Director of the Environmental Justice Initiative Vernice Miller, Government Professor Roger Masters and Chemistry Professor James Worman debated the nature and characteristics of environmental racism in a panel discussion held in the Rockefeller Center last night.
Robert Braile, a Boston Globe reporter who specializes in environmental issues, moderated the discussion titled "Environmental Racism: Does it Exist?/Is it a Class Issue?" that about 40 people attended.
Miller began the panel by arguing that environmental hazards tend to be located in minority communities.
"Environmentally hazardous sites such as sewage and toxic waste treatment plants are many times more likely to be located in minority communities than in white communities," he said
After considering various parameters such as income and location, the Environmental Protection Agency "realized race is the most significant indicator in the areas where these sites are located," Miller said.
She said contrary to popular belief, environmentally hazardous sites are not only located in low-income communities but can be found in African American communities regardless of the level of income of the people living in that community.
She cited her community, West Harlem, N.Y., as an example of a wealthy African-American community filled with environmentally hazardous facilities.
Worman, who defined environmental racism as "inequitable exposure of minorities to environmental hazards," argued that environmental racism does not exist.
Worman said Miller's statistics about hazardous industrial plants being located on minority communities were correct. But he claimed that the reasons why minorities tended to live around these areas were "socioeconomic and not racial."
He said for environmental racism to be plausible, its defenders needed to answer three crucial questions.
"What are the health risks posed by these industrial plants?" Worman asked, "Nobody can answer questions about environmental racism if you have no idea about the toxic effects industrial plants actually have."
The second question Worman asked, dubbed the "chicken or egg" question, was "Which came first, the communities or the sites?"
Worman argued that 50 years ago the people living around the supposedly "hazardous" sites were mostly white, and they gradually moved out as their income levels increased. Then, he said, whites were replaced by low-income African-Americans because "the land around the industrial sites was generally cheap."
The third and most important unanswered question, Worman asked was, "Are the facilities being placed in minority communities by deliberate racist design?"
Masters also said he did not think environmental racism existed.
He conceded that environmentally hazardous plants are generally located in minority communities, but argued that people discussing this issue were not considering the "brain science behind the problem."
Masters presented scientific evidence concerning the "correlation between the quantity of lead and manganese present in individuals in a certain area and the crime rate."
In highly industrialized areas where crime rates where high, he said, lead and manganese concentrations were also high.
"Crime is not a matter of race as much as it is a matter of chemicals affecting the brain," Masters concluded.
Masters said his research showed there was "no difference in crime rates between blacks and whites in areas where low or no lead or manganese concentration was found." In comparison, he said that high concentration of these metals was found in highly industrialized areas.
Masters also blamed the media for trying to "present complex scientific information -- such as the relations between lead and manganese and individual behavior -- in simple terms."
The Rockefeller Student Council, the Conservative Union and the government department sponsored the panel.
