Abstract

The United States of America is built upon the tensions between different sociocultural groups. These tensions, over the centuries, have manifested themselves into an extension of the Jim Crow era. Apart from the more concrete, more easily demonstrable issues of police brutality, slavery, and overall deprivation of basic human rights, low-income minority communities have fallen subject to more subtle forms of oppression. Left in the hands of wrongfully puissant political entities, environmental injustice plagues communities of low-income and minority persons, reducing their physical health in a society which, by the way, ranks third in the list of nations offering the least affordable healthcare. This is environmental injustice, and it can be understood as the oppression of minority groups through the historic economic/racial targeting of locales in which their populations are densest, thereby disproportionately subjecting them to hazardous, unsanitary conditions that contribute to asthma, cancer, lead poisoning, and so on. This is “A Dreamer’s Plague,” an umbrella term describing the illnesses commonly endured by low-income and minority persons as a result of environmental injustice. The fact of the matter is that environmental racism is no coincidence, as an institutionally racist government carved from the disparities among the economic, political, and social sectors has yet to check its usurpations against the people. 

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Economic struggles force minorities like African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos to reside in areas where land is cheapest. Of course, communities residing on cheap land, as a result of intergenerational immobility, political silence (or politically being silenced), and poverty, are prone to environmental injustice/racism since cheap land grasps the attention of corporate businesses and government entities, both of which seek the construction of industrial zones to reduce the costs of production. Simultaneously, upon the construction of polluting facilities (e.g., garbage truck facilities and power plants), existing residents who are not minorities and who possess the means to up and leave flee these areas due to the increase in ethnocultural and racial diversity as well as in health/safety hazards. Take the “White flight” to the suburbs during the Civil Rights movement, for instance: White persons migrated in large numbers out of cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, and the South Bronx after ethnocultural diversity rose (Buthe; Coes; Loh 2020). As a result, it left minority/low-income persons to rot in disadvantaged urban regions where crippling social issues rendered them politically uninfluential and subject to the unchecked authority of polluting businesses. 

Diminished political representation, along with reduced resident financing, means that effective NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) opposition cannot prevent the establishment of environmentally unjust laws, or even enforce policies against them. For example, in the South Bronx, according to Congressman José E. Serrano and Melissa Iachan in Seeking Environmental Justice in the South Bronx, “at least 14 waste transfer stations… [cause] an asthma fatality rate more than three times the national average, and asthma hospitalization rates more than five times higher than the national average” (Iachan; Serrano 2016). In 2015 alone, the South Bronx “received more than 50 percent of the city’s putrescible commercial waste stream” (Iachan; Serrano 2016). That means only 2 out of 59 community board districts across New York City absorbed over half of the garbage produced by all five boroughs! Additionally, fine particulate matter from diesel combustion is released into these communities by “an average of 304 commercial trucks [that] drive through the heart of [the South Bronx] neighborhoods every hour, almost half of which [a]re commercial waste trucks” (Iachan; Serrano 2016). If you do the math, that amounts to one commercial waste truck every 24 seconds, and that is undoubtedly a violation of the rights safeguarded under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial, color, and national origin discrimination in activities and programs receiving federal financial assistance. Even though Iachan and her office “joined forces with community members and New York Lawyers for the Public Interests to challenge the discriminatory siting of transfer stations by filing a Title VI complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency …18 years after we filed the complaint, the EPA issued a final response dismissing the claim” (Iachan; Serrano 2016). In fact, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently concluded that the EPA egregiously failed to respond to Title VI complaints, dismissing every single Civil Rights complaint filed prior to that of Iachan’s team; this is reason to be alarmed, as environmental injustice is systemic.

Its effects are felt as far down as Louisiana, too! LULU stands for “Locally Unwanted Land Use“, or any facility whose siting imposes externality costs among local residents, and they may include but are not limited to landfills, chemical factories, power stations, and more. They generally contribute to unpleasant odors and loud noise, air pollution, land pollution, reduction of water quality, and overall unsanitary conditions. The Clean Air Act of 1963 caps the acceptable cancer risk as a cause of polluted air at 1 in 1 million; however, LULUs, such as factories like Pontchartrain Works Facility, this number reaches as high as 1 thousand in 1 million in areas like Wilmington, California (“South Coast AQMD: Wilmington” 2018). As part of Los Angeles County, Wilmington is exposed to the waste absorbed by not 14 garbage facilities, but by twice as many garbage facilities as those in the Bronx, which constantly spew pollutants into the air we breathe, onto everything we touch, into water we drink, and eclipsing the cosmic aromas and melodic voices of Mother Nature! Considering the following, it stands to reason that this is not a coincidence, as 86.6% of Wilmington, CA, residents are Latino, 87.34% do not have an Associate’s degree, and 8.1% are below the poverty line (Wilmington Demographics 2021).

