What Does Environmental Racism Look Like?
Outside the office doors of Governor John Bel Edwards, most members of the Coalition Against Death Alley (CADA) were sitting down in chairs and on the cold marble floor. But Pat Bryant was pacing back and forth singing the same songs that he did as a child during the Civil Rights movement. The swell of voices grew, and echoed through the cavernous chamber, bouncing from wall to wall— the notes like falling dominoes, gathering momentum. As he paced back and forth across the lobby, he made eye contact with the members of CADA, bystanders, and Edwards’ secretary. Security seemed at a loss for what to do, and some of the members took out their phones to record the singing—this didn’t make it any less profound, their voices needed to be heard.
CADA held the sit-in during the Summer of 2019 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana at the end of a long week of demonstrations. In front of government buildings, along highways, and through city streets, the group carried signs, confronting companies like Formosa or Dupont, which produce plastics and other petrochemical products. If the name Death Alley doesn’t ring a bell, it was formerly called Cancer Alley; The name change reflects the residents’ acknowledgement of other public health crises caused by nearby polluters. Death Alley is the area along the Mississippi River which houses 25% of the United States’ petrochemical production. Its cancer rates are fifty times the national average, and there are substantial rates of auto-immune disorders in the area.
In 2021, the term “environmental racism” has fought its way into the mainstream lexicon of current and pressing issues, catalyzed by the Flint Water Crisis, and some acknowledgment from public officials. But it was in the 90’s that the movement towards environmental justice reached across geographic boundaries to begin more cohesive grassroots activism. According to Robert D. Bullard, often referred to as the “father of environmental justice,” before the 90’s, the movement was better categorized as a series of isolated struggles. Then, mainstream news wasn’t reporting on the connection between factory emissions and cancer rates, especially not in the context of race. In 1991 the Principles of Environmental Justice were adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit; three years later the Clinton administration acknowledged the issue with Executive Order 12898, Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations. Despite decades of collective effort and acknowledgement from governmental institutions, for the most part we are still lacking the shift in infrastructure and corporate sanctions required to fully untangle the myriad issues housed under the roof of environmental racism.
The problems that dwell within this framework are social, economic, and environmental. They are embedded into our very infrastructure and continue to grow. The new and the old injustices overlap, exacerbating negative effects in a synergistically destructive relationship—Death Alley is an exemplar. The population is majority African American and low-income. Like many rural areas, job opportunities are sparse. The main jobs within a reasonable distance are at the very factories that have been killing residents for decades; they thrive while producing unchecked emissions of chemicals like chloroprene, a monomer released in the production of petrochemicals deemed unsafe for human exposure by the EPA. There is little chance of getting better pay anywhere else in the area.
Many of the residents’ ancestors are buried here, dating back to Reconstruction. It is why one of CADA’s main tactics is to hold livestreams and press conferences at sites of injustice, connecting environmental degradation with a deep-rooted history of racism. The heat could only be described as dangerous the day that leading members of Rise St. James, a member organization of CADA, stood before a camera at a graveyard surrounded by the headstones of their ancestors— some marking the first family member that had lived free from slavery. The cemetery was to be demolished, so that yet another factory could be built. The leaders were elderly African American women. Sweat mixed with tears on the faces of most everyone present as these women told their families’ stories. Despite the wealth of emotion, apprehension of police intrusion cut through the moment—they were all technically trespassing. Louisiana and these factories long ago struck a deal not only in terms of official tax deductions, but with disproportionate police protection as well. The police did not come that day. But they did use the Critical Infrastructure Bill, put in place after the Standing Rock protests to threaten felony offenses and up to fifteen years in prison if protesters decided to march across the Sunshine Bridge. On a different day, Reverend Gregory T. Manning was brutally beaten and detained for “inciting a riot” after refusing to leave the eleventh floor of the Chase South Tower, which houses the Louisiana Association Business and Industry—a key player in the fate of Death Alley. Just before he was beaten and detained, the protestors, many of them elderly folk, were peacefully singing with undeterred faith, “Victory is mine. Victory is mine. Victory today is mine.”
