When Sharon Lavigne buried two of her closest friends over the course of one weekend, she knew exactly where the blame lay. For her community in St. James Parish, Louisiana, these deaths–and their cause–was nothing new. In fact, Lavigne knows 30 people that have died in the past 5 years, most from cancer or respiratory diseases. The culprit? Air pollution.
This air pollution comes from smoke stacks from over 200 chemical companies and fossil fuel refineries that span the 85-mile community running along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. In this distance that takes about an hour and a half to drive, 25% of U.S petrochemical production is made. This same 85-mile stretch has cancer rates twice as high as the rest of the country, which is why it’s been morbidly called “Cancer Alley.” Lavigne has talked about how these fumes burn her skin and eyes, a reality for many like her living in this dense hub of chemical plants and fossil fuel refineries.
Cancer Alley is also majority Black, with higher percentages of Black residents in areas zoned for industrial development. Take for example, St. James District 5 where over 90% of residents are African American. District 5 was rezoned in 2014 to allow for even more industrial development next to residential spaces. Immediately after this new zoning change, the St. James Highschool in District 5, where Lavigne worked for almost 40 years as a special education teacher, was shut down to make way for a new plastics factory owned and operated by Yuhang Chemical Inc, a subsidiary of Koch Industries. This new factory–before Lavigne successfully campaigned to halt its construction–was projected to be one of the largest in the world, releasing the most carbon dioxide out of all oil and gas related projects in the US, and doubling air pollution in the area.
Lavigne’s story and that of Cancer Alley, although shocking, is not unique. It is just one example of a phenomenon as old as America itself: environmental racism.
Although it may be easy to put environmental issues and racism in two distinct circles, they are actually experienced simultaneously for many in the U.S., existing within the same overlapping space of the Venn diagram. As a result of racism and white supremacy, those most vulnerable groups are Black and Brown communities.
When thinking of solutions to any societal problem, it’s important we understand its full scope. In this case, it’s understanding that it’s impossible to separate race, environment and health, which all merge together in the same toxic soup. In other words, anti-racism work is health care advocacy is climate protection. Our advocacy needs to address each aspect, or it is incomplete and inadequate.
This overlap of racism and pollution is not lost on Lavigne. “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation” said Lavigne in a recent interview with Rolling Stone Magazine. “They pollute us with these plants, like we’re not human beings, like we’re not even people. They’re killing us.”
And it’s not just St. James Parish. People of color are exposed to more air pollution than their white counterparts across the U.S., with Latinx communities breathing up to 75% more pollution than their white counterparts. This can cause and accelerate the onset of health problems such as heart attacks, miscarriages, and yes, cancer.
It doesn’t stop there. The single strongest factor in predicting where a toxic-waste dump will be sited is not geography or geology as one might assume but rather race. Two-thirds of Black and Latinx communities in America live in an area with at least one toxic-waste site. This means, if you live in a predominantly Black or Latinx community, the odds are you are living near a toxic-waste facility.
These are not simple coincidences or “slip-ups.” Tom Goldtooth, a Native American activist and director of the Indigenous Environmental network puts it plainly, “The system ain’t broke. It was built to be this way.”
For example, the Cerrell report, a report for the California Waste Management Board on where to place garbage incinerators, specifically suggested placing incinerators in poor, rural, communities of color. That incinerators are built in communities of color is a reality rooted in deliberate policy decisions.
We owe it to ourselves and communities like St. James Parish to address the overlap of racial and environmental issues in its entirety.
For many organizations, concerted coalition building is already underway. The Movement For Black Lives (M4BL), a group of 50+ organizations including Black Lives Matter (BLM), operates on a platform that calls for divestment from fossil fuels. Organizations like the National Hispanic Medical Association, Health Care Without Harm and Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments have called on Congress to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to clean power in order to “improve public health [and] help dismantle systemic racism.”
Lavigne runs an organization herself, RISE St. James, a grassroots organization that intertwines racial justice with environmental justice and fights to keep new industrial development out of the area. Her efforts are supported by national environmental organizations like the Sierra Club. RISE has also participated in the Global Climate strike, demanding global action to protect our climate.
The efforts of these organizations embody a fundamental idea in grassroots organizing: we are stronger when we work together. A unified, targeted fight makes us all the more powerful and impactful. If we can’t separate racism and the environment into distinct experiences, why do we separate our advocacy?