So what is 'environmental racism'?

It's a term I've heard bandied about now for several years, but something I've never completely understood. Or perhaps more accurately, a term I never really bothered to reflect on, since I grew up a middle class white boy in the suburbs. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it's a term I've been trying to get a handle on - especially since race, the environment and poverty have seemingly never been so closely intertwined in the national conscience before now.

So what are people saying environmental racism is? Well, a Webster's-like definition is available from Eco-Justice Ministries. They say it's "a form of environmental injustice in which the impacts are identified as falling primarily on people of color. The term was coined in a 1987 study drawing together US census data and government data on the location of toxic waste sites; the study documented 'clear patterns which show that communities with greater minority percentages of the population are more likely to be the sites of commercial hazardous waste facilities.'"

A more 'human' definition can be found in this interview with Black Voices for Peace founder Damu Smith from Democracy Now. As we see all these wrenching images from New Orleans and the Gulf Region, people like Damu are reminding us that large petrochemical, plastic and manufacturing companies have been reaping damage on poor communities of color in the Gulf region for decades. The "Toxic Soup" marinating in New Orleans now is only special because of its magnitude. But, as Damu Smith points out, companies have been releasing 'toxic soup' into the environment for years, in communities of color all throughout the Gulf region. It just took a category 5 hurricane to shed some light on it.

It all sounds very "Erin Brockovitch" to me. But now that I think about it, I wonder if Brockovitch would have been able to pull her story off if she was a poor black woman, and the communities affected in her story were poor black communities.

Everything feels so complicated right now. This Hurricane just isn't a Hurricane. It's a race issue, a poverty issue, an environmental issue, a federal budget priority issue, and more. It's so many things, it's hard to think about it anymore as just a storm. Like one of those M.C. Esher images, and no matter which way you turn it, something different is viewable.

But it says a lot about our country when the only thing that jogs us back into a discussion on things like race and poverty is a category 5 hurricane. What a privilege it is for white people to not have to think about race, save for the occasional national disaster.