Louisiana is representative of many of the overlapping elements and effects of environmental racism, and the Polluter-Industrial Complex, aptly coined by Daniel Faber, in his book Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice. But environmental injustice extends beyond factories and pipelines. It lies, discreetly, in the infrastructure of all American cities. Another Louisiana example is the Industrial Canal, widened over the years to expand shipping lanes into the lower ninth ward, a neighborhood with a high population of lower-income people of color. It is likely that if the canal had not been widened, the neighborhood of the lower ninth wouldn’t have faced as great a level of destruction from Hurricane Katrina. Infrastructure that seems disconnected from industrial production—things like zoning, highways and waste management—are also to blame.
Segregation in the United States is a better-known issue than environmental racism, but the ability to selectively victimize lower income people, and people of color, is predicated on their spatial isolation. In 1984, the Waste Management Board of California was recommended by Cerrell Associates to locate industry and state waste incinerators in neighborhoods of “lower socioeconomic status.” The reasoning? These communities would pose less political backlash. The reasoning was sound, as people with lower socioeconomic often lack resources like time and influence which are necessary to oppose such changes. These incinerators release microparticles of toxic materials like lead, mercury and arsenic; in the years leading up to 2008, federal information reported that up to 600,000 children in the United States may be born with neurological issues due to lead poisoning.
I grew up in the Swope Park neighborhood of Kansas City, a neighborhood that was, like the others I have discussed, home to a large population of people of color, as well as of lower and middle socioeconomic standing. When driving with my mom to school, we took the long way around. It was more scenic. The road was flanked by green, and between the trees I could see a big beautiful hill. As a child I associated big hills with Julie Andrews in the opening scene of The Sound of Music, or with California. I always mentioned that I wanted to climb that hill, to stand at the very top. Kansas City is in the part of Missouri that lacks hills, a more common characteristic of the Ozark area in South-Eastern Missouri. Then, when I was older, I learned that my hill was a landfill. Under the soft green grass there were decades of waste, much of it toxic.
Kansas City, like all American cities, was built to create social, economic and environmental disparity. It was the incubator of the modern American suburb, with major credit to J.C. Nichols, a land developer who created the comfortable Mission Hills neighborhood and The Country Club Plaza, using redlining to keep out people of color. The Troost divide in Kansas City is well known among people who know anything about segregation in the United States. One time, at my Catholic High School, I remember a friend of mine saying “East of Troost is like… a jungle,” not knowing at the time that was where I lived. It doesn’t look like a jungle, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t being treated unfairly by industry and the state. The Troost corridor itself is known to have high amounts of lead in the pipes that supply it drinking water. Just a little further East is Highway 71, which was built to connect Missouri suburbs like Lee’s Summit to the arts and entertainment district downtown, but divides the neighborhoods in between, helping to foster urban blight and environmental degradation.
It wasn’t until participating in CADA’s campaign in the Summer of 2019, that I fully understood the implications of environmental injustice in my own city. I was visiting a friend who had also grown up in Kansas City, but went to college in New Orleans. When we returned to visit our hometown, the cityscape was revealed for what it was. The thought has crossed my mind that I have an auto-immune disorder. I don’t know if the surrounding pollution is causal or whether poor health runs in my family, but the important part is that there is an unmistakable correlation between health disparities and constructed segregation all across America. The perpetrators are CEOs and the politicians they fund; the effects of their decisions are in the pipes, in the soil, in the water, and in the air. Yet it is important to remember that this is not a hopeless cause. Over the past decade there have been large steps taken to combat environmental racism. But it isn’t the EPA, executive orders, or our representatives that have been the main force behind this movement—it is people in the very communities that are the most affected, banding together in a grassroots struggle against huge odds, who have stood up, even suffered, to make significant change.
RCC Fellow — Yasmeen Mir — University of Missouri
Yasmeen Mir is a senior at the University of Missouri Columbia. With previous experience in journalism and a current major in Anthropology, she seeks to take an interdisciplinary approach to environmental justice.
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