Environmental justice (EJ) advocates are strongly opposing the Biden administration’s decision to exclude race from its newly released screening tool for allocating infrastructure and other funds to overburdened communities, charging it is a political rather than a scientific decision that also abandons core voters who were critical to President Joe Biden’s election.
EJ advocates say that by dropping race from the screening tool, minority communities will certainly be overlooked. They also stress that studies consistently show that race is the primary driver for environmental exposure and adverse health effects, regardless of income level.
“Hell no,” said Felicia Davis of the HBCU Green Fund.
Administration officials teed up the issue earlier this week, when the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) unveiled a long-awaited beta version of its Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), which includes a series of economic, environmental, health and other metrics but does not include race as a factor.
The tool is intended to identify the most overburdened and underserved communities, and then prioritize infrastructure funding for those areas under the Biden administration’s Justice40 program, which seeks to provide 40 percent of the benefits of federal infrastructure and other spending to such communities.
CEQ officials are defending the decision in light of almost-certain legal challenges to the tool’s use in an era where courts are reversing long-held affirmative action and voting rights requirements based on race.
“We are trying to set up a framework and a tool that will survive and one that still connects to what the on-the-ground impacts are that people are experiencing. I feel that we can do that based on race-neutral criteria,” CEQ Chairwoman Brenda Mallory said earlier this week.
Underscoring Mallory’s point, the Rhodium Group, a data analytics group, released a rapid analysis of the 93 million Americans the tool identifies as disadvantaged, finding that Black, Latino and Native Americans are three times more likely to live in a disadvantaged community as a white person.
“Half of Black, Latino and Indigenous Americans live in a disadvantaged community as defined by [Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST)], compared to 17 [percent] of Non-Hispanic White Americans,” the group said in a Feb. 18 tweet.
But the decision explicitly rejects the advice of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC) – convened to help implement Biden’s Justice40 program intended to reverse environmental racism -- which in May called on CEQ to prioritize “majority minority” communities among other factors.
WHEJAC, which has also been urging CEQ to release the tool, is slated to meet Feb. 24 and the panelists are expected to underscore their criticisms of the administration’s decision to drop race as a factor.
Sacoby Wilson, a former member of EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) who serves as ad hoc co-chair of its Justice40 workgroup, tells Inside EPA that he and others tried but failed to convince CEQ to include race as a factor, participating in meetings and signing onto a letter urging that race be included.
He declined to share the letter, saying he did not want to reveal other signatories.
The decision is “political, not science-based,” he says. And while he understands the politics -- including conservative courts, the looming midterms and the administration’s failure to make progress on criminal justice, voting rights and advancing Build Back Better in Congress – he warns that “you could also ask, ‘Who got you here?’ They need to be worried about” Black voters who turned out for Biden.
‘Environmental Hazards’
Wilson, a screening tool expert, says any viable tool must include criteria to identify disadvantaged communities as well as overburdened ones. “You have to have indicators that capture both disadvantaged in a cumulative way and overburdened in a holistic way.”
The decision to exclude race disregards established science, which is “clear that race is the biggest predictor of environmental hazards,” he says, citing study after study that demonstrates this.
Wilson argues that CEQ could have used a “race-proximate indicator” by developing an exposure index that would demonstrate the “Black/white disparity in hazard distribution, air pollution exposure, climate risk and in health outcomes,” which he notes is something “we actually do already” in public health contexts.
Further, he says that addressing EJ cannot be “race-neutral because it’s racism driven. . . . You have to be able to capture racism from the policies” that caused it, such as zoning, segregation and redlining. “You can’t just look at income because you would miss populations that are dying because of their skin color.”
For example, he cites a number of communities in the South that are still dealing with the effects of slavery, were missed by the New Deal and still lack access to potable water and sewers, living with third-world plumbing conditions, “and you may miss these same communities because you don’t have race.”
Wilson adds that he is “frustrated with Jutsice40” as well as with the administration’s decision to disregard his request to NEJAC that the administration map the return-on-investments.
“A lot of advocates are going to be disappointed. Not just because the indicators are race-neutral but because it is really a slap in the face to folks who work on environmental racism,” even as “people appreciate the effort and know they’re running scared because of the Supreme Court and current politics,” he says.
Wilson also criticizes the administration for “walking away from the fight” because of concerns about lawsuits and suggests that fence line communities could sue the administration over a weak tool.
Meanwhile, Davis says she is profoundly disappointed, stressing that “race has been a particular issue when it comes to [industrial] siting. So, if the first cause was race-based and when we’re going to finally repair things we then say, ‘Oh we’ll just take that out,’” lamenting that it has reached full-circle.
“[Racism] is an economic and political construct that has functioned to the greatest disadvantage of my group, and now, to suggest to me that the remedy is not therefore that factor . . . it’s almost an absurdity.”
She adds that she can “appreciate” the administration’s effort to “get something done” but says that misses the point.
She gives the analogy of school integration, noting that “the compromise was to let me go to that school over there. My parents were not working to have me sit next to white children. They were working so that I had a fair and equal opportunity that I didn’t have because of race. And the remedy [now is] ‘We’ll let you come over where we are’ and that doesn’t work for me.”
Further, Davis warns the action is going to cause divisiveness within the EJ advocacy world and frontline communities, because some will support the most expeditious route to accessing billions of dollars in funding.
She also points to Biden’s vow to nominate a Black woman for the Supreme Court and wonders how he can argue for that but yet, “let’s take the Black out of” this.
Last, she finds it a particular affront that it comes during Black History Month.
Despite advocates’ criticisms to the contrary, a CEQ source tells Inside EPA that demographic information on race has never been included in the tool, so there was no change in course, and that the Council has had ongoing conversations about this with the WHEJAC.
Ongoing Discussions
Meanwhile, one EJ advocate says there are ongoing conversations about the omission of race from the tool, including discussions about whether and how to push back. The source notes that continuing to push forward is ingrained in these communities, noting in the not-so-distant past “we couldn’t sit at lunch counters,” but perseverance helped overturn that barrier.
This source says WHEJAC may also weigh in further and expects fraught discussions at the next NEJAC meeting.
Also, the decision to drop race was likely made a few months ago at best, the source says, and may have contributed to the abrupt January departures of CEQ senior EJ advisor Cecilia Martinez and David Kieve, its public engagement director.
The CEQ source says recent staff departures were unrelated to the tool.
But the advocate also asks whether the Department of Justice has been involved in conversations about the tool, given its new focus on EJ decisions.
The upshot of dropping race from the tool is that it “makes it tougher to affect change in the communities that need it the most.”
Finally, one lawyer who works on EJ issues and is also unhappy with the decision says it is worth noting that WHEJAC was “created for a reason:” to advise CEQ, which blatantly disregarded its top recommendation.
Further, the attorney says newly highlighted links between environmental health injustices and racial segregation bought to light during the COVID pandemic shows, “We are in a moment and we really do need to take action to address environmental racism. . . . This is a very live issue.” – Dawn Reeves (dreeves@iwpnews.com)
