Explanations for Environmental Racism: Discriminatory Siting and Weak Regulation
Hamilton (1995) examined expansion plans of waste facilities from 1987-1992 to see if the racial percentage of the communities chosen for expansion differed significantly from those that weren’t chosen.Hamilton found that neighborhoods selected for expansion were on average 25% non-white in comparison to those neighborhoods not chosen which averaged 18% non-white. Therefore, the racial composition of a neighborhood did seem to play a role in the decision making of toxic waste facilities. Similarly, Pastor, Sadd, and Hipp (2001), intervening in the debate about whether waste facilities were placed in communities of color or if people of color moved in after the fact due to the neighborhood becoming cheaper to live in, found that in Los Angeles planned locations for toxic waste facilities already had sizeable working class and people of color communities before the sites were built.
Studies like these suggest that the racial composition of different neighborhoods played some role in the decision-making process of where to site toxic waste facilities. Both Hamilton (1995) and Pastor et. al. (2001) argue that a potential explanation is that managers of toxic waste facilities considered the potential backlash by residents of proposed sites. Communities with sizeable working class and residents of color were assumed to not have inspired the same level of collective action against the expansion of these toxic waste facilities as expansion in a whiter and wealthier neighborhood would.
Others have considered the action, or inaction, of government officials and agencies, to deal with cases of environmental inequality that predominantly affected people of color and the working class as instances like the water crisis in Flint, Michigan occur “despite existing regulations to protect the American people from contamination in their drinking water.” Many have drawn attention to how officials have neglected a responsibility to act through delayed responses and lack of enforcement of environmental regulations or have acted in ways that have not adequately addressed the problem by spreading misinformation or impractical solutions.
This video details the history of how the federal government has neglected its responsibility to address environmental inequality, which has served to make communities of color more vulnerable to environmental hazards:
In their report 20 years after “Toxic Waste and Race,” Bullard et. al. (2008) argued that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not had a great record when it comes to addressing environmental racism. The agency only began to acknowledge how environmental inequality disproportionately affected communities of color in the 1990s after pressure from community activists. Over the years, budget cuts and restructuring have resulted in the EPA cutting or defunding offices within the agency that were meant to address environmental racism or not properly enforcing regulations that could prevent the worst consequences of environmental inequality. Thompson (2021) argues that the EPA’s inability to properly address the problem is a product of the agency’s early history of promoting voluntary compliance to environmental regulations and its refusal to use its grants to enforce civil rights. State and local agencies have also been found to not follow or enforce regulations properly, resulting in populations like Flint, Michigan being failed at multiple levels of government.
