Where you live shapes the air you breathe, the water you drink and how hot your summers get. These five essays show how redlining, industry and the military have put the heaviest harm on Black, Latino and Native communities across the U.S.
1. First slavery, then a chemical plant and cancer deaths: one town’s brutal history
Reserve, Louisiana is a mostly Black town next to a chemical plant built on a former plantation that once held over 150 enslaved people. People living just behind the plant face a cancer risk from air pollution 50 times the national average.
2. Robert Bullard Isn’t Done Yet
In 1979, Robert Bullard and 10 graduate students searched Houston’s records for where the city had put its landfills. Black residents were just over 27 percent of the city. All five city-owned landfills sat in Black neighborhoods.
Read it at The Texas Observer →
3. How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering
In the 1930s, federal officials marked Black neighborhoods as hazardous for lending. Across more than 100 cities, those neighborhoods are now 5 degrees hotter in summer, on average.
Read it at The New York Times →
4. Not By Chance: Confinement, Harm, and the Fight to Breathe in an Urban Barrio
In April 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, a coal plant smokestack in Chicago’s Little Village was blown up with less than a day’s notice, and dust covered the homes around it. A Harvard study had linked the plant to 2,800 asthma attacks a year.
5. The US Nuclear Weapons Program Left ‘a Horrible Legacy’ of Environmental Destruction and Death Across the Navajo Nation
Uranium mining for the US nuclear weapons program left 523 abandoned mines across the Navajo Nation. In one study of mainly Navajo miners, researchers expected 10 lung cancer deaths and found 34.
- Written by
- Team ARD
- First published
- in Anti-Racism Daily
- Topics
- Environment
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