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Blanding, Michael. 2017. "Green Power". Boston Magazine. Accessed May 28 2018. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2017/08/20/mariama-white-hammond/.

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She's hoping an environmental crisis can bring us all together.

On an unseasonably warm day in late April, more than 150 people descended into the basement of the Arlington Street Church for a teach-in on "How to Be a White Ally for Climate Justice." Seated in folding chairs, they were greeted by one of the marquee speakers from a rally demanding action on climate change earlier that day: the Reverend Mariama White-Hammond. Wearing a clerical collar, with a sweeping beige shawl draped over her shoulders, she asked, "How many of you have ever heard this statement: 'I really just wish people of color cared more about climate and the environment'?" Many in the crowd of mostly older, mostly white women nodded their heads.

At the protest, which marked Donald Trump's 100th day in office, she had addressed the crowd in a booming voice, but now her tone has softened. In fact, she tells her listeners in the church basement, a Yale/George Mason survey found that African Americans and Latinos actually showed the most concern about climate change. "Our notion that people of color don't care about climate change isn't true," she says. It's a diplomatic way of telling her audience: We're not as far apart as you think-and it's time for you to listen up.

For the past four years White-Hammond has worked pulpits and podiums across the city to bridge Boston's racial divide, with a powerful-if somewhat blunt-unifying message: If the environment goes to hell, we're all screwed, so we better start working together. If it's a familiar idea, White-Hammond's goal adds a novel, local twist: By reaching out to Boston's white liberals about environmentalism-an issue that's comfortable, uncontroversial, and often overwhelmingly pale-she hopes she can also get them to become more fervent advocates for racial justice. "Maybe I can push people with a little bit of white guilt," she tells me later, only half joking. But if she can build such a coalition, she says, she'll have a machine for change that will make everyone's life a little better. And who knows? That could be a step toward Bostonians coming together on more-controversial issues such as sentencing reform and immigrant rights.

It's an ambitious idea, but White-Hammond is uniquely positioned to make the case. The daughter of black church royalty, she was raised with a foot in both the African-American and white communities of Boston. Her father, the Reverend Ray Hammond, is a founder of the Ten Point Coalition against youth gang violence, a trustee of the Yawkey Foundation, and the former chair of the Boston Foundation, one of New England's largest philanthropies, with more than $1 billion in assets. Her mother, the Reverend Gloria White-Hammond, is a trustee at Tufts and a leader in the movement to save Darfur. Mariama, who attended the Winsor School in Boston-an elite, private, and then almost entirely white all-girls school-knew Mayor Marty Walsh back when he was a state representative and has since worked on his Neighborhood Innovation District Committee; her husband, Rahn Dorsey, is the mayor's education chief. She was a ward coordinator for Deval Patrick, has been active in Attorney General Maura Healey's racial equity advisory council, and has been an outspoken advocate for issues ranging from making Boston a safe haven for refugees to the fight for a $15 minimum wage. Recently, she served as master of ceremonies for the Boston Women's March, which brought 175,000 activists to the Common to protest Trump's inauguration-possibly the largest protest the city has ever seen. She is, to say the least, no stranger to the corridors of Boston power. "Boston is a tribal city; it's all about social circles," says publicist Colette Phillips, who works on diversity issues in the business community. "Mariama is an example of why networking is important. She is able to leverage the tremendous network of her family, as well as her own network that crosses socioeconomic lines."

Still, for a city where racism is often thought of more as a crime of omission than an act of expression, or dismissed as the purview of a few bad apples, the case Hammond is making can raise uncomfortable questions about why we're as divided as we are. After all, can a green thumb really heal some of Boston's oldest and deepest wounds?

Strange as this may sound, White-Hammond's whole idea started with a garden. It was 2005, and for the past four years she'd been running Project HIP-HOP, a youth organization in Roxbury's Dudley Square that used art and music to empower young people of color and provided a safe space in a sometimes-violent neighborhood. But it was draining, too. In one year, five of her students were shot, two fatally.

First, she started obsessing over an orchid from Ikea, then growing herbs on her porch, then vegetables in a community garden. "I was facing so much death, these things that were producing life became really important to me," she says. It was the beginning, she now realizes, of an environmental awakening that connected the natural world to the issues she was taking on in Roxbury. "I feel like God intended us to be connected to the animals, connected to the plants," she says. "Some of this violence and anxiety and depression we're experiencing are because we are not living the right way."

She inherited that spiritual outlook on the world from her parents, who started their careers as doctors. When White-Hammond was young, though, they founded a school with members of their church to teach children pride in their African-American heritage. It was part of an upbringing that exposed her to an exceptional range of people. Rosa Parks met her and her classmates when Hammond was four. Later, Neil deGrasse Tyson would babysit. When the family moved to the tough neighborhood of Grove Hall, between Roxbury and Dorchester, the local kids called them the Cosbys. The Reverend Arrington Chambliss remembers her having an electric personality at age 15, and to most people around her, it was clear that White-Hammond was going to do something that made use of her ability to grab the spotlight. "She had a presence that just commanded attention," Chambliss says. "There was a confidence that came from growing up in a family that has taught you that you can do anything you want to do." And she did. Attending college at Stanford, she became known as an artist and singer, active in an a cappella group on campus. "There is a diva in me," White-Hammond says.

Like her parents, she wanted to leave a mark on her community, so she started staging guerilla-theater protests on buses to challenge fare increases and discrimination on the MBTA, and organizing flash mobs in Copley Square to draw attention to issues of sexual harassment. "There is no 'off' button on Mariama," says former director of the T Riders Union Khalida Smalls, who had an office in the same building in Dudley Square. "She is bold and full of energy and passionate about so many issues."

Slowly, though, White-Hammond started to see pollution and the environment overlapping with the causes she cared about. In 2009, as part of a prestigious Barr Foundation fellowship, she took a four-week trip to Brazil and was inspired by how connected the activism she saw was. "Social politics in Brazil is much more intersectional," she says. "The landless people's movement sees itself as connected to the street children's movement, who see themselves connected to the economic justice movement. I really felt like, 'Okay, we need a consciousness shift in this country.'" That led her to wonder if there might be a different way to forge connections in radically segregated Boston.

Despite its history of leading abolitionism, Boston has a long history of racial and economic inequality. A report by the Brookings Institution last year, for instance, found that Boston has the highest level of economic inequality in the country, with the top 5 percent of households earning 18 times what the bottom 20 percent makes. That disparity plays out clearly along ethnic lines, with whites in Boston having a median wealth of almost $250,000 while wealth among blacks and some Latino groups is effectively zero, according to another report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. It plays out along environmental lines as well, with one study by Northeastern finding that communities of color in Massachusetts averaged 7.5 times as many hazardous waste sites and 10 times as many pounds of toxic chemical exposure per square mile as white communities. That pollution has taken its toll on health, with black and Hispanic children in Boston seeing rates of hospitalization for asthma between four and six times those of whites.

White-Hammond decided to take action. When she enrolled in BU's School of Theology in 2014, she started looking into what African-American churches were doing about environmental justice. She didn't find much, so she decided to take up the fight herself, joining her parents' current church in Jamaica Plain as an ecological justice minister. There she began speaking out on environmental issues. On a national level, she helped push the AME Church to adopt a resolution on climate change, the first historically black denomination to do so.

Then, last summer, a new outlook started to take root.

Local environmentalists were planning a protest of the West Roxbury Lateral Pipeline, which Houston-based Spectra Energy hoped to build in order to bring natural gas from fracking fields in Pennsylvania up to Boston. When West Roxbury activists asked for White-Hammond's help-wanting faith leaders to lend gravitas to the protests-she hesitated. Growing up nearby in Grove Hall, she always looked at the wealthy, white neighborhood as a symbol of power in the city. "I was like, 'West Roxbury's got this,'" she says. "My feeling was, 'If this pipeline was in Roxbury, would you show up for us?'"

A few days later, on her 37th birthday, she was arrested along with 22 other mostly white activists, including Al Gore's daughter Karenna. They didn't stop the pipeline, but it gave White-Hammond an idea. She saw an opportunity to rise above Boston's racial divide and forge a connection across class and neighborhood lines. "A part of it is generational," she says. "I don't just have relationships with people in other communities that are transactional-these are my friends. I am very proud of who I am as a black person, but we are not going to win without really strong partnerships and alliances."

Recently, White-Hammond's environmental expertise has made her the go-to resource for other community groups. When the Massachusetts Interfaith Coalition for Climate Action (MAICCA), a faith-based group founded by Jewish and Unitarian activists in Wellesley, wanted to expand their work on climate change issues, they reached out to her for guidance. She invited one of their leaders, Amy Benjamin, to her kitchen to talk while she canned tomatoes from her garden.

White-Hammond's influence changed the direction of the Wellesley group, Benjamin says: "The environmental movement has been too willing to throw low-income communities and equity issues under the bus when push comes to shove. When something has to come off the table, that's the chip they hand back." As a result, Benjamin says, when the group lobbied at the State House on climate issues last fall, it pushed for solar power for low-income communities in order to cut pollution, and lobbied for jobs for working-class residents as part of the push to close coal plants and create wind farms in poor communities such as New Bedford. In January, state Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz and state Representatives Russell Holmes and Michelle DuBois introduced legislation to provide rate credits from solar power to low-income communities, which is currently being considered in committee.

White-Hammond is increasingly focusing on lobbying, meeting with legislators, testifying at the State House, and trying to get her issues before the traditional power players. But she wants to bring her community in with her, too. "A lot of my work in the next year is trying to engage other people of color in the climate movement," she tells me. She also wants to leverage this growing network to push for initiatives that will help low-income communities not just with issues of pollution, but also jobs and finances. Initiatives like bringing more green energy manufacturing to cities such as New Bedford would offer much-needed injections of capital, she says. But to make this all happen, to exert effective pressure on lawmakers, she knows she also needs the support of the people whom she was talking to at the climate-justice teach-in.

Back inside the Arlington Street Church basement, White-Hammond and activist Cathy Heller, who is white, led the audience through a series of exercises about forming diverse relationships. In the first, which they jokingly referred to as "social justice speed dating," participants talked to a series of partners about their own cultural background, whose shoulders they stood on, what their own connection was to climate change work, and how they connected with other people. The mood in the room quickly became emotional, as one participant said, "There is this idea that we all have to do this alone. Thinking about the shoulder I stand on almost made me cry." Another said, "It makes me realize that, as white people, we are actually quite different."

