Interview

The Politics of Race and Pollution

An interview with Robert Bullard

Robert D. Bullard is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He has worked on and conducted research in the areas of urban land use, housing, community development, industrial facility siting and environmental equity for more than a decade. He is the author of dozens of articles and monographs and four books, including, most recently, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality ( Westview Press, 1990). He is part of an ad hoc group of social scientists, known as the Michigan Group, which has pressed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to address issues of environmental equity.


Multinational Monitor: Do people of color in the United States have a different set of environmental problems, concerns and priorities than whites in the country?

 Robert Bullard: I think people of color probably do, for the simple reason that the problem of environmental degradation hits communities of color at all class levels much harder than white communities of comparable social and economic status. This is true whether we talk about problems ranging from lead poisoning to toxic waste siting to garbage incineration to pesticides poisoning farmworkers. The problems are more pressing and the call for action is more dramatic because it is a life-and-death situation.

MM: What do you mean when you use the term environmental racism?

 Bullard: Environmental racism is an extension of the institutional racism which touches every aspect of our society, including housing, education, employment and law- enforcement. And institutional racism is defined as those laws, customs and practices which systematically reflect and produce racial inequality in American society, whether by intent or happenstance.

Environmental racism also means excluding people of color from boards and decision-making commissions - bodies such as city councils, industrial commissions and boards of supervisors. Often times this means that unwanted land uses or polluting industry will be directed away from those policymakers' communities and constituencies and toward those persons who don't have the power to make siting decisions because they're not on those boards.

MM: How does environmental racism work in practice?

Bullard: Companies, whether by design or default, [target] communities that don't have the resources and infrastructure to fend off unwanted facilities - whether it be a Native American reservation or whether it be a rural poverty pocket in the black belt in Alabama.

Low-income minority communities are the most vulnerable for siting of landfills, incinerators, toxic waste dumps, lead smelters, you name it. And that is an extension of the fact that these are the same communities that are least likely to have adequate fire protection, housing code enforcement, health care delivery, street lighting and sewer hookups. You start naming municipal facilities, and you see that there is a direct correlation between lack of residential amenities and the location of these types of facilities.

MM: Could you discuss some of the evidence that you and your colleagues have accumulated about disproportionate siting of pollution-intensive facilities and dump- sites in people of color communities?

 Bullard: I want to make it clear that environmental racism doesn't just deal with siting of facilities - it's bigger than that.

I conducted one of the earliest studies that was done looking at disproportionate impact and differential siting - in Houston, Texas, beginning in 1978.

From the early 1920s up until 1978, the city of Houston had used basically two forms of waste disposal - landfilling and incineration. We documented that five out of five of the city-owned municipal landfills were located in predominantly black neighborhoods; six out of eight of the city's garbage incinerators were located in predominantly black neighborhoods. African-Americans only made up 28 percent of the city's population during that period of time.

When the city stopped disposing of its waste at its own facilities and turned it over to private industry, we documented that three out of four of the privately owned facilities, landfills, were located in predominantly black neighborhoods.

These were decisions that were made by public officials and by private industry. We were able to document that it was not just low-income black communities being targeted - low-income, moderate-income and middle-income black communities were all the subject of siting discrepancies.

This was 1979. It was not until 1983 that the General Accounting Office actually did a similar study, which looked at off-site commercial hazardous waste landfills in EPA's region 4 (which consists of the southern states). The 1983 GAO study documented that three out of the four offsite hazardous waste commercial landfills in region 4 were located in primarily black communities. Blacks, however, only made up about one fifth of that region's population, about 20 percent of the region's population - so that's a discrepancy.

You start seeing all these studies accumulate. There are numerous studies - the [1987] United Church of Christ Commission of Racial Justice Study is another study that has systematically documented that people in African-American communities and Latino communities are most likely to live around hazardous waste facilities and that race is the most potent predictor of who lives around these sites. Not class, not education, not prices of land, not owners vs. renters, it's race. So institutional racism, as I said before, cuts across class lines.

