Essay on Environmental Racism

This makes me qualified to do this research paper. Additionally, I am able to contact experts on the issue who can offer their opinion and knowledge on the issue. The sources used in this paper will be from Academic Search Premier. Academic Search Premier has a plethora of resources I can use for my empirical paper. The sources (articles) I will use will be peer reviewed and they will from the year 2007 and onward. I will try to steer clear of articles that are older than this because the data may not reflect the current situation. Therefore, the data will be more recent. The first source I will be using is a peer review article by Hines. The article talks specifically about the statics in Emelle Alabama and the detrimental effects of hazardous waste dumping in the county. The second article will be by Hurley who looks at the environmental racism history of America and how that affects minorities now. The third article is by Mcdoll who gives the background on how minorities are mistreated and treated unfairly when it comes to choosing where noxious waste facilities

Environmental inequality from a social justice perspective is based on the notion that there is discrimination in the policies that allow for establishing the sites and permits for industrial waste, which results in minorities and those living in poverty suffering from a greater share of the effects of pollution. This leads to environmental racism which is the underlying fact that racial and ethnic groups that are underprivileged, are

With the rapid development of the society, a large number of factories are built to meet the demand of the market. However, the problem of factory emission and processing system has been perplexing the residents of Flint. Flint water crisis’s crucial problem is based on environmental racism. Meanwhile, Flint is in uneven development situation and need to rebuild the infrastructure system.

Today we’re faced with multiple forms of inequalities and injustices. None of them are in no way, shape or form are okay or justifiable. While we as a people are striving to deal with the obvious forms of injustices, there is another form that is a real quiet one, but it can be heard throughout the world that we are living in and is a severe problem that needs to be addressed. The type of injustice that I’m speaking on is called: Environmental Racism. This has been a definite issue that not only affects the environment, but it also has effects on communities, individuals and it effects the economic system in the long run as well. Environmental Racism needs to be brought up in conversations within our communities as well as our local governments, so they will not forget their remains a problem.

Despite increased diversity across the country, America’s neighborhoods remain highly segregated along racial and ethnic lines. Residential segregation, particularly between African-Americans and whites, persists in metropolitan areas where minorities make up a large share of the population. This paper will examine residential segregation imposed upon African-Americans and the enormous costs it bears. Furthermore, the role of government will be discussed as having an important role in carrying out efforts towards residential desegregation. By developing an understanding of residential segregation and its destructive effects, parallels may be drawn between efforts aimed at combating

Many of the housing uses zoning power delegated by government officials to assure that certain races such as blacks don’t move into their neighborhood. Zoning power is regulating the use of land by state governments and local governments to exercise authority over privately owned real

One of the first influences on the deliberation on Environmental Justice was The Civil Rights Movement in the United States of America. Leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. fought hard to ensure that social transformation and power be established for African Americans, especially those in the southern states as well as those in the northern inner-city parts. Activists like King altered the philosophy on Environmental Justice arguing that there was a lopsided effect that proved that environmental hazards were not accidental. What environmentalists advocated instead was that environmental dangers resulted from racial segregation that placed power plants, nuclear plants, and other potential ecological hazards in areas with a high concentration of minority and low income groups. Several activists defined this as “environmental racism.”

Those who argue that environmental racism is a serious problem in America and the whole world, and their number are growing, are correct in at least one of their assertions. Racism exists. environmental problems exist. these facts, however, do not reveal whether or not environmental racism has occurred in any given instance. this might be an unimportant distinction but for the fact that some argue that civil right laws be applied to pollution events and related regulatory violations.

While social justice may not be at its peak today, times used to be worse. Formerly, while trying to improve cities with zoning- certain races, religions, and peoples were excluded from the nice parts of town and even jobs. Zoning began around 1900 when the local government restricted the height of buildings in Washington District of Columbia. From there, the government realized it could intervene on private property and the people would allow it (Silver, 1997). As zoning evolved, so did the type of zoning- from height restrictions to land use and eventually to redlining. Silver explains the extent situation as, “the nation's planning movement, not just its Southern branch, regarded land use controls as an effective social control mechanism for Blacks and other ‘undesirables’” (p. 2). Unfortunately for the US and for its citizens, racial zoning is not the only undesirable social norm.