According to “Environmental Injustice in the State of Louisiana: Hazardous Wastes and Environmental Illness in the Cancer Corridor,” the Mississippi is one of “the best” locations for major companies to base their factories and production plants. This makes the Mississippi River a “cancer corridor” whereby residents face insurmountably high cancer risks due to the toxic and polluted air. In east Baton Rouge, specifically, a two-mile radius where facilities dump toxic waste affects approximately 90 percent of the African American community (Adeola, 1998, 1-3). In addition, there are even certain communities along the Mississippi River where the cancer risk is almost 50 times the national average to the west of New Orleans. For instance, Pontchartrain Works facility, a chemical plant involved in neoprene production, is a stone’s throw from Reserve, Louisiana, and regularly leaches chloroprene and many other carcinogenic toxins into the air (Lartey and Laughland 2019). With chloroprene emissions regularly hundreds of times higher than the EPA’s 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter standard, the disproportionately high rates of cancer among the African American community in the Reserve are undoubtedly linked to their propinquity to a major polluting facility and White migrations, such as the St. George movement, which left minority groups to congregate where housing prices, along with quality of living, began to decrease. Where there is money, there is power, says capitalism; likewise, political representation follows money. 

Even the health sector follows money, disproportionately distributing access to proper healthcare and neglecting the integral role the natural environment plays in the optimization of physical and mental well-being. Roughly 48.8% of the population inhabiting ‘Cancer Alley’, a long stretch of the Mississippi from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, is African American and suffers from a cancer risk that is 16% greater than for White, higher income individuals. Tristan Baurick utilizes the words and experiences of people that actually live there in his article, Welcome to “Cancer Alley,” Where Toxic Air Is About to Get Worse, to convey the severity of human activities. For instance, Hazel Schexnayder states, “I bet you money there are 20 plants right now just around St. Gabriel,” to which Baurick responds, “She’s not even close. There are now 30 large petrochemical plants within 10 miles of her house… Thirteen are within a 3-mile radius of her home. The nearest facility, only a mile away, is the world’s largest manufacturer of polystyrene, commonly known as Styrofoam” (Baurick 2019). Baurick even unveils the unchecked discriminatory power of corporations by writing, 

“[T]he Shintech ethylene plant recently got the green light for a $1.5 billion, 300-acre expansion, which will intensify pollution in an area where an EPA model estimates the toxic levels of cancer-causing chemicals to be double the already high Iberville Parish average. The new plant is expected to increase those levels by up to 16% in nearby areas” (Baurick 2019). 

As someone who attended a public middle school, for three years, that was situated next to a power plant, air and noise pollution does make the average school today particularly distracting, in addition to degrading the health of students who come from low-income minority families. 

In the Bronx, the Environmental Protection Agency allows waste transfer stations to elevate asthma and cancer fatality rates. In California, wildfires disproportionately impact low-income minority groups, and in southern states, factories raise cancer risks to astronomical levels for the low-income minority groups inhabiting corporate areas of interest. Needless to say, environmental injustice is systemic and functions as an extension of the Jim Crow era in that corporations and political entities forgo the health and well-being of communities where low-income and minority groups are densest. They disproportionately expose them to inconceivably high concentrations of hazardous pollutants that reduce their health and quality of life in a nation that does not believe in universal healthcare and which ultimately exploits the environment and the reduced political influence of minority communities for short-term profit. 

Works  Cited

Adeola, Francis O. 1998. “Environmental Injustice In The State Of Louisiana?: Hazardous 

Wastes And Environmental Illness In The Cancer Corridor”. Race, Gender & Class 6 (1): 83-108. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41658850?seq=1. 

Lartey, Jamiles, and Oliver Laughland. 2019. “Almost Every Household Has Someone That Has 

Died From Cancer”. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/ 2019/may/06/cancertown-louisana-reserve-special-report.

Loh, T. H., Coes, C., & Buthe, B. (2021, January 6). Separate and unequal: Persistent

residential segregation is sustaining racial and economic injustice in the U.S. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/essay/trend-1-separate-and-unequal-neighborhoods-are-sustaining-racial-and-economic-injustice-in-the-us/. 

ProPublica. (2020, March 1). Welcome to “Cancer Alley,” Where Toxic Air Is About to Get 

Worse. https://www.propublica.org/article/welcome-to-cancer-alley-where-toxic-air-is-about-to-get-worse. 

Serrano, J. C. E., & Iachan, M. (2021, July 6). Seeking environmental justice in the South Bronx. 

City & State NY. https://www.cityandstateny.com//opinion/2016/10/seeking-environmental-justice-in-the-south-bronx/182133/. 

“South Coast AQMD: Wilmington”. 2018. Aqmd.Gov. http://www.aqmd.gov/nav/about/initiatives/community-efforts/environmental-justice/ab617-134/wilm.

Wilmington,CA Household Income, Population & Demographics | Point2. (2021). Wilmington, CA, Homes. https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/CA/Greater-Los-Angeles/Wilmington-Demographics.html.