Hillary Clinton has made environmental racism a campaign issue
Her outrage over Flint’s toxic water could spark interest in a topic championed by her husband
At the Democratic presidential debate on Sunday, moderator Lester Holt asked the candidates to speak about an issue they felt had been neglected that night. Hillary Clinton, seemingly out of the blue, responded by talking about the unfolding water crisis in largely black, largely poor Flint, Michigan.
The next day — the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — Clinton continued voicing her anger. “We would be outraged if this happened to white kids, and we should be outraged that it’s happening right now to black kids,” she said at an event in South Carolina.
Minority communities have made that same point for decades. But now Clinton is giving the issue fresh life by injecting it into a presidential campaign — and carrying on the legacy of her husband in the process.
In 1994 Bill Clinton signed a historic executive order — Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations — the first of its kind intended to address the notion that pollution and toxic waste gets dumped, disproportionately, on poor black neighborhoods.
Charges of environmental racism — and the concept of environmental justice — first emerged in the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred federal funds from being used to discriminate based on race, and the Act later became an important legal tool for environmental justice advocates.
But it wasn’t until the late 1970s and 1980s that the issue really began to get traction. In 1979, a black community sued the Houston and Texas governments for siting a dump in their neighborhood, becoming the first to use the Act as the basis for a legal challenge. In 1982, a largely black community in rural Warren County, North Carolina protested the dumping of PCB-laced soil in their community. The following year a government report that found three-quarters of the hazardous waste sites in eight southern states were placed in black communities. A 1990 book, Dumping in Dixie, found that the placement of those sites largely followed the patterns of historical segregation.
Since Clinton responded with his executive order, interest in environmental justice has grown, with more research and more universities offering it as a field of study. But environmental justice advocates say the field hasn’t expanded far enough, and that funding for environmental causes still tips in favor of large environmental groups, rather than to the grassroots groups that often voice minority concerns.
Hillary Clinton may be seizing on a political moment, but she could also give some of those smaller groups more ammunition to fight a battle that many believe is still far from won.
Take Flint. The city, in an attempt to save money in 2014, switched its water source from the Detroit system to the Flint River, violating federal rules that require water that runs through lead pipes to be treated. Since then, evidence has surfaced that state and federal officials knew that water from the river, tested by the Environmental Protection Agency, was highly toxic. As many as 8,000 kids under the age of 5 may have been poisoned.
Politically motivated or not, outrage seems like the only response.
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