Different areas of the private sector took control of the racial segregation. Areas such as real estate, banks, labor, and toxic waste locations have participated in some way to continue the segregation and inferiority of people of color. “African Americans and other communities of color are often victims of land-use decision making that mirrors the power arrangements of the dominant society” (Bullard [1994]2004:269). The land-use decisions are used by the real estate industry. The real estate industry along with the bank industry have worked together in order to make it almost impossible for people of color to acquire their own homes. When individuals of color do obtain their own homes the real estate industry corrals them all into one zone. Then the banks charge homeowners in these zones high interest rates on the mortgages needed to maintain their home ownership. “Zoning is probably the most widely applied mechanism to regulate urban land use in the United States” (Bullard [1994]2004:269). When people of color are corralled into a neighborhood the quality of the neighborhood is diminished. The

Racism is a constitutive feature of capitalism. Along with other modes of domination, racism constructs and enshrines those social hierarchies that legitimize expropriation, naturalize exploitation, and produce the differential value capital instrumentalizes in the interest of profit (Rodney 1981; Robinson 2000; Melamed 2015; Pulido 2016). Historically in the U.S., race has been produced in and through space. Housing, lending, zoning and environmental policies, as well as foundational and ongoing confiscatory processes at the heart of racial capitalism have linked race, place, and power in pernicious, “death-dealing” ways (Gilmore 2002:16; Lipsitz 2007; Fraser 2016). From the frontier to the plantation, the border to the reservation, the constitutive geographies of U.S. nationhood have inextricably bound race and space. Scholars of racial capitalism embed uneven development within this active and ongoing co-production of race and space. They emphasize that social difference is foundational, not incidental, to the production of the uneven spatial forms that underwrite racial capitalism. Race has been produced with and through space via urban renewal, restrictive covenants, systemic abandonment and the ‘racialization of state policy’ (Gotham 2000:14) by which the benefits of housing, lending and other urban policies have been afforded to some and denied to others (see Coates 2014; Shabazz 2015 for Chicago). Thus, vacant land and buildings on Chicago’ s South Side are not

The Bronx, NY is home to over 1.3 million people- men, women and children alike. It is currently the poorest urban county in the United States with the majority of residents being people of color. For quite some time now the Bronx has been experiencing an influx of industrial activity. As it is a relatively cheaper area compared to the rest of the five boroughs, it is cheaper to buy property there. As a result, more and more companies are buying up the land and setting up shop in what is already a highly urbanized area. Not only is the Bronx bordered on all sides by busy highways, it is also home to a number of industrial buildings such as the country’s largest distribution center, waste transfer sites, power plants, and so much more. It is

Distinguished in chapters three and four of The Color of Law, racial zoning is a way for organizations to manipulate and control what neighborhoods African-Americans and other ethnic minority groups reside in. Due to this, many of African-Americans viewed racial zoning as a serious threat to their well-being in the United States. With the help of Jim Crow laws, exclusionary zoning, and the "On-Your-Own-Home" campaign, banks and real-estate agents had provoked economic discrimination towards various ethnic minority groups. Furthermore, through the concepts of dysfunctionalism, social inequality, latent functionalism, and Eurocentrism as seen in The Real World, racial zoning has negatively affected African-Americans from breaking out of what the world considers them to be.

Hazards and pollutants are apparent in a variety of outcomes. Possible outcomes include asthma, cancer and chemical poisoning (Gee and Payne-Sturges 2004: 1647). Furthermore, “Although debated, the main hypothesis explaining these disparities is that disadvantaged communities encounter greater exposure to environmental toxins such as air pollution, pesticides, and lead” (Gee and Payne-Sturges 2004: 1647). Therefore, disadvantaged groups, such as people of color and the poor, experience greater environmental risks. Additionally, “Blacks in particular are exposed to a disproportionate amount of pollution and suffer the highest levels of lead and pesticide poisoning and other associated health problems” (Jones and Rainey 2006: 474). People of color, essentially, compete to live healthily. For example, African-Americans and Africans alike, struggle with the negative affects of oil refineries and unresponsive governments. The same can be said for Hispanics in California and the natives of Ecuador, who are forced to cope with the pollution of the Texaco oil refineries (Bullard 2001: 4). Environmental racism not only exploits natural resources, it abuses and profits from the communities involved. Governments and polluting facilities will continue to capitalize on the economic susceptibilities of poor communities, states, nations and regions for their “unsound” and hazardous operations (Bullard 2001: 23).

As stated in the thesis, environmental injustice mostly affects minority communities. In a map presented by the Los Angeles Times, in Southeast LA there are 26 communities- which 83.9% of the inhabitants are of minority groups (Southeast, n.d.). Similarly, another map released by EPA from the 1990 U.S. Census illustrates that in places where there is 80 to 100% of people of color there is at least 2