain areas based on their race or ethnicity; outlawed in 1968 but its effects are still felt in many US cities today