Disproportionate exposure to cancer-causing hazardous air pollutants based on ancestry within the United States

• In Event: 2251 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 9. Environmental inequality 1

Abstract

Previous studies of environmental inequalities in the US have focused on racial/ethnic differences in exposure to air pollutants, but few studies have observed how exposure differs within racial and ethnic groups. Building off previous studies, we applied an intracategorical framework to examine exposure by ancestry, with a focus on 26 ancestry groupings within Hispanic, Asian, African American, Pacific Islander, White, and Native American racial groups. We utilized racial/ethnic and ancestry data from the 2010 Decennial Census and 2009-2013 American Community Survey in combination with cancer risk estimates for total, point, and on-road sources from the 2011 National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA). Of the analyzed ancestry groups, Americans of Somalian, Dominican, Ethiopian, and Arab descent face the highest cancer risks from exposure to hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). In conclusion, applying an intracategorical framework allowed us to characterize disparate risks among specific racial/ethnic groups that would otherwise be overlooked if we had assumed that racial/ethnic environmental inequality formation conformed to broad, homogenous categories (e.g., “Hispanic” or “Asian”), as has been tacitly done in most research on environmental justice.

Authors

• Ricardo Rubio

• Sara Elizabeth Grineski, University of Utah