By Laurie Bergner
February is Black History month, so I thought it would be a perfect time to review where we are. No doubt there have been huge gains in the last 50 years, but we have so much further to go! Consider this:
- Black Americans make up only 13% of our overall population, yet they make up a disproportionate 37% of the male prison population.
- African Americans are much more likely than whites to get pulled over by police, frisked after being stopped, and detained after arrest; they also receive longer sentences than whites for the same crimes.
- Unemployment remains far higher among the black population, with 27% living in poverty, compared with only 10% of whites.
I could go on and on, but you get the picture. And now I want to add a whole new issue, one that I only recently became aware of and a new concept to me: environmental racism.Coined in the 1980s, the term refers to the disproportionate exposure of blacks to polluted air, water and soil. What could be a better example than the lead poisoned water in Flint Michigan, a working class, mostly African American community? What could be a better example than the complaints the community made about the water, starting in November, 2014, which were ignored by state government? But pollution issues in Flint didn’t start in 2014; its beginnings go way back to when heavy industry began dumping pollutants into their water in the 90’s. Complaints to the EPA about an incinerator built next to a school began in 1994, when Flint citizens filed an EPA complaint on the basis that state environmental agencies were allowing polluting industries disproportionately in communities of color, a public health danger.
But this is just a small part of the overall pattern, a pattern that we find everywhere in the country. Let’s check out Alabama, where every landfill in the state of Alabama is in a black community or in an economically depressed community. Or let’s look at oil trains in areas of lower income people of color in California, trains that have explosions as well as the longer-term health impacts of diesel fumes and gas emitted from these oil trains.
The fault lies with state and local governments, but also with our federal Environmental Protection Agency, which is supposed to police that beat by following up on complaints by initiating affirmative investigations of its own. It should be an important backstop for communities who’ve been failed by their local officials, but it hasn’t, instead ignoring over 300 discrimination complaints received since it was established in the early 1990s, has never once issued a formal finding of a violation.
Jim Wallis, who calls himself a Christian leader for social change wrote this, a fitting summary: “The answer of white Americans to the facts of racism must no longer be, “But I am not a racist.” If we are oblivious to the racism still in our social systems, we can’t deny our complicity with it. The best answer to continual denials from white Americans of being a racist is this: Racism is in the air that we breathe and the water we drink. So let’s change the water — and the air.”
Laurie Bergner is a clinical psychologist in private practice, working with individual adults, families and couples. She also works with the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, helping organize candidates forums, educational programs, and many issues in the field of law and justice. She has received many recognitions in both fields, including YWCA’s Women of Distinction in the Professions, Leaguer of the Year, LWV Special Project Awards, and the LWV of Illinois’s prestigious Carrie Chapman Catt award. Laurie has a wonderful husband and two grown children – also wonderful. She loves biking in the countryside, reading, and traveling.
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