Reckoning with Environmental Racism
By Chi Vo, Durham City-County Environmental Affairs Board
In Dudley Square Station in Boston, Massachusetts, I walked up the stairs to the streets of Roxbury, lined with Black vendors and convenience stands. The dancing hues of the pop-up art and garments were squeezed out by a gray fog erupting from nearby buses idling on the corner. I was working at a nearby school that day, a school of predominantly Black and Brown students. Unsurprisingly, childhood asthma rates are much higher in Boston than statewide; rates are highest for Black children. Where there is air pollution, there is a higher prevalence of asthma. Where there is racism, there is a higher prevalence of adverse environmental effects.
Racism and white supremacy claw into our everyday lives from redlining, segregated neighborhoods and schools, wealth disparities, food apartheids, and yes, environmental conditions.
In a 2018 study on air quality from the American Journal of Public Health, researchers found that People of Color had a 28% higher burden of exposure to particulate matter and that Black residents had 54% higher burden than did the overall population.
Fracking waste sites and oil drilling sites are permitted and concentrated in low income communities and communities of color.
With increasing natural disasters, predominantly Black neighborhoods are impacted to a greater degree than White neighborhoods but are provided with slower and inadequate disaster relief.
Industrialized animal farms produce massive quantities of pollution and toxic waste. These farms are situated in communities of color, exposing them to pollutants in their air and their water. A study conducted by UNC-Chapel Hill found that Black people are 54% more likely to reside near hog operations in NC than White people, Latinx are 39% more likely, and Indigenous People are well over twice as likely.
In North Carolina, solid waste facilities are disproportionately located in low wealth communities and communities of color.
“These disparities are leading to both health and environmental crises that fall along racial lines in communities across the United States. The systems of oppression that have led to the deaths of so many Black people were the same systems that perpetuated environmental injustice,” says Intersectional Environmentalist, Leah Thomas. Environmental racism is when Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) bear the burden of environmental ruin; they are disproportionately exposed to toxic waste, agricultural chemicals, air pollution, and water contamination. It is not caused merely by individual acts of pollution or poisoning, but it is directly tied to systems of oppression, a structural problem of devaluing the lives of BIPOC (The Daily Californian). When people are pushed to the margins in this way, they are more vulnerable to exploitation and harmful practices like rerouting sources of pollution or living closer to industrial sites.
In a circular economy, we aim to redesign our systems to improve the health of people and the environment and to create a more resilient and just economy. A circular economy is made up of people, first and foremost. People who listen to and uplift BIPOC in their everyday work. People who advocate for policies that center those most affected, those pushed to the margins. People who call for legislation that undoes and repairs the consequences of historic racism. People who divest in systems that are harming our communities and invest in supporting them instead.
To be American is to grapple and reckon with the systems and barriers that we face. In an era of transformation, we must reckon with them and move forward with a path toward resilience and justice.
Across the street from the bus stop, Dudley Café beckoned me through its stain glass doors and inside its artful walls. The vibrant city colors hugged me again as they did before. A site of BIPOC artists, poets, organizers, bakers, farmers, students, families – all a part of making the city their own.
This is our chance to clear the fog.