Heller then talked about what she calls the "four I's" of racism-interpersonal, institutional, ideological, and internalized-before introducing a fifth I, intersectionality. "Even if they are a white person, a person's age, race, gender, and sexual orientation all intersect with one another," Heller said. "That's one of the core things we are talking about: How does our work for environmental justice intersect with our racial identity, age, et cetera?"

By itself, the workshop is a small gesture, but it points to a larger need that White-Hammond has often referred to: the need for both white and black activists to get to know one another first if they are going to work together on intersecting issues. Rather than just carrying signs together, what liberals really need to do is sit down and talk. "I think personally people want to do things differently, but then as human beings we get into our spaces, and we do what we usually do," she says. "Part of my role is to hold people's feet to the fire to have those tough conversations that go beyond transactional and become transformational."

As an important next step, the organizers of the climate mobilization, which represent a cross-cultural section of the movement, have agreed to meet quarterly to start having those conversations. Likewise, the religious activists are talking about pairing congregations in white suburbs with black and Latino churches in the city to share their environmental concerns. These may be small gains, but they are ones that White-Hammond sees as having the possibility to lead to others. "People are actually hungry for spiritual homes that reflect what they are feeling in this moment," she says. "I believe that white people are feeling the same thing that I'm feeling."

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She's hoping an environmental crisis can bring us all together. On an unseasonably warm day in late April, more than 150 people descended into the basement of the Arlington Street Church for a teach-in on "How to Be a White Ally for Climate Justice."

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Citation:
Globe, The. 2018. "Boston. Racism. Image. Reality: The Spotlight Team Takes On Our Hardest Question". Bostonglobe.Com. Accessed May 28 2018. http://apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/boston-racism-image-reality/series/image/.

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Google the phrase "Most racist city," and Boston pops up more than any other place, time and time again.

It may be easy to write that off as a meaningless digital snapshot of what people say about us, and what we say about ourselves - proof of little beyond the dated (or, hopefully, outdated) memories of Boston's public and fierce school desegregation battles of the 1970s.

Except that Boston's reputation problem goes much deeper than an online search. A national survey commissioned by the Globe this fall found that among eight major cities, black people ranked Boston as least welcoming to people of color. More than half - 54 percent - rated Boston as unwelcoming.

Among African-Americans: How welcoming are these cities to people of color?

Little wonder that some comedians and athletes take aim at Boston, like Michael Che of "Saturday Night Live" this year telling a global TV audience this was "the most racist city I've ever been to." Or HBO's John Oliver suggesting that it took this summer's anti-bigotry march on Boston Common to finally make Boston "unracist."

The reputation is real, and pervasive - but, most important, is it deserved?

The Globe Spotlight Team analyzed data, launched surveys, and conducted hundreds of interviews, to answer just that question. Spotlight examined the core of Boston's identity: our renowned colleges and world-class medical institutions; the growth that keeps expanding our skyline; business and politics; and our championship sports teams.

And the Spotlight reporters, to get a sense of how much black residents are part of the mainstream of the city, did something decidedly old-school: They visited a number of iconic Boston places and simply counted the number of black people they saw.

All told, the findings were troubling. The reasons are complex.

But this much we know: Here in Boston, a city known as a liberal bastion, we have deluded ourselves into believing we've made more progress than we have. Racism certainly is not as loud and violent as it once was, and the city overall is a more tolerant place. But inequities of wealth and power persist, and racist attitudes remain powerful, even if in more subtle forms. They affect what we do - and what we don't do.

Boston's complacency with the status quo hobbles the city's future.

Look at the Seaport, a whole new neighborhood rising on the South Boston Waterfront that benefited from $18 billion in taxpayer investment, and you see none of the richness of an increasingly diverse city. Look at Boston's lauded colleges and realize black students remain rare; the percentage of black enrollment at many top universities has not increased appreciably in three decades, stuck in the single digits.

Look at our political institutions and try to recall how many black politicians have been elected to statewide office - or to the top job in City Hall - in the last half century. (Answer: 2.)

Peek, if you can, into corporate board rooms in Massachusetts, where only 1 percent of board members at publicly traded firms are black. Step into the newsrooms and front offices of media organizations anywhere in Boston, including the Globe's Page 1 deliberations, and see few black faces.

And look at the area's middle-class black neighborhoods - if you can find one. There also are not many downtown restaurants and bars where black patrons can go spontaneously and see others who look like them. Living in Boston can be a particularly isolating experience for black professionals.

Although the city's vast sports, entertainment, and cultural offerings are open to all, it's perhaps little wonder why black people are hard to spot at, say, a Red Sox or Patriots game or the Museum of Fine Arts. It could be they simply choose not to go, or it may be the cost. African-Americans in Greater Boston have a median net worth of just $8. That means they owe almost as much as the combined value of what they own, be it a car, or house, or savings.

Finally, know that if you seek an apartment in the region using Craigslist, and if you are black, you can't count on getting equal treatment, even in this day and age, a Globe study found. This inquiry, like this Spotlight series, focuses on the black community specifically, not all communities of color, because blacks have had the longest and most contentious history with racism in Boston.

"To be a black person in Boston, is [often] to be the only one. . . . The only one in the office; the only one in the leadership position. It's lonely," said 45-year-old Bridgit Brown of Dorchester, a communications specialist. "You're aware of the racism. You're aware of the subtleties. It's like the air we breathe, if you're black."

For all the gains that Greater Boston has made, unfinished business on race is everywhere.

In a 1983 series of stories, a team of Globe reporters took a hard look at racial equality in our region. It was not a pretty picture, but local leaders promised things would improve. Thirty-four years later, the promise has yet to be fulfilled. For example:

Then: Just 4.5 percent of black workers were officials and managers.
Now: That number has barely moved, to 4.6 percent in 2015.

Then: The "Vault" - an organization of Boston's most powerful business leaders - had no black people among its 20 members.
Now: The "New Vault" - the 16-person Massachusetts Competitive Partnership - has no black members.

Then: This area's unemployment rate was about twice as high for blacks as whites.
Now: The gap remains, with black unemployment more than double the rate of white workers in 2014.

"A lot of times when Boston engages in looking at itself around race, it focuses on attitudes and prejudices," said James Jennings, professor emeritus of race, politics, and urban policy at Tufts University. "With that, Boston certainly has made a lot of progress, but Boston needs to start looking at structural inequality - racial hierarchy, poverty, academic achievement - to move the needle forward."

Demographics and destiny

To truly explain why racial inequities persist in the Boston area, it is necessary to understand how much can be blamed on demographics and how much can not.

Greater Boston stands out among the nation's top 10 metro areas in one distinct way. We have the highest proportion of white residents - nearly three out of every four.

Racial makeup of 10 largest metro areas, by percent

Source: US Census

Our area's black population is small and the size relatively unchanged in decades - only 7 percent, or 334,000 people, in a region of 4.7 million. If you look only at the city of Boston, the black population is about 23 percent, or about 148,000 people.

And it's been this way for decades, in large part because the metro area never benefited from the Great Migration - the post-Civil War movement of blacks from Southern states in search of opportunity - the way places like Chicago and New York did.

Boston might think of itself as on par with the country's big cities like New York and Chicago - and in certain ways, it is: Harvard, MIT, and many other of the nation's elite universities are in the Boston area, we are a hub of biotech innovation and the epicenter of medical research, and our sports teams have made us a city of champions.

But Boston is also very different. New York and Chicago dwarf Boston in size and scale. The population of New York City alone is 8.4 million people, nearly 2 million of whom are black. That translates into more black residents who earn more money, leading to a developed middle class with extensive professional representation - in other words, cities made welcoming, in part, because there simply is a critical mass of black residents who reflect the achievement possible within their community. Boston lacks that advantage.

But make no mistake: The relatively small size of Boston's black community is not an excuse for the inequalities - or biases - that persist here.

The experience in other cities shows that, even when the black population is relatively small, things can be done with sufficient will. Minneapolis, Denver, and Seattle - all with smaller black populations than Boston - have elected black mayors at least once. Boston has never even come close.

The size of this region's black population also cannot explain how a new showcase neighborhood triumphantly rose in the Seaport with little to no involvement of the black community. Further, it can't explain why elite colleges here admit only slightly more black students than 30 years ago.

Nor does the relatively small size of Boston's black population have anything to do with barriers to finding housing, an inequity the Spotlight Team documented in detail.

Using a methodology employed by academic researchers who study bias in housing, the Globe conducted a study of nearly 600 Craigslist ads from rental landlords in the Greater Boston area, finding housing discrimination remains in Boston.

Overall, landlords ignored nearly 45 percent of e-mails from prospective tenants with black-sounding names, like Darnell Washington or Keisha Jackson, versus 36 percent of e-mails from people with white-sounding names, like Brendan Weber or Meredith McCarthy.

To be a black person in Boston, is [often] to be the only one... The only one in the office; the only one in the leadership position. It's lonely," said 45-year-old Bridgit Brown of Dorchester, a communications specialist. "You're aware of the racism. You're aware of the subtleties. It's like the air we breathe, if you're black."

For example, when a prospective tenant using the name Allison Wolf asked about renting a two-bedroom condo in Boston's Back Bay, the landlord responded later that day. "It's available," she e-mailed back. "You can see it on Sunday." But when a prospective tenant asked about that same apartment the same morning using the name Tamika Rivers, the landlord never replied.

The difference was even more pronounced when landlords received more informal e-mails with grammatical errors or typos, with landlords seeming more forgiving of such written lapses among whites than blacks.

Such lingering prejudices are part of the reason Charlotte Streat, who lives in Milton, questions her decision to call the Boston area home.

"I don't know that I would move here again," Streat, a Philadelphia native, said sitting under a hair dryer at Randolph's Styles with Character, a Roxbury hair salon.

Streat's parents were none too happy that she decided to attend college and grad school in Greater Boston several decades ago. "I was called a nigger. So yeah, my mother was not pleased," she recalled.

But she fell in love and married a Bostonian. The couple moved into a spacious home with a circular drive along Canton Avenue about 10 years ago.

Milton is a suburb where 15 percent of residents are black and the state's first black governor, Deval Patrick, once lived. Still, some black residents feel alone.

"We're isolated," said Streat, a former executive at Bank of America. "People say there are more black folk in Milton, but you're hard pressed to find them."

