SYSTEM OF KEEPING THEM DOWN:

Many Black Americans have dedicated their lives to helping communities of color protect themselves from environmental racism. One of the leaders of that movement is Robert Bullard, known as the father of environmental justice. He's written several books on the issue, including Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color. He collaborated with lawmakers including Maxine Waters, Al Gore, and the late John Lewis on environmental justice, and earned a lifetime achievement award from the United Nations Environment Programme. Robert Bullard is currently co-chair of the National Black Environmental Justice Network and the distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University.

On Friday's episode of A Word, I spoke with him about the cost of environmental racism and how a new generation is leading the fight to stop it. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. [...]

So if you look around a Black neighborhood where you are in Texas, or where I work in Baltimore or D.C., what are the visible signs of environmental racism? If you're taking a tour of people through a neighborhood and saying, "That's environmental racism," what kinds of things would you point to in a Black neighborhood?

This is how it works, Jason. If we could, fast-forward back 100 years ago in the '20s when racial redlining basically drew red markers around which communities would get nothing when it comes to housing, green space, parks, street pavings, sewer lines, etc., and then you could fast-forward to right now, we're talking the 1920s and the 2020s. The communities that were redlined 100 years ago and were pushed into low-lying areas with all industrial facilities, these are the areas that are the hottest in the city, where there's urban heat islands, meaning it's 10 to 15 degrees hotter. If you look at the fact that there are very few parks, green space, green canopy, very few full service grocery stores. You have schools across the street or across the fence from polluting facilities. Even when you have places that have zoning, locally unwanted land uses--and this is what planners called LULUs- it's basically saying "Black people or people of color, you are going to get the nasty stuff, and white people and the more affluent folks, they're going to get the parks, green space, walk trails, nature trails, all of the things that we know make communities healthy."

You can see the visible footprint of that racial redline that was stamped into the DNA of our cities; you can see that just up close and personal today. And COVID-19 really just took the scab off, and it just made it raw. And with the technology, with GIS mapping, spatial mapping, we can do it on a cellphone, on an iPad and just bring up all of the things that we know will make our communities unhealthy and will create those environmental disparities, those health disparities, those economic disparities, theft of Black wealth by stealing the home values. It's more than just not having trees. It's about the theft of transformative wealth, that a family can't pass down to that next generation after they bought that home. And it's stealing health and wealth. That's the injustice that you can see visibly and feel.

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