In 1990, I wrote a book called Dumping in Dixie. I looked at five communities in the South. Houston was one, with its landfills and municipal garbage facilities. In Dallas, Texas, all of the lead smelters in the history of the city have been located in African-American or Latino communities. In Louisiana's Cancer Alley, that stretch from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, I looked at a community called Alsen. Hazardous waste incinerators located within that area were all within a predominantly black community, not a low-income community but basically a low-to-moderate-income community of homeowners. The study also looked at Emelle, Alabama, where the nation's largest hazardous waste facility is located in a predominantly black county. Emelle is about 95 percent black and in the heart of the black belt - those predominantly black counties that stretch across Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi. I also looked at the problem of the chemical emissions in Institute, West Virginia, a predominantly black town in West Virginia that is a suburb of Charleston. I started to look at a pattern of how these facilities were operated in the heart of these communities without there having been any input from the local residents. Decisions were made by industrial commissions and by city councils to provide incentives for these companies to operate [in people of color communities], with very few jobs going to local residents.

MM: Do companies or cities, whichever is directing siting, attempt to buy off the communities that are going to be affected with promises of jobs?

 Bullard: The whole notion of environmental blackmail is real. In many cases, you'll find that communities that are being targeted have high unemployment rates. People want to work, and local elected officials often sign on to the notion that these companies can provide jobs and an expanded tax base and can become a good neighbor. The promise of jobs is a very potent kind of carrot to dangle in front of people when they are unemployed, poor and don't have any income.

However, garbage incineration, for example, is not a labor-intensive industry. We're talking very few jobs and we're talking the kind of jobs that would not be matched with the skills of local residents.

So what has happened is that more and more communities have started to look beyond the promise to what the bottom line is - how many jobs will actually go into the community and how many jobs will the residents actually get.

MM: Is there an upsurge of opposition to these kind of facilities in people of color communities?

 Bullard: There is an upsurge because there is an intensification of the targeting. However, the resistance has been there all along. Because of the more stringent environmental regulations, because of the difficulties involved in siting, more and more communities of color are being targeted. So you find more and more opposition organizations springing up all over the country, whether it is in Latino communities in California, on Native American reservations, in rural poverty pockets in the black belt or in urban areas in Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, New York City.

The activity has been intensified and all kinds of groups and networks are forming so that people can start to share their ideas and strategies about how to combat these things. In the southwest, for example, the Southwest Organizing Project and the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice cover eight states. The Gulf Coast Tenants' Associations covers Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.

 We have seen some maturation of people of color organizations and groups to address the dumping issue and the toxics issue, but also to start forming alliances to begin to address other environmental issues like farmworker issues and pesticides, or issues of lead in inner city areas. Organizations have become more sophisticated with the passage of time.

MM: Are there any successful campaigns that you can point to?

 Bullard: We've documented a lot of success stories and put together a directory of people of color environmental groups that includes more than 200 organizations all over the country that have been successful at some level in fending off the onslaught of environmental racism.

For example, the Concerned Citizens of South Central L.A. successfully fought off a city proposal to locate a municipal solid waste incinerator in their community. The Good Road Coalition on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota was successful last year in beating off a proposal from a Connecticut-based company to locate a 6,000 acre landfill on the reservation - a grassroots group of Sioux had an election that recalled some of the tribal council and defeated the proposal. During the same year, another Native American group in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Concerned Citizens of Choctaw, beat back a plan again to locate a toxic waste landfill on that particular reservation.

In Dumping in Dixie, I documented how local residents in a predominantly black neighborhood in West Dallas were able to close a lead smelter that had been operating for 50 years. As it turns out, the lead smelter had been operating in total violation of a local land use ordinance. And the city had known this for many years, but [had failed to take action because] the facility provided jobs. Because of the harm that had been done to local children in that area, a class action lawsuit was filed and was settled in 1984 for more than $20 million. That is one of the largest lead settlements in this country.

