To mark 400 years since Africans were first forced to North America
I will distribute 400 weekly words, offer 400 lessons, construct a bibliography of 400 works, and collect 400 commitments to confront systemic racism more directly from 400 people.
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Freddie Gray as a child. Note the peeling paint on the wall to the right.
Family photo from court filing
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400 Years Blog #17 – Schools, Cities, and Environmental Racism
My last couple of posts highlighted lynching, a grisly and public manifestation of white supremacy. My next couple will touch on a more hidden form of violence: environmental racism. I heard this term when Baltimore’s 25-year-old Freddie Gray died on April 19, 2015, due to a spinal cord injury in police custody. In a way, the environment had been killing him slowly for years.
Freddie Gray’s family sued their landlord in 2008. They argued that their children’s exposure to lead “played a significant part in their educational, behavioral and medical problems.” Freddie had lead levels well above those deemed safe by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Washington Post said this might explain why Gray had classroom failures and run-ins with the law. Perhaps he would have been working a 9 to 5 job, and not trying to elude the police on the streets, had he not been poisoned by peeling lead paint so prevalent in poor neighborhoods.
In Philadelphia where I work, inner-city students, mostly kids of color, are exposed to great environmental hazards. An investigative exposé called Toxic City: Sick Schools warned of lead and another killer – asbestos. One teacher who had been breathing one contaminated school’s air for a quarter of a century lamented, “I’m worried about my lungs, and my lungs are almost 60. My babies’ lungs — they are just developing…. How can this be happening in 2018? Are we running an experiment?”
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We seem to have created experimental control groups organized by race. In The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein explains: “Disparate health outcomes for African Americans and whites are the results of racial segregation.” Due to redlining and other segregating forces, African Americans live shorter lives because they live in less-healthy neighborhoods. The EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment indicates that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters. Black children are twice as likely to develop asthma. 68% percent of black people live within 30 miles of a coal plant. 71% percent live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards.
As we mark another Earth Day this week, the Trump administration continues to dismantle institutions built to address racial disparities. The Trump EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has further degraded weak federal environmental justice work, leading former EPA assistant associate administrator Mustafa Santiago Ali to resign in protest. The rising tide of environmental racism threatens people of color more than ever.
- Lesson #67: Environmental hazards kill people of color at a comparatively higher rate.
- Lesson #68: Environmental toxins inhibit educational and professional development of many young people.
- Lesson #69: Public schools, facing continued budget cuts, are becoming increasingly toxic environments.
- Lesson #70: It is indisputable that there is racial disparity regarding environmental threats.
- Lesson #71: The federal government is rolling back the progress made in environmental justice over the last two decades.
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Protest poster in Smithsonian collection.
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- Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility, by Dorceta Taylor, offers an academic examination of the connections among residential segregation, zoning, and exposure to environmental hazards.
- For a narrative more accessible to non-experts, try From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement, by Luke Cole and Sheila Foster.
- “The slow poisoning of Freddie Gray and the hidden violence against black communities,” posted on May 2, 2015, offers a clear and condensed story with good graphics.
- The Baltimore Sun offers a 2-minute video explanation by Ruth Ann Norton of Green & Healthy Homes Initiative of what toxins might have done to Freddie Gray.
- The Washington Post story by Terrence McCoy adds more details to how lead paint hurt Freddie Gray.
- See what is being done on the federal level to rollback environmental progress. Read this Washington Post story by Brady Dennis. “EPA environmental justice leader resigns, amid White House plans to dismantle program
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Hugh Taft-Morales
Is the Ethical Culture Leader of the Baltimore and Philadelphia Ethical Societies. This is his independent project - as much a learning experience as a modest effort to help others become more committed to, and effective in, anti-racism work.
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Next blog:
Rising Tides of Racism
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About this project:
This particular year-long commitment – which I am calling “400 Years” – is aimed mainly at people like me: people who identify as white, accept that racism gives them privileges, and want to confront systemic racism more consistently and constructively. Of course anyone can support the project, but my main hope is to encourage self-identifying whites who want to increase their efforts to confront racism and deconstruct white supremacy. I don’t intend on spending time trying to convince people who resist anti-racism activism. I want to help those who want to practice anti-racism to do it more often and more effectively.
This project will focus mainly on how racism in the United States has hurt Africans and their descendants. While non-whites from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East are often brutal victims of racism, I have been taught most by victims who happen to be black.
So when white people wanting to be more active in anti-racism ask me, “Where do I start?”, I often say, “Start with the history. People of color have already shared their wisdom in countless writings from slave narratives to peer reviewed articles to award winning historical works.” The weight of 400 years of race-based oppression fuels my commitment. Perhaps it will help you with your own efforts to deconstruct white supremacy.
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