Breathing While Black (or Latino or Asian-American): A study in Environmental Injustice
Racist housing policies have had their knee on the neck of minorities for the last 75 years or more. A new study shows the effects are literally killing people of color.
Hearing my senator Tim Scott, the one, and only, African-American GOP senator, reassure the nation that “there is no racism in America” last night was a little bit like hearing Bill Cosby offer you “something for your headache, sweetie” if you happen to be female. Swallow it and you’re going to hate yourself in the morning.
What made Scott’s big fib more galling was it came on a day when the NYTimes and many others published the results of a big research project that found that racial-ethnic minorities in the United States are exposed to disproportionately high levels of ambient fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5), the largest environmental cause of human mortality.
Fine particulate matter air pollution, known as PM 2.5, or simply air, in many marginalized communities, is harmful to human health and is responsible for 85,000 to 200,000 excess deaths a year in the United States, the report estimates.
The study led by University of Illinois Urbana Champaign civil and environmental engineering professor Christopher Tessum, with Joshua Apte, of Berkeley, Jason Hill, of the University of Minnesota, and Julian Marshall, University of Washington, is published in the journal Science Advances. (See link below)
The team used an air quality model to analyze Environmental Protection Agency data for more than 5,000 emission source types, including industry, agriculture, coal electric utilities, light- and heavy-duty gasoline vehicles, diesel vehicles, off-road vehicles and equipment, construction, residential sources, road dust, and other miscellaneous small emissions sources. In a press statement, Tessum said:
“Community organizations have been experiencing and advocating against environmental injustice for decades,” Tessum said. “Our study contributes to an already extensive body of evidence with the new finding that there is no single air pollution source, or a small number of sources, that account for this disparity. Instead, the disparity is caused by almost all of the sources.”
The study debunks a commonly held belief in some circles that income, not race, is the driving factor.
“Some assume that when there is a systematic racial-ethnic disparity, such as the one we see here, that the underlying cause is a difference in income,” Tessum said. “Because the data shows that the disparity cross-cuts all income levels, our study reinforces previous findings that race, rather than income, is what truly drives air pollution-exposure disparities.”
The reason minorities are more likely to be adversely affected by PM 2.5 is well-documented. In the post-World War II boom, government bureaucracies across the U.S. launched “urban renewal” projects that demolished older poor and minority neighborhoods in cities all across the country and replaced them with highways, public housing, and top-down economic developments. They became appealing places for white city councils to locate various kinds of industrial waste facilities. With limited public transit, these “renewal” projects often physically cut off the residents who weren’t displaced outright from white areas and surrounding suburbs.
The Federal Highway Act of 1956 funded 90 percent of the cost of interstate highway projects, which heavily incentivized states to use eminent domain to raze what they considered “slum” neighborhoods which were almost always low-income communities of color. Minorities were frequently targeted for “slum” clearance, displacing families and destroying one of the most important forms of building intergenerational wealth. Many residents and their progeny left behind behind face increased rates of serious pollution-related health conditions and poverty to this day.
A supplementary text that accompanies the main report demonstrates some examples of how racist government housing policies confined ethnic minorities to mainly segregated neighborhoods. For example:
…the Federal Government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), created in the 1930s, provided neighborhood ratings that supported investment away from residential neighborhoods with an “infiltration of inharmonious racial groups”, among other attributes. This remained official policy until 1977. We find that people living in areas given the lowest HOLC rating in the 1930s (comprising 3% of current White population and 5% of POC) are disproportionately exposed by sources causing the majority of exposure (White: 65%; POC: 72%; Black: 66%; Hispanic: 72%; Asian: 68%;) as compared to the total area covered by HOLC maps (comprising 10% of current total population).
The findings in the report are clear and horrific.
We have shown here that most emission source types—representing ~75% of exposure to PM2.5 in the United States—disproportionately affect racial-ethnic minorities. This phenomenon is systemic, holding for nearly all major sectors, as well as across states and urban and rural areas, income levels, and exposure levels. Industry, light-duty gasoline vehicles, construction, and heavy-duty diesel vehicles are often among the largest sources of disparity, but this can vary widely by source type and location. Because of a legacy of racist housing policy and other factors, racial-ethnic exposure disparities have persisted even as overall exposure has decreased. Targeting locally important sources for mitigation could be one way to counter this persistence. We hope the information provided here can help guide national, state, and local stakeholders to design policies to efficiently reduce environmental inequity
I hope so too. As co-author Julian Marshall neatly sums it up.
We find that nearly all emission sectors cause disproportionate exposures for people of color on average. The inequities we report are a result of systemic racism: Over time, people of color and pollution have been pushed together, not just in a few cases but for nearly all types of emissions.”
I’m sending a copy of the report to my Senator Tim Scott who is something of a disappointment to me although my other senator is far worse. You probably know some people who could use a copy of it too.
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Dig Deeper
PM2.5 polluters disproportionately and systemically affect people of color in the United States (Science Advances)
Supplementary Materials for PM2.5 polluters disproportionately and systemically affect people of color in the United States (Science Advances)
Today’s News (University of Illinois)
People of Color Breathe More Hazardous Air. The Sources Are Everywhere. (NYTimes $)
Why highways were designed to run through Black communities. SC faces historic dilemma again (Post&Courier)
A Brief History Of How Racism Shaped Interstate Highways (NPR)
Don't forget all those minority kids got sick who ate lead paint chips off of blighted housing during 60s thru 1990s.