 We've documented another case that goes back to the late 1970s, involving a community in North Alabama called Triana. This community was dubbed in National Wildlife magazine as the unhealthiest town in America. The Centers for Disease Control documented that this town's residents were contaminated with the highest level of DDT ever recorded. Olin Chemical Company manufactured the DDT for Redstone Arsenal, which is an army base in North Alabama. Once DDT was banned, the company closed the plant and buried drums of the chemical in the ground. The DDT residue leaked into a tributary of the Tennessee River. People had been eating the fish from the river for years, and they were contaminated. A lawsuit was filed and settled for something like $26 million.

There have been a number of Love Canals and Times Beaches all over this country and in communities of color. They just have not received the coverage and media attention that a Love Canal or Times Beach has gotten. However, people have been resisting and they have been winning. The idea that communities of color are not concerned and that they are not active is a myth. That myth is being dispelled every day as we find groups from West Harlem to East L.A. becoming very active in the grassroots environmental justice movement. We don't find a large number of people of color in the mainstream organizations. Their activity is concentrated at the local, grassroots level, where most of the problems are concentrated.

MM: Could you speak about the specific sort of problems that Native American groups are facing?

 Bullard: Native Americans are facing some of the worst environmental problems of any particular group. Reservations were one of the areas that the federal government forgot about. Because of the quasi-sovereign status of Indian nations, they are not covered by state or, for the most part, federal environmental regulations. So we find, in many cases, polluting industries on the reservations. For example, the Navajo lands that were used to mine for uranium are some of the most polluted areas - the tailings create tremendous health problems for children who play on them, for the families who live around them and for the workers themselves.

Reservations are being targeted for incinerators, toxic waste dumps and even nuclear waste storage facilities. We've documented more than four dozen reservations that have been approached by polluting industries to locate there, to get around the more rigorous state regulations.

And the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs' position is to promote more polluting industries on these lands as a form of economic development.

 Then you look at the added problem of health care, infant mortality and disease and alcoholism and life expectancy - Native Americans have one of the lowest life expectancy rates of any ethnic group in this country. You're talking about locating these facilities that are health threatening in an already impoverished, unhealthy environment.

For Native people, their land and their religion is one. I think that you can see how when Native people talk about environmental and toxic genocide, they see it as not only racism but as a form of cultural and religious genocide. It's a very important piece in our definition of what people of color see as environment.

We define environment as everything: where people live, where people work, where people play. Some people see the environment as something to be exploited; other people see it as something to be preserved and conserved for generations to come. That is where the conflict comes in and that is where various groups across the country, whether they be African-Americans in urban areas or Latinos or Asian-Americans, are converging in total solidarity with native peoples in this country and indigenous people around the world.

MM: How has the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) responded to concerns about environmental racism that you and your colleagues have brought before the agency?

 Bullard: The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't want to own up to the fact that institutional racism exists in this society, including environmental racism.

In the EPA's Environmental Equity report, there is not even a mention of racism, and the fact that racism could be operating to disenfranchise people of color communities. The report leaves out a substantial body of literature on environmental disparities as related to race and class. It glosses over the problem of pesticides and farmworkers and how the Agency has systematically neglected this area - from 1979 up until this day, we have not gotten farmworker protection regulation. For EPA to say that we don't have enough data and enough studies and that's why we cannot act is disingenuous. We do have the data on lead: the federal government has systematically documented that at every class level, African-American children are more likely to be poisoned by lead. Sixty-eight percent of black children who come from families making $6,000 or less are poisoned, versus 36 percent of white children who come from comparable income levels. Of African- American families with incomes of $15,000 or more, 38 percent are poisoned, versus 12 percent of whites who come from families with comparable incomes. So the federal government has documented that a middle-class African-American family is more likely to be poisoned than a lower-income white family.

We asked "why?" And there is a racial component, and that racial component is that African-Americans are residentially segregated at every income level. The housing that middle-income African Americans can acquire is often times of lower quality and more likely to be in areas where houses have lead-contaminated paint.

The problem that the EPA does not want to address is that racism is real, and the agency thinks it can somehow deal with the inequities and deal with the disparities without calling it racism.

MM: Are there are specific demands you've made of EPA?

