The theory of environmental racism holds that minority populations–African-Americans, in particular–have been inordinately subjected to the unhealthy effects of pollution.
By calculated, sinister design, the theory goes, these populations have been crowded near garbage dumps, industrial centers and toxic waste sites, or have had these headaches visited on them because they didn’t have the organization or political clout to resist.
Activists have used it to oppose projects, such as the garbage-burning incinerator recently completed in Robbins–a project, by the way, eagerly welcomed by Robbins’ African-American administration.
In vogue for about a decade, the theory is a compelling, plausible one that has one potential, glaring flaw: It may well be dead wrong.
Equally compelling is a painstaking new study by two University of Chicago researchers who set out to examine the causal links in environmental racism in Chicago. After 3 1/2 years of research comparing census tracts and hundreds of dumps, factories and Superfund sites, the significance is in what they did not find: evidence to prove the theory, or a correlation between race and the presence of hazardous sites.
African-Americans are no more likely to live near these sites than anywhere else; in fact, they are more likely to live away from them, and if that is a product of racism, it is not of the environmental kind.
Hispanics are more likely to be found near such sites, especially industrial neighborhoods on the Northwest and Southwest Sides, but that is because of their moving patterns. And in a touch of irony, so-called young urban professionals are clustering near industrial sites along the North Branch of the Chicago River, eager for loft apartments in converted factories.
In analyzing Chicago’s history, the researchers found that the location of the sites was largely a function of geography–building factories, for example, along the river and its branches and other rivers. And the nearby residents were mostly whites who wanted to be close to the jobs.
There should be some cautions about the research, among them that it is one study in one city and can’t be applied to situations elsewhere. Further, as Chicago Environment Commissioner Henry Henderson pointed out, it didn’t take into account illegal waste dumping in poor African-American neighborhoods–a separate issue but a very real problem.
The study’s authors–Don Coursey, dean of the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, and Brett Baden, a graduate student–concede that and may conduct further research on it. There also should be more study of the whole issue of environmental racism, not just in Chicago but in other cities.
In the meantime, these researchers have performed a genuine service with the greater caution that their work suggests: Things are not always what they seem to be, or what someone says they are. And problems such as environmental racism cannot be addressed based on conclusions that may have no basis in fact.
