The White House Council of Environmental Quality recently announced that it won’t directly take race into account when pursuing policies of environmental justice.
That’s problematic because achieving environmental justice is essential to sustaining the life, culture and language of frontline communities. To not take race into consideration when discussing environmental justice is to deny someone’s lived experience and reality.
We can’t address environmental racism without addressing race: racial justice is environmental justice.
Environmental racism, declares author Robert Bullard, is “any policy, practice or directive that differently affects or disadvantages (where intended or unintended) individuals, groups or communities based on race.” This can occur when communities of color disproportionately experience environmental hazards like toxic waste facilities, garbage dumps, and air pollution, resulting in detrimental health effects.
Environmental health injustices are also correlated with gender. A study found that Latina, Black, Asian and Pacific Islander mothers were more than twice as likely as white mothers to live in the most air-polluted counties in the country. More than half of all textile workers are Asian women, and they’re exposed to particles, dyes, formaldehyde and arsenic, leading to high rates of respiratory illness.
As an Asian American educator, I never saw myself represented in my own K-12 curriculum. Narratives about the environment also failed to include my own lived experiences. This is unfortunate, especially because immigrant and Asian American communities have a history of involvement in issues related to environmental justice and environmental health.
Since the 1990s, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network has organized and built power among Laotian refugees and Chinese immigrants in California’s Bay Area. In Chicago, the fight for environmental justice involves urban gardening.
Planting vegetables in backyard gardens gives Asian immigrant families in Chicago the ability to produce vegetables that are difficult to find at Western markets. University of Illinois researchers noted, “Chinese origin households have a higher density [of gardening] than anywhere else in the city.” However, much of the soil is contaminated.
In Louisiana, the fight for historical and cultural preservation is a fight against climate change. St. Malo, a former village along Lake Borgne in Louisiana’s St. Bernard Parish, was the first Filipino settlement in the United States. Louisiana has always been at the frontlines of the climate crisis and according to the U.S. Geological Survey, the state lost about 25% of coastal land that existed in 1932. The Filipino American community is tasked with preserving its legacy in the face of environmental harm.
According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Americans overwhelmingly support teaching children about climate change. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education recently unanimously approved a comprehensive Climate Literacy program for all L.A. Unified schools. New Jersey also adopted climate change as part of the core curriculum in all public schools and Maine’s L.D. 1902 was introduced in 2021 and is now being considered by the legislature.
The White House clearly acknowledges that communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change. We can’t address environmental racism without addressing race: racial justice is environmental justice.
Removing race as a factor threatens not only environmental justice efforts but also climate justice education. Every student deserves to have their lived experiences and realities included in the classroom.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.