Conceptualizing Environmental Racism: The 1987 Report on "Race and Toxic Waste"
The Commission concluded that “some underlying factor or factors, related to race, played a role in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities.”The report provided empirical evidence for what communities had known for years and helped inspire movements for environmental justice in the late 1980s and 1990s. In the decades since the report, there has been debate among scholars of environmental racism and environmental activists about what exactly defines the “factor or factors” related to race that result in communities of color facing greater exposure to toxins and pollutants and how we should understand the “racism” of environmental racism.