The missing middle class

The lack of a robust black middle class is both a result, and a cause, of Boston's reputation as an unwelcoming place. As blacks move up the economic ladder here, they encounter an increasingly white world, and their solitary and alienating experience becomes part of our city's word-of-mouth reputation.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the city's history - the mayhem surrounding court-ordered school desegregation - was reason enough for many black graduates and professionals to settle elsewhere. Boston's black middle class stagnated, providing little incentive for the next round of graduates to stay in Boston. And so a cycle, or perhaps a spiral, began.

Today, of all the households in the region earning at least $75,000 annually, only 4 percent are black.

"Does Boston lose because it doesn't have a visible, strong black middle class?" asked John Barros, the mayor's chief of economic development and the most prominent black official at City Hall. "Yes. It loses out on talent. It loses out on investments."

The reality is that Greater Boston has few neighborhoods where prosperous black residents can live with others like them, and finding such areas requires a bit of searching.

The Globe ran a data analysis of census tracts nationally to see which met three criteria: At least 15 percent of the residents are black; and among the black residents, at least 30 percent had a four-year college degree and their household income was at or above the median for their metro area. (That is about $75,000 in Greater Boston.)

Here in Greater Boston there are just four such enclaves: two in Stoughton, one in Milton, and one in Boston's Hyde Park neighborhood. If the search were done looking for neighborhoods that met these criteria for white residents, the results would be a bountiful choice of 516 enclaves. The Boston area also reflects a pattern of segregation that is more extensive than in most other metro regions, studies show.

Forty-five other metropolitan areas have far more black enclaves than Boston, including some major metropolitan centers, such as New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, each with more than 100 enclaves, and other smaller urban areas, particularly - but not only - in the South.

Middle-to-​upper-class black enclaves: How Boston compares

The Boston ​metro area includes Suffolk, Norfolk, Plymouth, Middlesex, and Essex​ counties and​ ​New Hampshire's Rockingham and Strafford counties.

Finding those enclaves in other major cities.

The town with the highest concentration of black residents in Massachusetts is Randolph, which is about 30 minutes south of the city. More than 40 percent of Randolph's population is black, as is the town council president and superintendent of schools. Its median household income is about $12,000 less than the overall metro area.

Netty Oliveira, 51, said she and her husband considered living in Randolph before buying their tan and brick, split-entry house in Stoughton 17 years ago. Their street borders one of the four black enclaves identified by the Globe.

And while she appreciates that her town includes other black residents, she hasn't always felt totally welcomed. She'll never forget one of her first encounters with a neighbor who was white and asked her husband skeptically: "What do you do for a living?"

"I think he was afraid of black people moving in," said Oliveira, who works in criminal justice while her husband works in information technology.

She decided the Stoughton public schools weren't the best fit for her children, now 12 and 15. She eventually chose private schools, which vastly expanded her childrens' world view but forced them to contend with being in classes where they were often one of the few black students. She said white children have asked to touch her son's hair and wondered why his clothes were so nice.

"Our kids pretty much broke a lot of the color barriers," she said.

She hopes the trade-offs are worth it, even though she sometimes feels judged.

"Some of my friends say, 'You're too bourgie. You don't think you're black.' I'm very much black," she said. "But I want more. I want all of us to have a college degree. I want us all to climb the corporate ladder."

Our own worst enemy

There is no doubt that Boston has made gains in overcoming its history of racism. Gone are the days when black people crouched in cars, windows rolled up, hats pulled low so as not to be seen driving through the streets of South Boston or Charlestown, fearing racial slurs or real physical violence.

Though safety remains an issue in some neighborhoods, violent crime in Boston is the lowest in a decade. Also, as police forces nationwide work to end deep mistrust of them within black communities, Boston's officers have so far avoided high-profile clashes that have led to protests elsewhere, and have garnered generally favorable reviews about the city's level of outreach.

Despite the dearth of black politicians elected to statewide office - save for Deval Patrick's two terms as governor and Edward Brooke's path-breaking election as state attorney general and a US senator in the 1960s and 1970s - gains have also been made locally, including the election of black candidates in predominantly white neighborhoods.

Yet this is a city that still stumbles and, in doing so, rekindles seething images of racial discord beamed into televisions during the school desegregation battles of the 1970s.

There was the case of Charles Stuart, a white man who in 1989 killed his wife and then lied, describing the assailant as a black man. The city readily set out in pursuit of a man fitting the fake description.

That was followed by the 2009 arrest of a prominent African-American scholar at Harvard, Henry Louis Gates Jr., handcuffed after being confronted by police for allegedly breaking into his own home, attracting national headlines.

Meanwhile, the image of Boston portrayed on the big screen, and beyond, reinforces the outsider status of many in the city's black community. There are the movies that showcase white-working-class heroes (Remember: "The Departed," "Good Will Hunting," or "The Town"); punch lines (Think: Che and HBO's John Oliver); and sports controversies old and new (Picture: Yawkey Way and Adam Jones).

The region's main tourism website features a video of overwhelmingly white faces inviting visitors to places like Faneuil Hall, Symphony Hall, and along the Charles River. And the introduction of the website's "neighborhood dining guide" only highlights the Back Bay, downtown, the North End, and the Seaport - all neighborhoods with few black residents.

"That's literally making entire communities invisible," said Sarah J. Jackson, a black Ph.D. who moved to Boston six years ago from Minneapolis to teach at Northeastern University. "It became really apparent to me soon after moving here that the version of Boston that the city is really invested in portraying to the outside world is only white Boston. What's the fear? That people are going to go to Dorchester?"

Compare that to Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., where black travelers can find entire itineraries on those area's tourism websites dedicated to African-American arts, culture, food, and history.

Our complacency on economic issues also works against us.

Despite a thriving economy fueling a downtown building boom, black residents in Massachusetts are twice as likely as their white counterparts to be unemployed. They earn sharply lower salaries when they do land jobs, have little savings, and are far less likely to own their homes.

The median net worth of non-immigrant African-American households in the Boston area is just $8, the lowest in a five-city study of wealth disparities. It's hard to ignore the dramatic contrast to the $247,500 net worth for white households in the Boston area.

"That borders on insane and absurd. The disparity in Boston just transcends everything," said William A. Darity Jr., a professor of public policy at Duke University who was one of the lead investigators of that study, which involved the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. "It's just staggering."

And when it comes to income alone, the imbalance looks like this: For every one black household earning more than $75,000 in the metro region, there are about 21 white ones.

Those findings may provide some context for the results of a Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll completed this summer. Nearly two-thirds of black Bostonians said they were treated unfairly because of race in the previous 30 days.

It also provides insight into the separate Globe-commissioned survey on Boston's national reputation, which compared us to Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Charlotte, San Francisco, Miami, and Philadelphia. The survey was conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey, a market research and strategy firm in Boston, and designed to update a race image survey already done twice for Commonwealth Compact, a nonprofit group that promotes diversity.

The question was: How welcoming is each city to people of color? And each time it was asked - in 2010, 2013, and 2017 - Boston came in last among African-American respondents.

Atlanta topped the list the last two times, with 83 and 84 percent of blacks respectively saying it was most welcoming to people of color.

Everywhere you look

Even though about 334,000 black people live in Boston's metro region, few of them can be found at the city's most iconic locations.

Less than 2 percent of some 4,600 fans counted systematically at select entrances in Fenway Park on a summer night when the Red Sox beat the St. Louis Cardinals were black. And of nearly 8,000 ticketholders counted at Gillette Stadium at a game this fall, about 2 percent were black.

On a sunny Saturday in September, about 4 percent of the roughly 3,000 patrons counted entering the Museum of Fine Arts, one of the largest museums in the country, were black. And about 4 percent of the more than 1,180 people counted walking into the Boston Children's Museum on an October Saturday were black.

Of the 200 diners sipping cocktails and enjoying Thursday night dinner in October at Eastern Standard in Kenmore Square, four were black. That same night and time, only one black person ate at Ostra in the Back Bay and no black people dined at Blue Dragon in the Seaport.

And during the Saturday night rush at Legal Harborside, about 4 percent of nearly 380 diners were black, while about 10 percent of diners were black that same night at the Cheesecake Factory at the Prudential Center, which could be due to its more moderate-priced menu and accessible location.

There are only a small number of restaurants in which black diners report they can dependably find other black people, including Darryl's Corner Bar & Kitchen, Slade's Bar & Grill, and Savvor Restaurant & Lounge.

"There's really nothing here for us . . . and this is a big city," said Thomas Grupee, a project manager working in biotech. "If you visit a place like D.C. or Atlanta, there's so many places to go that are black-owned. Why not give us a piece of the pie, too?"

Everyone in Boston loses out on the cultural front. The downtown dining and social scene does not reflect the city's full diversity, and some black patrons who want to dine in places with others like them organize "friendly takeovers" of establishments with their friends or hold private events. It's today's answer to social segregation in Boston.

That was the situation that 32-year-old Mike Free stepped into one recent night.

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The doors of Scholars, a restaurant in the heart of downtown, had just opened, and the place was almost empty save for the wait staff and DJ.

But Free, dressed in jeans and a button-up, was the first to arrive. His sense of punctuality was honed by four years at West Point. His sense of excitement amplified with anticipation. Today, he was not going to be the only black person at the bar.

By the end of the night, Scholars would fill with some 400 young, urban (read: black) professionals brought together via group chats, retweets, and Instagram - and an ambitious event planner - to create a social scene where one really doesn't exist.

"When I moved, I didn't really know exactly where to go," said Free, who had just moved here from Chicago for an executive training program. "Chicago is easier. Here, you all have a different kind of vibe."

What he did know about Boston was discouraging. This was a town where a racial slur was hurled at a black Baltimore Orioles player. Friends also told him: It's not diverse. It's small. It's a difficult place for a person of color to thrive.

So he set his expectations low, really low. And after several months here, the best Free could say about Boston's social scene was that it is a step up from one of the whitest states in the nation.

"It's not Idaho," he offered with a smile.

Barros, the city's development chief, maintains that Boston needs to show that it is welcoming by creating a "social infrastructure" for black professionals to connect - or risk losing them to other cities, such as Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York.

Building a more vibrant black middle class and professional community in Boston may depend on the success of entrepreneurs like Gregory Minott. The 41-year-old, along with business partner Troy Depeiza, both of whom are black, started Dream Collaborative, an architecture and development firm, in 2008. It has 13 employees who design and develop commercial and residential projects with up to $20 million price tags.

Minott knows white colleagues who vacation with their clients, leveraging those personal relationships to broaden their professional networks. This is difficult for black businessmen like him in a metro region where only 1 percent of companies with paid employees are black-owned.

