Earthkeeping: Toxic Racism
Clip | 4m 33sVideo has Closed Captions
Learn about the beginning of the environmental justice movement.
Learn about the beginning of the environmental justice movement in this video segment adapted from Earthkeeping: Toxic Racism. Meet various experts and leaders who describe the issues of environmental racism and justice, and learn about the watershed event—the controversy over the location of a toxic landfill in Warren County, North Carolina—that brought the issues to national attention in the ear
Corporate sponsorship for American Experience is provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance and Carlisle Companies. Major funding by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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Earthkeeping: Toxic Racism
Clip | 4m 33sVideo has Closed Captions
Learn about the beginning of the environmental justice movement in this video segment adapted from Earthkeeping: Toxic Racism. Meet various experts and leaders who describe the issues of environmental racism and justice, and learn about the watershed event—the controversy over the location of a toxic landfill in Warren County, North Carolina—that brought the issues to national attention in the ear
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For families that just decades earlier were torn apart by chattel slavery, being photographed together was proof of their resilience.Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipIn a small, predominantly African-American community in eastern North Carolina called Warren County, African-Americans and white activists joined together in protest what's described as a merger of civil rights and environmentalism.
The whole environmental justice movement as a movement really took off in Warren County because this was a case study where people basically drew a line in the dirt and said no more.
For nearly four years, the residents of Warren County have been protesting the state of North Carolina's plan to transport PCB contaminated soil to a landfill in their community.
When the trucks began to roll, angered residents decided they'd had enough.
And in a nonviolent act of civil disobedience, they blocked the road.
Here you had primarily a lot of African-American women and their children who literally lay down in the streets to block the trucks from dumping polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs and a toxic waste landfill in their community.
And here's an agricultural community where the aquifer level is very shallow near the surface, where most people have wells and they're drinking water from wells.
And the thought that the state would pick this kind of all of the 100 counties in Arkansas as a dumping site was just unthinkable.
The Warren County incident triggered a whole series of investigations into the relationship between race and toxics.
In 1983, the General Accounting Office examined the placement of off site commercial hazardous waste landfills in eight states in the Southeast.
What they found was that three out of four were located in predominantly poor and African-American communities in a region where African-Americans comprise only 20% of the population.
Now, that's disproportionate impact.
It is not a random distribution.
In other words, you only 20% of the population, but three out of four of the landfills.
And that's the first government study that actually documented this particular pattern.
In 1987, the United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice issued its first report on toxic wastes and race in the U.S..
The report's findings stirred up a big national debate about the relationship between where people live.
The race of those communities and the location of the toxic waste facility.
And what the 1987 report did was it verified beyond a shadow of a doubt that in terms of the location of toxic waste facilities, those are commercial license and those uncontrolled sites?
Those are not license.
You find an overwhelming disproportionate amount of these facilities in African-American communities and Latino communities and other people of color communities.
The report concluded that three out of every five Hispanic and African Americans lived in areas with uncontrolled toxic waste sites.
Reverend Ben Chavis, executive director of the commission at that time, coined this phenomenon environmental racism.
Environmental racism is racial discrimination in environmental policymaking.
It is the deliberate targeting of racial and ethnic communities for environmental facilities.
Has IT facilities like toxic waste, landfill as incinerators?
It is also the disproportionate presence of generation sources of toxins like petrochemical facilities.
In 1992, the National Law Journal released the findings of its own investigation.
One of the things that became really clear to us in our data was that polluters in white communities get higher penalties for violating the law than polluters in minority communities.
And that is not the case if you compare high income and low income areas.
Their penalties are virtually the same.
The study also found that the government had taken longer to address hazards in Superfund sites located in minority communities and accepted less stringent cleanup plans.
I think once people find out what the real dangers of environmental injustice are, that there are a lot of dangers, people really get involved because we often say that the issue of environmental racism is an issue of life and death.
It's just not an issue of some form of prejudice where somebody doesn't like you because of the color of your skin.
This is an issue that will take your life away if we don't get involved.
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