Old and New Environmental Racism

Over the past five decades, the US Environmental Protection Agency moved from purposeful disregard of environmental racism to a public embrace of environmental justice as an organizational priority. Unfortunately, its efforts to address environmental discrimination remain a work-in-progress. This article posits that the Agency’s core difficulties have arisen out of its reluctance to accept the continuing salience of race and the substantive implications for its regulatory work. It has not only blinded the Agency to the evolving manifestations of environmental discrimination and associated harms, but also impeded the aggressive enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, particularly the discriminatory effects regulations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.In this article I argue that the EPA’s effective adoption of a color-blind approach to environmental justice has created three serious blind spots in the Agency’s civil rights enforcement program. First, EPA has extended unwarranted trust with regard to compliance, even in instances of repeated discrimination complaints. Second, its superficial (albeit earnest) reviews of discriminatory effect allegations with respect to pollution risks has ignored the harms that even small increments of pollution risks can pose to minority communities. And third, its commitment to scientific analysis has allowed science to become a shield against social justice concerns and compounded environmental harms to minority communities.While these issues are specific to the Title VI context, like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they expose deep-seated policy issues endangering the environmental welfare of vulnerable communities more generally. There are straight-forward policy fixes to address the specific shortcomings identified here. However, long-term solutions to the environmental quality short-fall experienced by vulnerable communities more generally will require structural and cultural changes in the Agency