"You miss that part . . . the kind of peer-to-peer thing," he said.

Minott started the firm to inspire other people of color to enter an industry where black architects make up about 2 percent of the workforce.

He'd like to tap into a wider network, including the fast-growing Seaport, but focuses on projects in predominantly black neighborhoods, such as transforming the old Grove Hall Library into the Freedom House's new community center, using culture competency - his blackness - as a competitive advantage.

For black professionals who live or work outside of the heart of the city's black community, day-to-day life can be very isolating.

For many, this means being the only black person in the room, turning them into the de facto emissary and expert on the entirety of the global black experience, a translator of everything from HBO's "Insecure" to soca music to respectability politics and the Black Power movement.

Also, being the only one in the room often means being constantly on guard, policing your attire, aesthetic, tone, speech, and mannerisms.

For the last decade, 46-year-old Farah Paul has been painfully aware that she is the only black person in management at her downtown office. "That's constantly in my head," she said. "I'll walk into a meeting. I'll scan the room, and that's the first thing I notice."

It's a fact of life that she's become accustomed, but not numb, to. And if there is another black person in the room, there's an automatic, unspoken sense of camaraderie, she said.

"You still maintain that professionalism, but you just feel a bit more comfortable," she said.

The struggle to find a place where black people can connect is part of the reason Farrah Belizaire started LiteWorks, which hosted the event at Scholars, after she graduated from Boston University.

"A lot of people come to Boston with the idea that it's racially unfriendly or that socially, they're going to have to take a loss," the 28-year-old Brockton native said. "So they always place a time limit on how long they stay."

LiteWorks, she said, is about creating the social experience she wanted to have, and she uses technology to help people stay in touch between events.

More than 1,800 people belong to "Boston's Young, Black & Social," a massive group chat Belizaire started using a smart phone app. She also uses Instagram to feature members of the LiteWorks community. Entrepreneurs, engineers, lawyers, artists, and scientists - all black and living in the Greater Boston area.

"It helps reinforce the community aspect that I'm trying to create," she said. "Here, you have to be a little bit proactive."

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Boston. Racism. Image. Reality: The Spotlight Team takes on our hardest question

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The Globe's Spotlight Team confronts one of Boston's most vexing issues - racism - in a seven-part series that examines the city's pervasive and persistent national image as a place unwelcoming to black people. Spotlight attempts to answer an important question: Is this reputation still deserved?

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Great work here, Rachel. Your color-coordinated boxes and spacious organization of ideas/topics/research  facilitate easy navigation of your padlet with regard to your research and outline.
Your lists of primary and secondary sources provide ample diverse research to bolster your arguments throughout the essay.

Going forward, how might you include the current EPA, and their recent action, into your thesis?

Thesis: 3/3
Into: 4/4
Body parag.: 15/15
Counter arg: 4/4
Concl.: 4/4

30/30

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Rolf, Carol A. "Environmental Protection Agency." Salem Press Encyclopedia (2014): Research Starters, EBSCOhost (accessed May 25, 2018).

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"Silent Spring by Rachel Carson." Salem Press Encyclopedia (2015): Research Starters, EBSCOhost (accessed May 28, 2018).

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staff, Grist. 2006. "Tomasita González, Environmental-Justice Organizer, Answers Questions". Grist. Accessed May 28 2018. https://grist.org/article/gonzalez/.

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What work do you do?

I work as a community organizer at SouthWest Organizing Project, based in Albuquerque, N.M.

What does your organization do?

For over a quarter century, SWOP has worked to build an environmental-justice movement in disenfranchised, working, and people-of-color communities. In the '90s, we sought to challenge the mainstream "Group of Ten" environmental organizations with a letter demanding that affected communities - those suffering most from industrial and human-produced toxins and pollution - have a seat at the table in shaping the environmental movement.

What are you working on at the moment?

We're trying to get the New Mexico state legislature to adopt an environmental-justice bill and memorial.

How do you get to work?

I carpool with coworkers when possible.

What long and winding road led you to your current position?

I and my community are struggling for the right to access clean, safe drinking water. SWOP came in and helped organize, guide, and empower us to stand up to elected officials, etc., in order to resolve the problem. I saw changes within the officials, etc., so I decided to stay and share my struggle and experience and be a support to others.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?

I was born, raised, and am currently living in the South Valley, which is located in Albuquerque, N.M.

What has been the best moment in your professional life to date?

When we were organizing for environmental-justice legislation and some elected officials treated the polluters like we normally get treated - like we're crazy.

What environmental offense has infuriated you the most?

What really upsets me is when our elected officials hand out permits to polluters, knowing our communities are already overloaded with toxins and environmental hazards and degradation.

Where do you think environmentalists and social-justice advocates can find common cause?

During the last year, whole communities and cultures were found to be expendable following natural disasters all over the world. In the U.S., the richest country in the world, the poor and working class - and yes, African Americans - of the Gulf Coast were left to die in a predicted disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The threat of climate change and a world energy shortage looms mightily over the world's overwhelmingly poor population. Environmentalists and social-justice advocates must find common ground not only in combating the effects of corporate globalization on the environment, but also in organizing to meet the immediate needs of families all over the world left out of existing power structures.

Do you see environmental ills disproportionately afflicting the communities where you live and work?

Of course. There are two environmental movements we can speak of: one is a middle-class (mostly) white environmental movement and the other is a very diverse grouping of locally based groups working hard to end the environmental degradation of their communities. A central tenet of this movement is that people have the right to live, play, and work in a healthy and safe environment. Commonly referred to as the EJ movement, this work receives little attention in the press despite its significant accomplishments toward holding corporations and governments environmentally accountable - not to mention the (other) environmental movement, which often is perceived to act as if humans are parasites.

How can the environmental movement cast a wider net culturally and become a bigger-tent issue politically?

The environmental movement must come to the realization that humans are part of the environment.

Who is your environmental hero?

Jeanne Gauna, one of the cofounders of SWOP. She passed away a few years ago. She really knew how to engage, motivate, and empower people. She made me feel like anything could be done as long as we stuck together and stood up. Now, I know why she said it wouldn't be easy, but things are getting done.

What's your environmental vice?

Sometimes I stretch the truth about my carpooling habits.

How do you spend your free time?

I come from a soccer family (myself and my two boys), so my free time is spent in practice or at games.

What's your favorite meal?

As long as it has chile (hot preferred), I'm good.

What's your favorite place or ecosystem?

I love to go to the Bosque along the Rio Grande with my kids. I hope my kids will be able to take their kids there too.

If you could institute by fiat one environmental reform, what would it be?

It would be that polluters and governments would have to complete an impact study prior to issuing permits.

Who was your favorite musical artist when you were 18? How about now?

I love to dance to cumbia no matter the artist!

What's your favorite TV show?

I really don't have time for TV, but I'd say the game show 100 Mexicanos Dijeron.

Which actor would play you in the story of your life?

There's no one in Hollywood quite like me. But my kids want J.Lo to play me in a movie!

If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?

Now more than ever, we should value the importance of community-based institutions where disenfranchised, everyday people can impact the decisions that affect our lives - decisions increasingly made by special interests, corporate interests, and patron politicians. Donate to your friendly, local community-based organization!

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What work do you do? I work as a community organizer at SouthWest Organizing Project, based in Albuquerque, N.M. What does your organization do? For over a quarter century, SWOP has worked to build an environmental-justice movement in disenfranchised, working, and people-of-color communities.

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Citation:
staff, Grist. 2006. "Tomasita González, Environmental-Justice Organizer, Answers Questions". Grist. Accessed May 28 2018. https://grist.org/article/gonzalez/.

"Environmentalists and social-justice advocates must find common ground not only in combating the effects of corporate globalization on the environment, but also in organizing to meet the immediate needs of families all over the world left out of existing power structures."

"The environmental movement must come to the realization that humans are part of the environment."

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Lee, Mark, and John Elkington. 2006. "What Green Looks Like To The World’S Emerging Economies". Grist. Accessed May 29 2018. https://grist.org/article/elkington_lee/.

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Give a child a hammer, they say, and everything is seen as a nail - or at least in need of a good pounding. Likewise, give an environmentalist a brush loaded with green paint, and she or he may set to turning everything one verdant hue. Pretty, perhaps, but problems can arise when well-off painters try to "green" the people the communists once tried to "red": the world's huddled masses, the have-nots, the dispossessed, the poor.

While Grist's new series explores poverty and the environment in the U.S., we are wondering about a broader question: What chance is there that the environmental revolution will reach the bottom of the wealth pyramid wherever it may be found, from Chicago to Calcutta, from London to Lahore? Will the future be driven by "trickle down," "trickle up," or something more akin to what would have happened if the fabled Dutch boy had taken his fabled finger out of the fabled dike?

With our deadline fast approaching, we sent an email to the SustainAbility team asking what they thought - then had to duck sharply as answers began to ricochet off the walls.

Do as I Say, Not as I Do

The first reply came from Kavita Prakash-Mani, who runs our Emerging Economies program. She had just returned from a conference on the greening of emerging economies held at, of all places, Windsor Castle. (Prince Charles may be Britain's leading example of a gentleman organic farmer, but he still drives cars that have the efficiency of a Sherman tank.) The real problem today, Prakash-Mani stressed, is that industrialized countries are trying to export an unsustainable economic model to developing countries like Brazil, China, and India - or, at least, such emerging economies are embracing our economic and business models, regardless of how unsustainable they may be. She relayed the comments of one Windsor attendee, who noted that China is racing to replace its "bamboo" past with a "plastic" future, bulldozing land and building its 21st century infrastructure around the private car, rather than public transit. Sound familiar?

Next online was Kavita's partner in crime, Jodie Thorpe, who has led much of SustainAbility's work in countries like Brazil. She said the problem is that the rich North expects the poor South to leapfrog to a sustainable lifestyle - if not an impossible goal, a notion that's stymied by the fact that very often the South aspires to the northern model. (The story may be apocryphal, but it is said that during the height of Lebanon's civil war the gunfire periodically faded as gunmen retreated indoors to watch the latest episode of Dallas.) Developed countries must not underestimate the appeal of unsustainability built on economic prosperity. On the other side of the coin, they have to be acutely aware of how their own attempts at sustainability look in poorer parts of the world. The North's well-intended "food-miles" campaigns, for example, which emphasize buying local, can look uncomfortably like trade barriers in the making from a southern perspective.

