Illuminating Geographic Racism: The COVID-19 Shutdown and Environmental Justice

• In Event: Relevance, Quality, and Expedience: Political Science Responds to COVID-19: COVID-19 in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

In the US, both the Environmental Justice (EJ) movement and EJ scholarship were catapulted by events in the 1980s. In 1982, protesters in NC fought against the government placing contaminated soil in one of the “few counties in the state with a majority black population” (NRDC May 18, 2016), and in 1983 Sociologist Dr. Robert Bullard presented research showing that solid waste sites in Houston, TX, were disproportionately in black communities or “near black schools” (Bullard 1983, np). Following soon thereafter, the famous Toxic Waste and Race study conducted by the United Church of Christ found similar results for the entire US (Chavis & Lee 1987). Although the study found both social and economic class to be contributing factors to siting environmental polluting facilities in African-American communities, race was identified as the most accurate predictor for the siting of such egregious land uses.

In the decades since these pathbreaking events, significant research has continued to show that African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities in the US are disproportionately collocated with a wide variety of environmentally harmful pollutants—and that race/ethnicity are even more important predictors than poverty (Ringquist 2005). Aside from the patent unfairness of this in a society that pledges “liberty and justice for all,” these pollutants cause a variety of physiological harms, and the cumulative effects of greater exposure to a whole variety of pollutants may partially explain race-based health disparities including worse birth outcomes for African Americans (Bekkar, Pacheco & Basu 2020), greater death rates from COVID-19 for African Americans and Hispanics (Wu et al. April 2020; Garcia Cano, Snow & Anderson June 20, 2020), and increased incidence of respiratory diseases (e.g. asthma) for African Americans and Latinos (Brulle & Pellow 2006; Brown 1995; Mohai 1992; and Szasz & Meuser 1997).

In 2000, geographer Dr. Laura Pulido showed that environmental racism doesn’t require explicit, current racist acts because environmental racism can be historio-spatial, woven into the very fabric of the geographies in which we live (Pulido 2000). Outside the EJ context, we have evidence of this reality in newer findings of the ongoing and cumulative economic damage to minority neighborhoods—and their residents, usually African Americans—that were red-lined many decades ago (e.g., Rothstein 2017), and those that were bifurcated by freeways, zoning, etc. (Connerly 2002).

In the proposed paper, we use the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 shutdowns to provide additional illumination regarding the ways that environmental injustice is woven into US geographies. It is well known at this point that the economic downturn has caused a significant decline in air pollution (some amazing before-and-after photos have appeared in the media), and particularly in CO2, NO2, and PM2.5 (Liu et al. 2020; Tanzer-Gruener et al. 2020). NO2 and PM are harmful to human health, and health impacts of exposure to PM “include cardiovascular effects such as cardiac arrhythmias and heart attacks, and respiratory effects such as asthma attacks….” (USEPA October 2019, np). We use multivariate regression analysis to assess whether the shutdown-induced air-quality improvements were distributed evenly across racial and ethnic groups or whether, as we have seen too often, benefits accrue disproportionately to White-non-Hispanic residents. Or, perhaps, since racial and ethnic minorities suffered disproportionately from air pollution before the shutdown (e.g., Morello-Frosch, Pastor & Sadd 2001), they will gain disproportionately from the improvements in air quality.

Our unit of analysis is the Census Tract, and we examine all tracts in the contiguous US that contained at least one EPA air sensor for PM in both April of 2019 (business as usual) and April of 2020 (post shutdown). The dependent variable is the change in average measured PM. The primary independent variables are the percentage representation of minority racial and ethnic groups within each Census tract (white-non-Hispanic is the baseline omitted group). Control variables include measures of poverty/income, population density, and measures of rainfall (rainfall has an important causal impact of washing air pollutants from the air).

The repeated dramatic police-caused deaths of African Americans have finally revealed to most that there is systemic racism in policing in America. Elevated levels of miscarriages, pre-term births, and low-birth-weight babies; heart attacks and asthma; and susceptibility to COVID-19 among African Americans are less dramatic, but they are also evidence of systemic racism that is instantiated in our very geographies and that, often invisible, can be nearly impossible to escape. The proposed paper uses the misfortune of the COVID-19 economic downturn to better understand the geography of oppression via changes in air pollution.

Authors

• Heather E Campbell, Claremont Graduate University

• Shawnika Johnson, Claremont Graduate University/Innovative Planning

• SeKwen Kim, Claremont Graduate University

• Claudia Caceres, Claremont Graduate University