United States
According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), in the U.S., there is a correlation between the location of hazardous waste facilities and the ethnic background of an area's residents. In predominantly minority areas, voter registration and education are often lower than average, and citizens are less likely to challenge proposals or seek financial compensation for environmental and health damages. Implementing techniques to stop hazardous waste sites requires time, money, and political influence or backing. Resources such as meeting places, access to private and public records, and funding for technical assistance are also required for action. Minority groups may not have full access to these tools and resources creating challenges for the groups in fighting against the placement of toxic sites. Further, controversial projects are less likely to be sited in areas expected to pursue collective action. Some studies also suggest that the lack of protest could be due to fear of losing area jobs. Non-minority communities are more likely to succeed when opposing the siting of hazardous waste and sewage treatment facilities, incinerators, and freeways in their areas. Non-minority communities have better chance at accessing these tools and resources used to prevent placement of toxic sites and also negative impacts of environmental policy decisions.
While some social scientists see the siting of hazardous facilities in minority communities as a demonstration of intentional racism, whereby these communities are targeted for prejudicial reasons, belief in racial inferiority, or a desire to protect racial group privilege. Others see the causes of environmental racism as structural and institutional. The traditional perspective views discrimination as more individualistic, sporadic, and episodic than the institutional perspective. Processes such as suburbanization, gentrification, and decentralization lead to patterns of environmental racism even absent intentionally discriminatory policies. For example, the process of suburbanization (or white flight) consists of non-minorities leaving industrial zones for safer, cleaner, and less expensive suburban locales. Meanwhile, minority communities are left in the inner cities and in close proximity to polluted industrial zones. In these areas, unemployment is high and businesses are less likely to invest in area improvement, creating poor economic conditions for residents and reinforcing a social formation that reproduces racial inequality. Furthermore, the poverty of property owners and residents in a municipality may be taken into consideration by hazardous waste facility developers since areas with depressed real estate values will cut expenses.
Read more about this topic: Environmental Racism
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.”
—Ashley Montagu (b. 1905)
“In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Some of the offers that have come to me would never have come if I had not been President. That means these people are trying to hire not Calvin Coolidge, but a former President of the United States. I can’t make that kind of use of the office.... I can’t do anything that might take away from the Presidency any of its dignity, or any of the faith people have in it.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)