The term environmental racism refers to actions or policies by public or private actors that disproportionately harm persons of color or disadvantaged racial groups. The term was coined with the 1987 United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice report “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” which documented that hazardous waste facilities were far more likely to be sited in African American or Latino communities than in those primarily populated by whites, controlling for economic class. This and other empirical studies of the disparate impact of environmental policies and practices are credited with inspiring the environmental justice movement in the United States. While originally concerned only with domestic polluting facility siting decisions, it now refers to a wide variety of environmental harms that disproportionately impact persons and peoples on the basis of race or color, both domestically and internationally.
Describing various phenomena as examples of...
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Vanderheiden, S. (2011). Environmental Racism. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_148
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