The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board has rejected an application to build a $855 million nuclear plant near two black neighborhoods in Louisiana. The Board was concerned that building the plant in a predominantly black area might constitute environmental racism. A 1994 Executive Order from President Clinton requires federal agencies to take racial factors into account in environmental policy.

The issue of environmental racism was first raised in Houston in 1983, when sociologist Robert Bullard found that areas around landfills and incinerators were disproportionately populated by blacks. He concluded that environmental racism had made black neighborhoods "dumping grounds for the city's household garbage."

However, a 1994 review of Bullard's research by Vicki Been of New York University found that he had gotten the cause-and-effect relationship backwards. She discovered that at the time the landfills and incinerators were built many of the areas in which they were located were in fact predominately white. In short, the polluters were not targeting black neighborhoods; rather, blacks were in effect targeting the polluters.

The reason is simple: landfills and incinerators are unattractive and bring down property values. This drives out current residents and makes the properties more affordable to lower income people. Thus the neighborhoods around polluting facilities became black because blacks moved into those areas after the facilities were established.

A new study of St. Louis confirms this. Thomas Lambert and Christopher Boerner of Washington University also found that areas around hazardous waste facilities, landfills and incinerators in St. Louis are largely populated by minorities. But like Been, they too discovered that at the time they were established, many of these areas had in fact been majority white. It was only afterwards that the racial makeup of the neighborhoods became black.

Unfortunately, the lack of empirical data to support the charge of environmental racism has done nothing to sidetrack it. In fact, the Environmental Protection Administration has made combating environmental racism a high priority. EPA Administrator Carol Browner has said, "It is clear that poor communities and communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of our modern industrial life."

What is driving the process is not facts, but politics. Opponents of industrial facilities -- the Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome -- have found it easier to block their location in minority areas using the 1964 Civil Rights Act than the environmental laws.

Title IV of the Civil Right Act prohibits agencies receiving federal funds from taking actions that disproportionately impact minorities, and allows plaintiffs to prove discrimination without establishing discriminatory intent. The threat of suits based on this law "has strongly discouraged siting and permitting authorities from allowing industrial facilities to operate in minority areas," Lambert and Boerner note.

The irony, of course, is that minorities ultimately bear the cost of these efforts to stop environmental racism, in the form of fewer and lower paying jobs. Driving business away from cities in the name of environmental racism is a highly perverse way of helping minorities.

Source: Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis, May 7, 1997.