Race, ecology and campaigns

Chapel Hill Herald, Saturday October 22, 2005

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was a brief moment in which the long-neglected problem of environmental racism received some attention. Katrina exposed the racism in state and national efforts to aid victims, in who lives near Superfund sites, in who lives in the most vulnerable areas and in who has the means to evacuate.

It also laid bare the difficulty in disentangling questions of race and class particularly in a city like New Orleans. In the flooded Lower Ninth Ward, more than 98 percent of residents are black and more than a third live in poverty.

Katrina made manifest the nature of American poverty. Suddenly, we could see, as Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal put it, that the poor are "already dying a slow death, brought on by a concentration of financial limits, inferior housing, dilapidated educational structures, violence, environmental decay and systematic state neglect."

Katrina revealed that the typical understanding of environmental racism -- that it merely defines who lives near garbage dumps or Superfund sites -- is insufficient. When it comes to the ill effects of environmental degradation, the poor, and especially poor people of color, suffer more.

Despite Katrina, environmental racism has not been raised as a concern in our current political campaigns. The lone African-American candidate for the Carrboro or Chapel Hill boards, Bill Thorpe, speaks of his support for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, against excessive road widening and for mass transit. But he has not connected these issues to the problems of racial justice he has addressed as a leader of the NAACP.

Recent election results indicate that voters motivated by environmental and neighborhood concerns generally understand that Chapel Hill still faces serious problems involving race. Nor are voters unaware of the environmental implications of decisions forced on lower income households.

Consider, for example, the problem of sprawl. There is no question that the negative consequences of sprawl hurt those of lesser means the most. They are the ones forced to live far from work, who can least bear the cost of commuting and who are unlikely to be doing so in a late-model hybrid. They are also less able to deal with the health consequences of air pollution.

One mechanism in Orange County to reduce sprawl is the rural buffer. Most citizens recognize that to violate the rural buffer to build affordable housing would be to sacrifice one good to attain another.

The result is not that we turn our backs on affordable housing. Instead, we elect candidates who support programs for inclusionary zoning and increasing affordable units in existing neighborhoods and especially downtown, closer to workplaces and other destinations.

Or, consider Carrboro's debate over the application of its vernacular architecture standards to affordable housing. While not in itself an environmental question, these standards are established to improve the quality of life for residents. If government is setting a standard, the mechanism must be found so rich and poor alike share in its presumed benefits.

The Chapel Hill Herald pointed out recently that a large proportion of this year's candidates are recent arrivals in Orange County. Nonetheless, there is a deep and abiding memory of our history of slavery and Jim Crow and of persistent discrimination today. As committed as we are to righting old wrongs, it still took a divided council a tortured 10 months to approve the Airport Road renaming after the proposal was brought forward by Thorpe and Edith Wiggins.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson said in a speech at Howard University "Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences -- deep, corrosive, obstinate differences, radiating painful roots into the community and into the family and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression."

Orange County is unlikely to have a natural disaster that so vividly reveals the hardships faced by many of our fellow citizens. But, thanks to Katrina, we have seen the stark reality of poverty and better understand that environmental stewardship is not just a privilege for the affluent or middle class. It turns out that environmental protection is, in the end, human protection: essential to safeguard us from the consequences of our own behavior.

Candidates may not be talking about it in the campaign, but let's hope we can elect leaders who will not shy away from addressing the social, economic and environmental dimensions of racism, and the incorrigible intersection of race and poverty.