A new article by Dr. Jennifer Roberts and fellows with the Harvard JPB Fellowship begins with a painful reminder: “‘I can’t breathe’ were the last words spoken by Eric Garner (July 17, 2014), Javier Ambler (March 28, 2019), Elijah McClain (August 30, 2019), Manuel Ellis (March 3, 2020), and George Floyd (May 25, 2020).” All were Black men killed by the police.
Roberts and her co-authors show how today’s police brutality and environmental racism stems from systemic racism and provide historical context for modern social and racial injustice.
The authors were compelled to write the manuscript, published in Current Environmental Health Reports, because though police brutality has gained critical attention as one clear manifestation of systemic racism… historical and current policies related to a wide range of environmental hazards have exposed Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to disproportionately high levels of physical, mental, social, emotional, and cultural toxicities, thus creating unbreathable and unlivable communities,” the paper reads.
Though people often associate environmental racism with the physical environment, including factors like air pollutants and exposures to hazards like lead, Roberts says our understanding should extend beyond that to include other harmful dimensions of marginalization.
“I wanted to talk about some of the emotional and social toxicity too,” Roberts said. “You could talk about ‘I can’t breathe’ when you’re talking about someone who’s a victim of over policing and police brutality, or you could talk about someone who’s saying ‘I can’t breathe’ because they live in Cancer Alley, where there’s disproportionately high levels of carcinogens in the air.”
The manuscript makes the connection between current police brutality and environmental justice by walking the reader through the history of racism in this country, explaining how early systems of oppression like sharecropping and Black Codes exposed Black Americans to environmental and occupational hazards. In a more modern example, the paper highlights the disparate impact of COVID-19 on Black communities. Throughout, one thing is clear: environmental racism is merely a continuation of centuries of deeply rooted racism and oppression.
The body of the paper concludes with a vision for what an environmentally just world might look like, including policies that encompass better land use planning and strong enforcement and regulation of environmental impact assessments.
The paper ends with a call to action:
“In order to achieve environmental justice, we have to acknowledge and explicitly seek antiracist policies and actions against the multiple dimensions of environmental racism and injustice,” Roberts said. “And we have to understand that an antiracist society benefits us all.”