The third broadside came from our Washington, D.C., office, courtesy of Meghan Chapple-Brown. Before coming to us, Chapple-Brown spent years working with low-income communities of color in Chicago on issues including economic development and environmental justice. She pointed out that some environmentalists think the poor are simply waiting for a green angel to descend with organic fare and free bus tickets, an idea she disparages. While sustainability proponents may genuinely want to ensure that the benefits of greener lifestyles cascade to have-nots, she said, the more effective route - one embraced by many community activists in the U.S. - focuses on "increasing the power of the poor. When the environmental movement relates to power, then it becomes salient and relevant to minority communities."

As these and other issues unfold in the years to come, there are at least three political - and ultimately, market and business - trends we all should monitor closely as we go forward. The first is long-established, the second still surfacing, and the third a solution that scarcely dares speak its name in some parts of the world.

Up, Down, or Sam-Ways

The first is the phenomenon of trickle-down development. Ronald Reagan was wildly over-optimistic on this front, clearly, but the fact is that new technologies can start out hideously expensive and stay that way until competition and technological innovation erode the price to the point where luxury may end up a necessity. Take the humble ballpoint pen, now given away at conferences alongside the mints. When Laszlo Biro reinvented the ballpoint in 1938, he sold his product to the British government at prices that remind us of the budget-warping lavatory seats the Pentagon was buying a few years back. Green technologies can follow this "ballpoint trajectory," and that should be encouraged. Indeed, the Japanese started putting solar cells into things like calculators and watches many years ago as part of a strategy of spurring use and driving down costs.

Second, there's a related aspect of the emerging economy space that should give the optimists among us cheer. In spite of the tendency for emerging economies to adopt northern models and aspire to that lifestyle, the horrendous environmental challenges that countries like India and China now increasingly face are also likely to inspire considerable innovation in terms of green technology development. These new ideas can then be exported ("trickle up") to the rest of the world - a point stressed recently by New York Times writer Tom Friedman. That doesn't mean wealthy nations can simply sit back and wait for this to happen. Northern investors should make strategic (and patient) investments in these areas, and northern companies need to participate in the development of these technologies, unless they want to be taken by surprise the way Detroit's automakers were by Japan in the 1970s.

Now for the third trend. It's increasingly clear that for all this to happen in a sufficiently rapid and tidy fashion, governments must get involved. Pause. Not a popular idea. When we were in New Delhi a month or two back, for example, CEOs at a Confederation of Indian Industry conference insisted that progress depends on keeping government and politicians completely out of the kitchen. But while some governments are certainly venal, corrupt, and largely counterproductive, good governments have the power to put in place the fiscal and market incentives that will be needed to drive the necessary processes of innovation, replication, and scaling. Think of Toyota's Prius, now allowed free - along with other alternative-fuel vehicles - into London's congestion charge area. It's in the nature of markets that the standard processes of cost reduction, coupled with tax incentives like London's, will eventually bring hybrid and other sustainable mobility technologies in reach of much larger numbers of people, among them many of the millions who will occupy the bulldozed landscapes of the emerging world.

In the business world, there are several levels of response to all of this. At the grassroots level, a growing number of social entrepreneurs are working to create new markets for, among other things, renewable energy and waste-management services. In the middle are the corporations that are being teased by the notion of the fortunes to be made at the bottom of the wealth pyramid. And then, perhaps the potential solution that really dares not speak its name, there is Wal-Mart and its globe-straddling supply chain.

The much-hammered $300 billion-a-year behemoth has begun pledging itself to sell everything from organic cotton baby clothes to sustainable fish. While its supply chain initiatives still lag way behind the likes of Nike and Gap, the potential for allying Wal-Mart's cost-reduction power with the green agenda should tempt us to at least think the unthinkable. What if Hurricane Katrina really did turn out to be CEO Lee Scott's Road to Damascus, and Wal-Mart really were to embrace sustainability? If Scott stuck with this long and effectively enough, would we put his name up in lights alongside the likes of BP's Lord John Browne and GE's Jeff Immelt? We shouldn't count on it, but stranger things have happened.

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What green looks like to the world's emerging economies

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Give a child a hammer, they say, and everything is seen as a nail - or at least in need of a good pounding. Likewise, give an environmentalist a brush loaded with green paint, and she or he may set to turning everything one verdant hue.

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"What constitutes “the environment” in American environmentalism? The iconic images of the movement — California’s redwoods, Yosemite’s Half Dome, the arches at Zion — suggest one answer: the environment as wilderness, a pristine domain to be protected from human incursion. But, almost by definition, that’s not the environment we actually live in. The first two weeks of this special series on Poverty & the Environment will focus on the land where we do live — specifically, the land consigned to the poorest among us. This is a land where people live near the freeway or next to a power station or miles from public transit; a land where the neighbors include landfills, oil refineries, nuclear-waste repositories, factory farms. This is a whole different kind of environment — but one that is no less American, and no less deserving of a movement to protect and transform it."

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"Poverty & The Environment: On The Intersection Of Economic And Ecological Survival". 2006. Grist. Accessed May 29 2018. https://grist.org/poverty-the-environment-on-economic-and-ecological-survival/.

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Consider this central paradox of U.S. environmentalism: In much of popular and political culture, the movement is dismissed as the pet cause of white, well-off Americans - people who can afford to buy organic arugula, vacation in Lake Tahoe, and worry about the fate of the Pacific pocket mouse. And yet, the population most affected by environmental problems is the poor.

This is a reality most of us recognize in the developing world, and it's true that the confluence of economic and environmental injustice can be particularly extensive and devastating in poor nations. But it is also true - and far less remarked-upon - that poverty and environmental degradation go hand and hand in the United States as well. The lower your income in this country, the higher the likelihood that you will be exposed to toxics at home and on the job. The greater the risk that you will suffer from diseases - ranging from asthma to cancer - caused or exacerbated by environmental factors. The harder it will be for you to find and afford healthy food to put on your table. The less likely you are to live in a community that provides safe outdoor spaces for you and your family to enjoy. And, as recent history tragically exposed, the more vulnerable you are to environmental catastrophes, whether they are natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or human-made tragedies like the Exxon Valdez.

In short, the worst consequences of environmental degradation are visited on the homes, workplaces, families, and bodies of the poor.

In the United States today - that is, at a time and in a nation touted for prosperity - 12.7 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. In this special seven-week series, Grist will focus on the environmental realities facing those 37 million people, as well as the many additional millions of Americans who struggle to make ends meet. Our coverage includes investigative reports, opinion pieces, interviews, and profiles. And we will debut a series of multimedia "virtual walking tours" of poverty-stricken regions around the country, led by the community members who are fighting to transform them.

It is our hope that this special series will help shed light on some frequently hidden environmental problems and expose the connections between economic and ecological survival. Ultimately, we hope to challenge and change the received wisdom about what counts as an environmental issue, what we mean when we refer to "the environment," and where, how, and for whom environmentally minded movements, organizations, and people should dedicate their energies.
Weeks One & Two: Land and People
What constitutes "the environment" in American environmentalism? The iconic images of the movement - California's redwoods, Yosemite's Half Dome, the arches at Zion - suggest one answer: the environment as wilderness, a pristine domain to be protected from human incursion. But, almost by definition, that's not the environment we actually live in. The first two weeks of this special series on Poverty & the Environment will focus on the land where we do live - specifically, the land consigned to the poorest among us. This is a land where people live near the freeway or next to a power station or miles from public transit; a land where the neighbors include landfills, oil refineries, nuclear-waste repositories, factory farms. This is a whole different kind of environment - but one that is no less American, and no less deserving of a movement to protect and transform it.
Week Three: Consumption
Flat-screen TVs, iPods, plane tickets, supersized fries, tall skinny lattes, North Face jackets, motor homes, second homes: what (and how) we consume speaks volumes about our class background, our relationship to the environment, and what those two things have to do with each other. In week three of Grist 's special series on Poverty & the Environment, we look at class, consumption, and environmentalism - from the price tag of environment-affecting essentials to the difference between "simple living" and simply surviving. Plus: photos of trash (no, really!) and an artist's take on how the other half lives.
Week Four: The Midpoint
This week, the midpoint of our series, seemed like a good time to step back and take the long view. Hence, we present Matthew Klingle and Joseph Taylor's look at the history of the environmental movement and how it came to be so white and affluent. Meanwhile, Oliver Bernstein talks about what happens when that movement rubs up against a very different environmental ethos, in a story on the Texas-Mexico border. Also, Tomasita González answers questions about her environmental-justice work with the SouthWest Organizing Project.
Week Five: The Movement
While the mainstream environmental movement is just waking up to the relationship between environmental and economic devastation, the environmental-justice movement has sought from its founding to protect the environment while simultaneously securing the political, economic, and cultural liberation of all people. This week, we feature an interview with one of EJ's founding fathers, Robert Bullard, who has spent the last two decades helping to organize and lead the fight for environmental equity. We also feature some of the movement's youngest members - children from Houston's impoverished Fifth Ward, who used art and photography to document the Superfund site that is despoiling their community - as well as other voices pushing for environmental justice.
Week Six: The Good Fight
Poverty, inequality, environmental devastation - not exactly the most fun party in town, is it? Our magazinely mission forbids us from indulging in all gloom all the time, so in this penultimate week of Grist's special series on Poverty & the Environment, we turn our attention to the good fight: to the people, ideas, and strategies that are effectively countering economic and environmental injustice. We profile Sheryll Cashin, who is rethinking one of the root issues of the civil-rights movement - integration - as the key to improved environmental and social justice. We take you on a tour of the Sokaogon Chippewa tribal lands in Mole Lake, Wis., to profile their efforts to halt the reopening of a nearby mine - by buying it. And, to lighten the gloom in a different way, we turn to the movies, and to the burning question of why, from Silkwood to Erin Brockovich to North Country, downtrodden white women who fight environmental battles make such darn compelling film.
Week Seven: Looking Ahead
This last week of Grist's special series on Poverty & the Environment doesn't so much wrap things up as open them up. We bring you a dialogue between a mainstream environmental leader (Frances Beinecke, president of Natural Resources Defense Council) and an environmental-justice leader (Eric Mann, of the Labor/Community Strategy Center), who together try to figure out how to move forward on securing a just and sustainable future. We hear firsthand about the challenges of doing so in an opinion piece by Na'Taki Osborne about trying to save Atlanta, Ga., from its reputation as the sprawl capital of the South. We look beyond our borders to the problem of global slums as a devastating nexus of environmental and economic catastrophe. Finally, we're proud to bring you the last in our series of virtual walking tours - this one, a trip around Pacoima, Calif., a community of recent immigrants who are working with their better-off neighbors to form a multi-language, multicultural coalition to clean up the environment.

