Finding Racism Where It's Not

By Jeffrey Hart | Wednesday, May 15, 1996

I had never heard the term 'environmental racism' before and so decided to attend a symposium on that new subject at Dartmouth College recently.

Naturally I was aware that the term 'environment' galvanized interest, and knew the term 'racism' was another hot-button issue that has come to have almost universal application. So the fusion of these two terms into 'environmental racism' seemed to me a stroke of genius.

The event took place on a Friday afternoon in Dartmouth's splendid new Rockefeller building, which is devoted to the social sciences. A good-sized and attentive audience filled the hall.

The principal proponent of the theory that there is such a thing as 'environmental racism' was one Vernice Miller, a black woman introduced as 'Director of the Environmental Justice Initiative,' which I gather is sponsored by a branch of the Methodist Church.

She said some amazing things, which sometimes came under mild challenge, though she saved her most amazing statement for late in the program when she may have caught the other participants by surprise. I will try to do my best with her central thesis.

The moderator, who turned out not to be altogether a moderator, was one Robert Braile, a reporter for the Boston Globe, described as specializing in environmental issues.

As a 'moderator' the reporter Braile was remarkable. His introduction for Vernice Miller was fulsome. He had heard her before, he said, and she could be expected to speak with 'great conviction.'

Perhaps I should not have been surprised when Mr. Braile, the moderator, always nodded his approval emphatically as Vernice Miller soon spoke with 'great conviction.' Nor should I, perhaps, have been surprised when he intervened, not as moderator, but as participant, to try to refute statistics offered by another panelist.

The two other panelists, or disputants, were Roger Masters, a Government professor, and James Woman, a Chemistry professor, both of Dartmouth.

Vernice Miller speaks as if she cannot discipline her flow of words, but the upshot of her case went as follows. Environmentally hazardous sources of toxic chemicals tend overwhelmingly to be placed in 'minority' communities. She cited statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency purporting to show that 'race is the most significant indicator in the areas where these sites are located.'

She also argued that 'minorities' to a considerable degree are trapped in such toxic areas. She cited her own upscale neighborhood of West Harlem in New York City, where the average home costs $300,000. She doubted that even such affluent blacks could escape the toxic plants near there by moving to nearby suburbs.

Professor Masters, a brilliant theorist, came in at an unexpected angle. He has been doing a great deal of research on the relations between toxicity and various social pathologies: crime, illegitimacy, drug and alcohol addiction, and the rest.

Nevertheless, he also thinks that previous ethnic minorities in poor areas were subject to the same toxicities as Vernice Miller was talking about.

Professor James Worman, the chemist, came at the issue from another direction. The author of a fine new book, An Endless Series of Hobgoblins, he challenged the notion that small amounts of so-called toxins are indeed damaging, and asked for a demonstration that the industrial plants Vernice Miller was talking about were really harmful.

Professor Worman also noted that such plants most often are built where real estate is less expensive, that successive minorities have tended to live in just such locations, and that therefore 'racism' is unconnected with 'environment.'

Vernice Miller responded to a reasonable question in an odd way. The question went: 'In your opening remarks you used the terms 'race' and 'minority.' Did you use these terms to refer to black Americans only or to Asians and others as well?'

Her answer was: 'To everyone except whites. To Asians, Amerinds, Aleuts, whatever.'

But, the follow-up question: 'It is not so clear, is it, that even in your opening account, industrial plants and so on are disproportionately being located in Asian neighborhoods? Nor do Professor Masters' statistics about lead, manganese and so on, and their correlation with crime and other social pathologies, seem to apply to all people of, as you call it, 'color.''

Vernice Miller's only reply, a little later, to this, was that she 'found offensive' the assertion that black Americans are 'predisposed to crime.'

No such assertion had been made. The fact that an individual commits a crime by no means indicates that he is 'predisposed' to do so.

Toward the end of the discussion, she said a startling thing.

Professor Worman asked her: 'Do you really think the Board of Directors of, for example, Gulf Oil, sit around and decide to locate one of their plants at a given place merely because the residents there are black?' In other words, that they decided on 'racist' grounds.

Her reply hung in the air: 'I think they put them there because they think black lives are less valuable than white lives.'

Wow! Is it really acceptable to launch a statement like that, totally unsupported by any evidence, into such a public debate? No one asked her for any evidence. No one demanded corporate minutes, letters diaries, trial testimonies or whatever, the sort of evidence courts and historians consider important.

Her bare-faced statement simply sat there. The students seemed passive before such a wild claim. One of the professors, for some reason, grinned — looking rather silly. Before I could ask her whether or not she thinks Jewish physicians are spreading AIDS in Harlem, the session was over.

Did she escape without challenge to such a statement because she is black? It has become commonplace in social relations today for whites not to contradict a black even when he says something completely asinine. Whites just let the thing go, which, I suppose, is terribly condescending. It certainly should not happen in the academy, where pursuit of truth is supposed to be central.

I left this event with the pretty firm conclusion that 'environmental racism' is just another scam, more victimology, and that putting the terms 'environmental' and 'racism' together is a masterpiece of PR well-designed to turn a buck or two.

Finding Racism Where It's Not

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