There’s a great Instagram page called Philly Housing Projects that exposes the harsh environmental and social conditions many urban Black people are forced to live in. The decrepit streets and sidewalks, the illegal dumping and litter, the vacant lots and abandoned houses, this is what many of us wake up to and see every single day. The question we must ask is why some people live in clean, well maintained and greenery-filled spaces while others live in polluted and violence ridden places that look straight out of a horror movie. Our environment is not only far away forests and ice caps, it’s the area and the spaces surrounding us that we live in and move through day to day. The quality of our environment determines the quality of our lives. In the summer of 2019, there was a massive explosion at an oil refinery in South Philadelphia that released thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the air. Guess who lives near that refinery? Mostly working class and poor Black people, many of whom have suffered health problems from the refinery’s decades-long history of toxic emissions. If the worst-case scenario had occurred, tens of thousands of people would have been killed as a result of the latest explosion. In big cities, who is more likely to live near airports, highways and congested traffic corridors? Most so-called ghettos and public housing are placed near pollution spewing infrastructure. Daily exposure to high levels of smog, car exhaust and other air pollution can cause or aggravate conditions like heart disease and asthma. Air pollution has also been linked to miscarriages and birth defects. Many of us are familiar with Flint, Michigan, but lead contamination is a problem in many Black communities across the country. Recently, residents of Newark, NJ were ordered to stop drinking tap water and switch to bottled water because of high levels of lead. Lead contamination can cause brain damage that contributes to a lack of self-control as well as learning disabilities. The origins of today’s environmental injustice and inequality can be traced back to the time of chattel slavery. Most enslaved people lived a distance away from their captors’ home in run down shacks not far from the outhouses. Enslaved people were essentially housed in the worst possible conditions on plantations just a step above farm animals. We’re all familiar with how enslaved people were given leftovers like pig intestines to eat, but that’s part of a bigger story about how our ancestors were forced to live in degraded and rundown circumstances from the very beginning. A 1982 sit-in protest against a planned chemical landfill in a majority Black North Carolina county is viewed as part of the foundation of the environmental justice movement. Organizations like MOVE have been talking about the issue of environmental racism since the 1970s. Poor people in general, but especially Black, Latinx and Native Americans are often subjected to environmental racism; the institutional practice of either incidentally or intentionally exposing communities to environmental harms. Notice how you will almost never find a waste burning power plant, a trash dump, or an oil refinery in a wealthy, white suburb. The owners and managers of our society know these things are toxic
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