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Poverty & the Environment: On the intersection of economic and ecological survival

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Consider this central paradox of U.S. environmentalism: In much of popular and political culture, the movement is dismissed as the pet cause of white, well-off Americans - people who can afford to buy organic arugula, vacation in Lake Tahoe, and worry about the fate of the Pacific pocket mouse.

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2018. Washington Post. Accessed May 29 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/28/redlining-was-banned-50-years-ago-its-still-hurting-minorities-today/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.19fb6842c543.

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Racial discrimination in mortgage lending in the 1930s shaped the demographic and wealth patterns of American communities today, a new study shows, with 3 out of 4 neighborhoods "redlined" on government maps 80 years ago continuing to struggle economically .

The study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, released Wednesday, shows that the vast majority of neighborhoods marked "hazardous" in red ink on maps drawn by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corp. from 1935 to 1939 are today much more likely than other areas to comprise lower-income, minority residents.

"It's as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty," said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC, a consumer advocacy group.
[The Senate rolls back rules meant to root out discrimination by mortgage lenders]
Researchers compared the HOLC maps, the most comprehensive documentation of discriminatory lending practices, with modern-day census data to determine how much neighborhood demographics have changed in 80 years. The findings have implications for today's po litical debates over housing, banking and financial regulation, as well as civil rights, as Congress seeks to weaken the government's ability to enforce fair-lending requirements. Policies that influence access to capital and credit have long-lasting effects on residential patterns, neighborhoods' economic health and household accumulation of wealth, the report said.

In the 1930s, government surveyors graded neighborhoods in 239 cities, color-coding them green for "best," blue for "still desirable," yellow for "definitely declining" and red for "hazardous." The "redlined" areas were the ones local lenders discounted as credit risks, in large part because of the residents' racial and ethnic demographics. They also took into account local amenities and home prices.

Neighborhoods that were predominantly made up of African Americans, as well as Catholics, Jews and immigrants from Asia and southern Europe, were deemed undesirable. "Anyone who was not northern-European white was considered to be a detraction from the value of the area," said Bruce Mitchell, a senior researcher at the NCRC and one of the study's authors.
[White families have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families. And the gap is growing.]
Loans in these neighborhoods were unavailable or very expensive, making it more difficult for low-income minorities to buy homes and setting the stage for the country's persistent racial wealth gap. (White families today have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families and more than eight times that of Hispanic families, according to the Federal Reserve.)

"Homeownership is the number-one method of accumulating wealth, but the effect of these policies that create more hurdles for the poor is a permanent underclass that's disproportionately minority," said John Taylor, president and chief executive of the NCRC. "I think most people believe the problem is not with the rules but with the people. Most middle-class whites in America don't have empirical observations of what happens in underserved neighborhoods or understand the historical treatment of poor and minority communities."

The Federal Housing Administration institutionalized the system of discriminatory lending in government-backed mortgages, reflecting local race-based criteria in their underwriting practices and reinforcing residential segregation in American cities. The discriminatory practices captured by the HOLC maps continued until 1968, when the Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in housing.
[Could the #BankBlack movement help African Americans close the wealth gap?]
But 50 years after that law passed, the lingering effects of redlining are clear, with the pattern of economic and racial residential segregation still evident in many U.S. cities - from Montgomery, Ala., to Flint, Mich., to Denver.

Nationally, nearly two-thirds of neighborhoods deemed "hazardous" are inhabited by mostly minority residents, typically black and Latino, researchers found. Cities with more such neighborhoods have significantly greater economic inequality. On the flip side, 91 percent of areas classified as "best" in the 1930s remain middle-to-upper-income today, and 85 percent of them are still predominantly white.

Researchers found that redlined neighborhoods in the South and the West are more likely today to be home to a largely minority population. Neighborhoods in the South and Midwest display the most persistent economic inequality.

In Macon, Ga., 65 percent of neighborhoods were marked "hazardous" in the 1930s, making it the most redlined city in the United States, followed closely by Birmingham, Ala., and Wichita, Kan.

Here are the 10 U.S. cities with the highest percentages of neighborhoods marked "hazardous" in the 1930s:

In Macon today, 91 percent of redlined neighborhoods are inhabited by mostly minorities; 73 percent of such neighborhoods remain low-to-moderate income, researchers found. Whites, on the other hand, remain the overwhelming majority in Macon neighborhoods deemed "best" in the 1930s - all of which remain middle-to-upper income.

The racial disparity is reflected in the city's poverty statistics. Nearly 35 percent of blacks in Macon live in poverty today, compared with less than 13 percent of whites, according to 2012 to 2016 census data.

In Baltimore, one of the earliest cities to officially adopt restrictive covenants limiting African Americans and Jews to certain neighborhoods, nearly every census tract labeled "hazardous" in the 1930s remains low-to-moderate income today, researchers found. The only exceptions are the areas surrounding Baltimore's harbor, a former industrial front that's been redeveloped to attract businesses and tourism.

Nearly 70 percent of formerly redlined communities in Baltimore remain predominantly minority, as well as lower income. Even neighborhoods in western Baltimore that had been rated as "desirable" subsequently became populated with minority, low-income residents as middle-class whites fled to the suburbs, researchers said.

A 2015 study of home mortgage and small-business lending in Baltimore by the NCRC found that race, more than income, affected mortgage lending in the city. Lending is greater in neighborhoods with larger white populations, with banks making more than twice as many mortgage loans to whites as they did to blacks.
[Interactive: View and download NCRC maps for 114 metropolitan areas]
A February report by the Center for Investigative Reporting showed that redlining persists in 61 metro areas - from Detroit and Philadelphia to Little Rock and Tacoma, Wash. - even when controlling for applicants' income, loan amount and neighborhood, according to its analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records.

Banks have largely blamed the racial lending discrepancies on borrowers' credit scores. Lenders were supposed to soon start reporting extra information about credit scores and other loan-pricing features. But the Senate recently voted to roll back the new reporting requirements for small lenders.

The researchers also analyzed 30 cities for patterns of gentrification, where once-redlined neighborhoods showed an increase in median home values and educational attainment between 2000 and 2010. They found that in cities with higher levels of gentrification, more redlined neighborhoods had become middle-to-upper-income neighborhoods. These areas saw a greater influx in economic activity and changes to their downtowns. They also now have lower levels of segregation, with more interaction between blacks and whites, as well as greater economic inequality between newcomers and those who have historically lived there.

Current lending discrimination reinforces the economic gulf, Mitchell said, as middle- and upper-income gentrifiers moving into lower-income areas are able to obtain loans to buy and renovate homes, while longtime residents rarely have access to that type of capital.

Researchers ranked Portland, Ore., which has seen an influx of financial investment from the tech sector, as the most gentrified American city, with 58 percent of its census tracts having gentrified. It is followed by Minneapolis, Seattle, Atlanta and Denver.

Detroit was the least gentrified city, the research showed, with less than 3 percent of its census tracts having gentrified, and only around the downtown core. But artists and other "urban pioneers" have in recent years begun moving into more pockets of the city, researchers said.

Longtime residents of formerly redlined neighborhoods are often pushed out when the areas' economic fortunes are reversed, researchers said. Many can no longer afford the rising rents. Homeowners often can't afford the increases in property taxes, and as their home values rise, many are tempted to sell and cash out.

"Is gentrification promoting sustainable desegregation?" Mitchell said. "Or is it just a movement towards increased segregation in the next census period?"

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Analysis | Redlining was banned 50 years ago. It's still hurting minorities today.

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Racial discrimination in mortgage lending in the 1930s shaped the demographic and wealth patterns of American communities today, a new study shows, with 3 out of 4 neighborhoods "redlined" on government maps 80 years ago continuing to struggle economically .

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Citation:
2018. Action.Naacp.Org. Accessed May 24 2018. https://action.naacp.org/page/-/Climate/Teaching%20Intersectionality%20and%20Environmental%20Justice%20in%20Our%20Classrooms%20FINAL.pdf.

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Where can I include information about environmental justice + native Americans?

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Citation:
Baker-Blocker, Anita. "Environmentalism." Salem Press Encyclopedia (2013): Research Starters, EBSCOhost (accessed May 23, 2018).

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"The publication of Silent Spring was an important factor leading to the formation of the Environmental Defense Fund in 1967 and ultimately to the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970."

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"Indeed, the modern environmental movement, at least in its regulatory mode, can be traced to a middle-class awakening that the pollutants of industrial production were no longer limited to already- blighted, working- class, inner-city neighborhoods--a realization arising from the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962)"

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"The Principles of Working Together recognize that
we need each other and we are stronger with each
other. This Principle requires participation at every
level without barriers and that the power of the
movement is shared at every level."

"The Principles of Working Together require
members to cooperate with harmony, respect and
trust—it must be genuine and sustained relationshipbuilding.
This demands cultural and language
sensitivity."

"The Principles of Working Together require
affirmation of the value in diversity and the rejection
of any form of racism, discrimination and oppression.
To support each other completely, we must learn
about our different cultural and political histories so
that we can completely support each other in our
movement inclusive of ages, classes, immigrants,
indigenous peoples, undocumented workers, farm
workers, genders, sexual orientations and education
differences."

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"During the 1960s, most Americans involved in environmental activities were white and members of the upper or middle classes. Issues such as conservation and preservation of natural resources were of little interest to members of low-income and minority groups, who were often more concerned with civil rights and the improvement of economic conditions. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, as concerns mounted about lead poisoning, the dangers of hazardous waste dumps, and the effects of soil and water pollution, minority leaders began to take notice."

"Such successes do not mean that these movements are without their critics, however. Some argue that the concept of environmental justice is so broad and vague that it cannot serve as a guide for policy makers. Moreover, they maintain that the available evidence regarding environmental racism is flawed. They contend that studies have failed to determine whether harmful facilities have been located in already existing minority communities or the communities coalesced around the facilities."

"Activists also complain that the national news media consistently ignore environmental racism, favoring instead sensational stories that do not examine the deeper institutional causes of the environmental disasters featured in the headlines. Finally, proponents also fault the mainstream environmental movement for its fixation on preservation issues."

