Black, Latino and other people of color are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards. President Biden has vowed to address the problem, but his strategy to identify areas that need help will be colorblind: Race will not be a factor.
The reason, administration officials say, is the threat of lawsuits and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court that would be likely to reject a race-based approach to allocating federal benefits. Instead, the White House will focus on economically disadvantaged communities.
Legal scholars I interviewed for my article this week on the plan agreed. If the administration uses race to determine policy or funding for environmental programs, they said, those programs could end up tangled in court.
When I spoke to activists, though, many expressed concern. They said decades of exposure to environmental hazards, rooted in historical wrongs like racist zoning and housing policies, cannot be effectively addressed with a race-neutral approach.
Quotable: “When you look at the most powerful predictor of where the most industrial pollution is, race is the most potent predictor,” Robert Bullard, a professor and a pioneer in the environmental justice movement, said. “Not income, not property values, but race. If you’re leaving race out, how are you going to fix this?”