Race, Affirmative Action and the Environment

  

It’s an ugly reality, far worse than the racial covenants and red lining practices (restrictive bank lending) that excluded people of color from an ability to buy homes in “White neighborhoods” for most of the 20th century. It was a way from owners of former garbage dumps, toxic waste disposal sites and sites near chemical plants where effluents were often simply shunted onto land where “poor folk” (mostly black) lived to make money with undesirable tracts. Sooner or later, these toxins also make their way into ground water or nearby lakes and streams, eventually to the sea.

Even local governments engaged in the practice, selling polluted land to poor Blacks, to generate revenue when dumpsites were full. For example, as Lauren Zanolli writes in the December 11, 2019 The Guardian, notes: “In the 1980s, black New Orleanians were encouraged to buy houses built by the city on top of a toxic landfill. Three decades later it is one of Louisiana’s worst cancer hotspots, but residents of Gordon Plaza are still fighting to be relocated…

“After chemical drums and other detritus started literally popping out of front yards, the EPA began testing the soil in the 1980s. The land was rich in arsenic, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and had extremely high levels of lead, among other powerful toxins left behind by the Agriculture Street landfill. All told, about 150 contaminants have been found in the soil, 49 of which are known carcinogens.

“In 1994 the area – including Gordon Plaza, an elementary school, a public housing development called Press Park apartments and a senior housing complex – was declared a Superfund site (a US federal government program designed to fund the clean-up of toxic wastes).” To be one of Louisiana’s worst cancer hotspots takes work. Louisiana is the cancer capital of America.

According to the July 22, 2019 NOLA.com, “Louisiana has a history of man-made environmental disasters, from the worsening ‘dead sea’ off the Gulf of Mexico to the high-profile BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. But many incidents of damage fly under the radar. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, however, keeps a priority list of toxic sites as part of its ‘Superfund’ program.

“Facing a series of national toxic waste disasters, Congress passed legislation in 1980 authorizing the EPA to create the ‘Superfund,’ which identifies harsh toxic sites to jump start and fund cleanup efforts. Currently, the EPA lists 15 sites” in Louisiana where land-based environmental toxicity is off the charts. It can’t be a coincidence that most of these issues are concentrated in primarily Black communities. Louisiana is hardly alone in this abysmal practice. Particularly in the Deep South, this racially slanted waste disposal practice is entirely too common.

For poor residents living at serious land-based environmental risk, statistically heavily more Black than White, there is a new risk on the horizon. Alex Brown, writing for the December 8th FastCompany.com, “In recent years, more states have crafted environmental justice policies to help communities of color plagued by polluted air and water, poor health outcomes, and limited access to green space.

“But now they fear that work could be upended by a pair of pending U.S. Supreme Court cases examining affirmative action admissions policies at universities. If the court strikes down affirmative action, many state lawmakers believe, the ruling could open legal challenges to ‘race-conscious’ laws that seek to help marginalized communities.

“‘State laws are very explicitly self-aware in acknowledging the past explicit racism that underlies the environmental injustice that we continue to see,’ said Emily Hammond, an environmental law expert and professor at the George Washington University Law School. ‘That’s heartening, but it’s worrisome to see those on a crash course with a different policy agenda to make race neutrality the explicit law of the land.’

“State lawmakers who have backed such measures say they’re carefully watching the Supreme Court cases, and many Democrats worry they’ll have to revise a whole slew of state laws to help them survive legal challenges. There’s not yet a clear consensus on whether the environmental justice proposals that legislators will consider in their 2023 sessions should be written to exclude race…

“In Maryland, Del. David Fraser-Hidalgo, a Democrat who serves on the Environment and Transportation Committee, is working on legislation related to air quality monitoring, electric school buses and equitable access to electric vehicles. The pending court decision could affect how those bills are written.

“‘The last thing you want to do on the state level is pass a bill and have it declared unconstitutional,’ he said. ‘From the drafting perspective, you’re going to have to very closely define economically challenged as opposed to losing X number of years going through the process and then starting all over again.’” Think White controlled MAGA legislatures will rewrite their environmental laws to benefit Black homeowners in toxic neighborhoods?

It is concerning that the Trump reconfigured Supreme Court seems to be towing the antiregulatory (financial and environmental), climate-change-marginalizing and racially insensitive MAGA party line. This trend may help the wealthiest in the land, able to shelter themselves from the horribles that demand correction in our country, but it does not benefit most of us… particularly those at the lower reaches of the economic ladder.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you think voting does not matter, look at the result of a MAGA controlled Supreme Court on the daily lives of those living… and those in future generations who will have to live with the consequence long after those who caused them are gone.