"The issue of environmental justice has garnered support because the stated goals of advocates—a clean environment for all and an end to racist industrial and government practices—are attractive to many people. Achieving those goals has proven difficult, however. People tend to desire both justice and the manufactured goods that cause environmental degradation. While most people oppose racism, they understandably have no desire to relocate polluting industries into their own neighborhoods. In addition, as the debate about disparate impact indicates, conflicts over environmental racism may have the unintended consequence of denying low-income people jobs that they desire."

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"There are four offsite hazardous waste landfills in Regions IV’s eight States. Blacks make up the majority of the population in three of the four communities where the landfills are located. At least 26 percent of the population in all four communities have income below the poverty level and most of this population is Black."

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"Annual Environmental Justice Progress Reports | US EPA". 2018. US EPA. Accessed May 29 2018. https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/annual-environmental-justice-progress-reports.

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You may need a PDF reader to view some of the files on this page. See EPA's

Want to learn more about how the Office of Environmental Justice has been advancing environmental justice principles throughout all EPA programs? Read our latest progress reports to receive updates on our latest accomplishments.
About PDF page to learn more.

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Annual Environmental Justice Progress Reports | US EPA

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You may need a PDF reader to view some of the files on this page. See EPA's Want to learn more about how the Office of Environmental Justice has been advancing environmental justice principles throughout all EPA programs? Read our latest progress reports to receive updates on our latest accomplishments.

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sdesdf

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come back later

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"Environmental equity: Poison people equally
Environmental justice: Stop poisoning people, period."

"Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. Environmental justice is the movement's response to environmental racism. 'Environmental equity' is not environmental justice. 'Environmental equity' is the government's response to the demands of the environmental justice movement. Government agencies, like the EPA, have been coopting the movement by redefining environmental justice as 'fair treatment and meaningful involvement,'"

"The most significant problem facing people of color is the institutional and cultural racism which results in discrimination in access to services, goods and opportunities."

"Now all of the issues of environmental racism and environmental justice don't just deal with people of color. We are just as much concerned with inequities in Appalachia, for example, where the whites are basically dumped on because of lack of economic and political clout and lack of having a voice to say "no" and that's environmental injustice.
-Dr. Robert Bullard"

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"Environmental Justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction."

"Environmental Justice demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias."

"Environmental Justice considers governmental acts of environmental injustice a violation of international law, the Universal Declaration On Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on Genocide."

"Environmental Justice must recognize a special legal and natural relationship of Native Peoples to the U.S. government through treaties, agreements, compacts, and covenants affirming sovereignty and self-determination."

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Laws and policy pertaining to environmental justice:

Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment

Legal Tools for Environmental Equity vs. Environmental Justice (original of 2012 law journal article reviewing EJ legal history and equity vs. justice approaches)

Executive Order 12898, Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations (11 February 1994)

Not In My Backyard: Executive Order 12,898 and Title VI as Tools For Achieving Environmental Justice (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Oct 2003)

Memorandum of Understanding on Environmental Justice and Executive Order 12898 (2011)

Council on Environmental Quality's Environmental Justice Guidance

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

Unequal Protection: The Racial Divide In Environmental Law (1992 investigation in the National Law Journal that documents unequal enforcement by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

EPA Office of Environmental Justice

EPA Environmental Justice blog

EPA and Enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act requires that federal agencies and recipients of federal funds may not act in ways that create a discriminatory impact. Since the 2001 Alexander v. SandovalU.S. Supreme Court decision, private individuals and groups may no longer sue recipients of federal funds (like state agencies that give operating permits to polluting industries) for discrimination unless they can prove that the discrimination was intentional -- contrary to what most federal courts have held up to that point. Since that decision, the only recourse is to file a Title VI complaint to EPA's Office of Civil Rights. EPA has a dismal record of responding to these complaints and has only ruled on the merits of two complaints to date. Both of these rulings failed to protect against discrimination and set very negative precedents.

Environmental Justice, Denied: Environmental racism persists, and the EPA is one reason why (2015 report by Center for Public Integrity on EPA's failure to handle Title VI complaints)

The EPA Denies Civil Rights Protection for Communities of Color (Title VI factsheet)

List of Title VI complaints filed and their status, as of July 15, 2011

2011 decision: Angelita C. v. California Department of Pesticide Regulation

EPA Fails to Enforce Civil Rights Act: Secret Methyl Bromide Back-Room Deal Disregards Latino Children's Rights (8/25/2011 press release by the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment)

Settlement Agreement between U.S. EPA and California Department of Pesticide Regulation (8/24/2011)

Preliminary Finding of EPA's Office of Civil Rights (4/22/2011)

1999 Title VI complaint (6/30/1999)

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Environmental Justice / Environmental Racism

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Environmental equity: Poison people equally Environmental justice: Stop poisoning people, period. Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. Environmental justice is the movement's response to environmental racism. "Environmental equity" is not environmental justice. "Environmental equity" is the government's response to the demands of the environmental justice movement.

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Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (1962)

Citation:
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. N.p.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962.

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Citation:
Heiman, Michael K. "Race, Waste, And Class: New Perspectives On Environmental Justice". 2018. Ejnet.Org. Accessed May 21 2018. http://www.ejnet.org/ej/rwc.html.

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Race, Waste, and Class: New Perspectives on Environmental Justice

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Many of our readers may already be familiar with evidence suggesting that residents of poor communities and in communities of color in the United States bear a "disproportionate" burden of toxic contamination, both through the generation and release of hazardous chemicals in their neighborhoods, and via the location of waste management facilities.

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Interview with Robert Bullard about the basics of environmental justice
Citation:
"Environmental Justice: An Interview With Robert Bullard". 2018. Ejnet.Org. Accessed May 21 2018. http://www.ejnet.org/ej/bullard.html.

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Environmental Justice: An Interview with Robert Bullard

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Here is the full text of an interview with Dr. Robert Bullard, one of the pioneering scholars and activists in the environmental justice movement. Robert Bullard is one of the major researchers and organizers in the environmental justice movement. This interview is anti-copyright and may be reproduced and distributed at will.

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People of Color Environmental Justice
“Principles of Working Together” document
Citation:
"Principles of Working Together." 1991. Ejnet.Org. Accessed May 21 2018. http://www.ejnet.org/ej/workingtogether.pdf.

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- environmental justice movement through to the present—successes, failures, what's next
- largely ignored by the press
- why this matters

The environmental justice movement is ongoing to this day, and the lessons it has to offer in activism will always be relevant.
- successes: bill clinton's executive order, EPA acknowledging EJ, continued engagement in locally-based organizations across the country, etc.
- failures: too broad, rarely acknowledged by press who favor more sensational stories, not well known
- some people involved in the fight for racial justice don't get involved in , and American environmentalism still sees the environment only "as wilderness, a pristine domain to be protected from human incursion. But, almost by definition, that’s not the environment we actually live in... This is a whole different kind of environment — but one that is no less American, and no less deserving of a movement to protect and transform it."
- shows the need to acknowledge the experiences of all people in any given social movement—all social movements are connected

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"In addition, as the debate about disparate impact indicates, conflicts over environmental racism may have the unintended consequence of denying low-income people jobs that they desire."

This is indeed a potential danger. The very facilities that pollute these communities may also worsen economic conditions of people living in poverty, which is hardly an intersectional approach to justice. However, the types of pollution that result from a lack of environmental justice can make people very sick, making it difficult to work and support families in the long run.

- also connects to the fact that communities of color are more likely to be denied jobs and housing, as well as the wage gap between whites and blacks.
- if working to eliminate environmental racism also means eliminating jobs, this could be seen as an opportunity to work with the blm movement and government projects to create jobs in order to bring more opportunities into disadvantaged communities/communities of color
- also connects to access to healthcare
- letting people get sick or even just denying them access to a healthy environment isn't an option, so use the fight for environmental justice as a way to also further the goals of movements like blm
- working together!
- furthermore, working for environmental justice actually can offer job opportunities
- can I find an instance when this really happened?

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Topic Sentence: Throughout the 70s and 80s, minority leaders began to pay more attention to the environmental issues facing their communities, and in the 80s, the environmental justice movement started in earnest.

Evidence:
- 1983 study in which it was found that 3 out of 4 towns facing environmental hazards had a significant black population
"There are four offsite hazardous waste landfills in Regions IV’s eight States. Blacks make up the majority of the population in three of the four communities where the landfills are located. At least 26 percent of the population in all four communities have income below the poverty level and most of this population is Black."

- Declaration of the Principles of Environmental Justice in 1991
"Environmental Justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction."

"Environmental Justice demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias."

"Environmental Justice considers governmental acts of environmental injustice a violation of international law, the Universal Declaration On Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on Genocide."

Analysis:
- redefined what it could mean to talk about the environment
- Principles of Working Together: movement based on cooperation
- proves the connection between movements and what can be achieved by working together

First acknowledgement of the connection between the movements—sanitation strike, study done in 1983 of four towns

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Topic Sentence: Perhaps partially as a result of the environmental movement's indifference to the plight of marginalized groups, most members of the civil rights movement paid little attention to environmentalism in the beginning.

Context: At the same time that Silent Spring was published, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. In fact, only one year following its publication, MLK gave his famed "I Have a Dream" speech.

Evidence: "Issues such as conservation and preservation of natural resources were of little interest to members of low-income and minority groups, who were often more concerned with civil rights and the improvement of economic conditions" (Research starter)

Analysis: It's easy to understand the viewpoint of these civil rights activists. Nature would seem much less significant than the kinds of violence and inequality they were facing. (transition) However, events through the 70s and 80s began to change the perspective of some minority leaders.

Civil rights movement—viewed environmental issues as less significant than racial issues

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Topic Sentence: From the beginning, the environmental movement in America never did a very good job of including marginalized groups in its ranks, or indeed considering their experiences at all.

Context: In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book about the affect of pesticides on human, animal, and plant life. The publication of this book galvanized vast numbers of the middle class into awareness and action in support of environmentalism. Its publication "was an important factor leading to the formation of the Environmental Defense Fund in 1967 and ultimately to the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970" (Research Starter, Environmentalism).

Evidence: Silent Spring—widely considered to be one of the biggest sparks of mainstream environmental awareness—only really talks about the effects of environmental issues (in this case, the use of pesticides) in the context of the white working class of America.
"During the 1960s, most Americans involved in environmental activities were white and members of the upper or middle classes."
Environmental movement was focused mainly on conservation and preservation and focused less on people. When it did talk about people, it mainly focused on the white working class (see above).

