, in reference to the organization’s investigation. “We sacrifice these low-income, African American, Indigenous communities for the economic benefit of the region or state or country.”Title VI provides remedy that could begin to address this flagrant legacy by steering agencies toward serving the communities they’re charged with protecting with equal rigor.
“It’s a very powerful tool — at least on paper — for addressing environmental justice issues,” Oren Sellstrom, the litigation director for Lawyers for Civil Rights told“The [EPA] has over decades internalized the idea that the Civil Rights Act is not worth enforcing.” It’s also a tool that’s profoundly needed, but has yet to be fully embraced, advocates say. In addition to data made available by scholarly and journalistic efforts, the federal government’s ownreveal enormous health and pollution disparities. But in spite of this documentation, and having received hundreds of complaints alleging discrimination, the EPA’s External Civil Rights Compliance Office has only four times ever in its history issued a formal finding of discrimination.
“This area is predominantly black, low-income, with a disproportionate number of female-headed households,” C.S. Mott Community College professor Janice O’Neal said in 1995, according to. “These people are at greater risk for all kinds of environmental exposures already. This ought to be taken into consideration in the siting process. If it’s not, the process is racist.”
As the complaint — originally filed in 1992 — collected dust, babies grew into adults and had their own children, all while the incinerator was allowed to pump pollutants like lead into the atmosphere and the lungs of its primarily Black neighbors. The
America the beautiful. But only for the few, the rich, the connected.