 Bullard: We would like to see the EPA begin addressing the problem of the inequitable and differential enforcement of regulations that are already on the books. There is a disparity in how EPA addresses clean-up and relocation in Superfund sites, for example. We want to see one set of rules, to have all communities treated the same.

For example, an African-American community of homeowners in Texarkana, Texas is sitting, right now, on top of a Superfund site. Congress has passed legislation for a relocation: $4 or 5 million has been set aside to relocate Texarkanans. And EPA has dragged its feet for two or three years. We say treat Texarkana the same as Times Beach was treated - with deliberate speed. Give people fair market value for their houses; right now, the EPA has turned over the appraisal to the Army Corps of Engineers, which is trying to purchase the houses from the local residents. People cannot buy houses and move to other communities when they are being promised [unfairly low] prices for their houses.

I think people are saying we should have one set of rules when it comes to relocation of people of color and when it comes to relocation of white people. Environmental equity does not call for putting landfills or incinerators in white communities, and poisoning white children at the same rate as people of color. That's not what we're talking about. We want to see fairness implemented in all of the rulemaking and implementation of all the environmental protection regulations. We want to see pollution prevention take the front seat.

So we want to see some changes made within the EPA. It's beginning to make some changes, but it's very slow. The EPA has agreed to set up an office of environmental equity, but we want to see some teeth put in that, we want to see some funding put into that. We want to make sure that it's not just a window-dressing office, that it is not an office that is set up just to tell people of color, "no." We want to see rigorous enforcement, we want to see rigorous use of EPA's permitting powers to make sure that states and local governments in conjunction with private disposal companies don't continue siting facilities in people of color and low-income communities.

The EPA should look at all of the land use in a particular area and begin to address not just risk analysis associated with the permiting facility, but also what's already in there. If a community has a landfill, if it has an incinerator, if it has a lead smelter - then this is not an appropriate area for locating another facility. We want to see cumulative and synergistic analysis done to take into account the total impact.

These are the kinds of things that we've been exploring with the Agency. I think the fact that we are talking is progress. But we're not satisfied with promises. We want to see something actually put in place and institutionalized.

MM: What are some of the linkages that U.S. people of color groups are making with Third World organizations and the major common issues they are trying to tackle?

 Bullard: The same problems that exist for people in our communities here are now being exported abroad. We have poisoned people of color communities here and now we are getting ready to poison people of color communities around the world. That is environmental racism.

 There are a number of areas of common concern. One is the export of toxics and polluting industries. There has to be some kind of mechanism to address the waste that is created within our borders. Shipping it abroad is no solution, as shipping it to people of color communities is no solution. Pesticides are another example: pesticides that are banned in this country are being manufactured abroad. That has to be addressed. Another example is the problems of the maquiladoras, the twin plants along the U.S.- Mexico border - the same companies that are operating in this country are moving across the border and setting up shop and following different health and environmental standards than they are in this country.

We're beginning to see links made between grassroots groups in this country and grassroots groups in other countries around the world. I think that's where the important meetings are going to occur at the Rio Earth Summit - between grassroots groups of this country and the Third World - not the government-to-government meetings, because the deal has already been cut in terms of the environment and the economic and the development part.

MM: Could you elaborate on connections that are developing between grassroots groups here and abroad?

 Bullard: There are a number of study groups that have been going back and forth. One example is groups that have been working with groups in South Africa - making tours to the townships and working with groups to talk about environmental problems and how to integrate the environment into an economic social justice movement. We have a lot of things in common. When you talk about polluting industries locating next to homelands or next to townships or next to the ghetto, it's the same.

Similarly, farmworkers, for example, in their organizing strategy, are now linking up with farmworkers in other parts of the world and addressing the issue of pesticides and work conditions.

Also, grassroots women's groups, which are often leaders of local environmental movements, are linking up with women's groups in other countries.

In many cases, Third World groups are looking to people of color organizations and organizing in this country as models they can learn from. The Southwest Organizing Project in Albuquerque, for example, has made a number of trips to Costa Rica and other Latin American countries to work with groups on land reform and organizing people around environmental, economic and social justice issues - not just separating out the environment as one piece, and economics or job development as another piece, and justice over here as another piece.