Analysis: From its beginning, the environmental movement failed to consider the effects of environmental issues on marginalized groups.

Environmental movement—focused almost completely on preservation, only went mainstream when middle class began to be affected

Silent Spring, Research Starter

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When people think about the environmental movement, a number of images likely jump into their mind. They might think of melting glaciers or the destruction of forests, or perhaps of birds slicked with oil or whales with stomachs full of plastic. In short, they think of the destruction of nature. On the other hand, when people think of the Civil Rights Movement and #BlackLivesMatter, they're likely to think of the violence committed against people of color—from segregation to lynching to police brutality. At a glance, these two movements are utterly separate from each other. However, there is another facet of these issues that is rarely included in the mainstream perception of environmentalism and racism: the way environmental issues affect communities of color or of poverty more than they affect more privileged communities. This intersection of those two movements is where the environmental justice movement exists. The formation of the environmental justice movement demonstrates the connections between all social movements and the necessity of intersectional collaboration.

-when people think of the environmental movement
-when people think of the civil rights movement

-what is environmental justice/environmental racism? Difference between environmental equity and environmental justice?
-explain (without going into depth yet) how the environmental movement was formed
-thesis

Thesis: The formation of the environmental justice movement demonstrates the connections between all social movements and the necessity of intersectional collaboration.

Question: can my intro be divided into two paragraphs? I feel like organizationally it would make more sense if I had the first paragraph be the one included above, and then had a second paragraph explaining what exactly environmental justice/environmental racism is. That second paragraph would be concluded by my thesis.

Alternately I could Just have the second paragraph as my intro and have the "when people think of.." be part of each of their respective body paragraphs but I feel like that's too abrupt an entrance into my essay and leaves too much of my point on ntersectionality out

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book on a case study in the 1990s
Citation:
Spears, Ellen Griffith. Baptized in PCBs : Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed May 20, 2018).

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Sign in with your credentials to access the EBSCOhost premium information resources provided by your subscribing institution.

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How did the civil rights movement and the environmental movement combine to form the environmental justice movement? How/why should different social movements work together to further each other’s goals?

(Other things to consider: how can they help each other? Is this necessary, and if so, why? What happens if they don’t work together? How should they remain separate? How can this be applied to other movements?)

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Very long, but has good info on how both the environmental movement and the civil rights movement built up to the foundation of the environmental justice movement and the shortcomings of both movements to consider the other.
Citation:
Purdy, Jedediah. "The Long Environmental Justice Movement." Ecology Law Quarterly 44, no. 4 (January 2018): 809-864. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed May 20, 2018).

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Sign in with your credentials to access the EBSCOhost premium information resources provided by your subscribing institution.

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Research starter for the environmental justice movement on ebsco
Citation:
Clarkin, Thomas. "Environmental justice and environmental racism." Salem Press Encyclopedia(2013): Research Starters, EBSCOhost (accessed May 21, 2018).

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Sign in with your credentials to access the EBSCOhost premium information resources provided by your subscribing institution.

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“‘galvanized the environmental justice movement and provided empirical support for the claims for environmental racism.’ The study, which used 1980 Census data, documented that three out of four hazardous waste landfills examined were located in communities where African Americans made up at least twenty-six percent of the population, and whose family incomes were below the poverty level.”
Citation:
2018. Archive.Gao.Gov. Accessed May 20 2018. http://archive.gao.gov/d48t13/121648.pdf.

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EPA’s statements on environmental justice

"Memorandum On EPA’S Environmental Justice And Community Revitalization Priorities | US EPA". 2018. US EPA. Accessed May 29 2018. https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/memorandum-epas-environmental-justice-and-community-revitalization-priorities.

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You may need a PDF reader to view some of the files on this page. See EPA's

Memorandum on EPA's Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization Priorities
From: Samantha Dravis, Associate Administrator, EPA Office of Policy
Signed: Friday 23 February 2018
About PDF page to learn more.

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Memorandum on EPA's Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization Priorities | US EPA

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You may need a PDF reader to view some of the files on this page. See EPA's Memorandum on EPA's Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization Priorities From: Samantha Dravis, Associate Administrator, EPA Office of Policy Signed: Friday 23 February 2018 About PDF page to learn more.

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Citation:
"Environmental Justice | US EPA". 2014. US EPA. Accessed May 20 2018. https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice.

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EPA’s timeline of the environmental justice movement. Obviously does not outline every single important event, but good overview.
Citation:
"Environmental Justice Timeline | US EPA". 2015. US EPA. Accessed May 20 2018. https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/environmental-justice-timeline.

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About difficulties people of color and people of low income face in accessing green spaces

Citation:
"Martin Luther King, Civil Rights, And Environmental Justice". 2014. KCET. Accessed May 21 2018. https://www.kcet.org/history-society/martin-luther-king-civil-rights-and-environmental-justice.

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"When you go beyond a relatively simple though serious problem such as police racism . . . you begin to get into all the complexities of the modern American economy." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr."

This year, 2014, marks the 20th anniversary of the President's Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice and health, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty.

Martin Luther King highlighted urban planning, parks and recreation, schools and education, human health, meaningful work, and democratic decision making as genuine civil rights issues. There has been progress in these areas in Los Angeles. Healthy green land use, equitable development, and planning by and for the community is helping to change L.A.

Civil rights laws -- including the Environmental Justice Order and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- have helped. These laws have shaped L.A. We will consider green justice here.

The site of the Los Angeles State Historic Park could have been warehouses. Instead, it's a park. Andrew Cuomo, who was Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) at the time, withheld any federal subsidies for the proposed warehouse project unless there was a full environmental study that considered the park alternative and the impact on people who were of color or low income. Secretary Cuomo acted in response to an administrative complaint, citing Title VI and the President's Order on Environmental Justice. As a result, the state bought the land for the park. The L.A. Times called the community victory a heroic monument and a symbol of hope. As reported in the Times, The City Project, with diverse allies, "organized a civil rights challenge that claimed the project was the result of discriminatory land-use policies that had long deprived minority neighborhoods of parks."

HUD's decision was a seminal act that has led to real change -- in creating green space on the ground, and at the policy level through plans for a new national recreation area in the San Gabriels, the expansion of the Santa Monica Mountains, and the greening of the L.A. River.

On the ground, HUD's action inspired the green justice movement that is helping create or save great urban parks, including:

HUD's decision is a best practice that other federal agencies are carrying on through voluntary compliance with civil rights laws in the planning process.

For example, the National Park Service (NPS) recognizes that people of color and low income people face disparities in access to parks -- these disparities harm their health, and park agencies have an obligation to alleviate these disparities. And NPS is taking action, such as their recommendation for a new national recreation area in the San Gabriel Mountains, citing the President's Order on Environmental Justice and health. Congresswoman Judy Chu cites health and environmental justice as two of the main reasons why the new recreation area is needed. According to NPS, L.A. County is one of the most disadvantaged in access to parks for people of color, and county averages mask dramatic disparities. Non-Hispanic whites have disproportionately greater access to parks. Latinos and African-Americans are 12-15 times more likely to have less park acreage per capita than non-Hispanic whites. Communities with the least amount of green access tend to have higher rates of obesity and diabetes. NPS seeks to improve green access, recreational opportunities, and transit for all through the proposed NRA. For example, 36% of black and 35% of Hispanic high school students nationwide are overweight or obese, while 24% of non-Hispanic white high school students suffer from these conditions. Evidence-based social science research collected by NPS, through its Healthy Parks, Healthy People U.S. initiative, shows that parks can play an important role in alleviating socioeconomic health disparities. NPS is also developing a Community Engagement Resource Guide to serve park officials and stakeholders across the nation, working with diverse allies.

The Army Corps of Engineers released its draft study for the greening of the L.A. River in September 2013, citing the President's Order on Environmental Justice and health. The Corps recognizes that a "key concern in Los Angeles is the growing disparity of access to and use of open space resources, including parks, ball fields, and natural areas by those living in low income communities of color."

Diverse allies have submitted public comments to work with federal, state, regional, and local agencies to promote healthy green land use, equitable development, and planning by and for the community in the San Gabriels and the Santa Monicas, and along the L.A. and San Gabriel Rivers. These allies stress the need for voluntary compliance with the President's Order on Environmental Justice and health, Title VI and its regulations, and the Affordable Care Act sections on non-discrimination, wellness, and prevention.

Discrimination under these laws includes intentional discrimination, and unjustified and unnecessary discriminatory impacts based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities by recipients of federal funding, including parks. A thoughtless policy can be as unfair as, and functionally equivalent to, intentional discrimination. As a matter of common sense, discriminatory programs or activities should be avoided in favor of those that serve everyone's interests fairly, effectively, and without discrimination.

Mayor Eric Garcetti has pledged to comply with Title VI and parallel state laws to promote equal access to parks and recreation. The California Parks Forward Initiative is a new "independent, multi-year collaborative process that seeks to ... transform the [state parks] system into one that is financially sustainable and better meets the needs of California's growing population and changing demographics." This provides an opportunity for implementing green justice.

Barry Sanders, the president of the City Parks and Recreation Commission, recently wrote in the L.A. Times about the growing number of parks in L.A.:

Los Angeles has always been known as "park poor" . . . for too many Angelenos, life in our far-flung city is park poor because these assets are far from their homes, and transportation to the parks is difficult . . . We are changing that . . . We can transform Los Angeles.

We agree. L.A. can do it. We can help.

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Martin Luther King, Civil Rights, and Environmental Justice

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"When you go beyond a relatively simple though serious problem such as police racism . . . you begin to get into all the complexities of the modern American economy." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr."

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List of sources, principles, studies, definitions, resources, laws, etc.
Citation:
"Environmental Justice / Environmental Racism". 2018. Ejnet.Org. Accessed May 20 2018. http://www.ejnet.org/ej/.

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Environmental Justice / Environmental Racism

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Environmental equity: Poison people equally Environmental justice: Stop poisoning people, period. Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. Environmental justice is the movement's response to environmental racism. "Environmental equity" is not environmental justice. "Environmental equity" is the government's response to the demands of the environmental justice movement.

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Primary
Declaration of the principles of environmental justice at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held on October 24-27, 1991, in Washington DC
Citation:
"Principles Of Environmental Justice". 2018. Ejnet.Org. Accessed May 20 2018. http://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html.

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WE, THE PEOPLE OF COLOR, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness