New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman wrote in a Thursday email deploring the U.S. Supreme Court’s ugly rulings on race-conscious college admissions:
This is an attack on equality for Black and brown people in America. Affirmative action is a way to make sure that we have an equitable shot at higher education to pursue advancement. And let’s not forget that we ALL benefit from diversity in our schools.
As an educator, I’ve seen how our education system is plagued with inequities. I’ve seen how things like standardized testing in high schools and legacy admissions in colleges favor the already fortunate. Affirmative action is essential to racial and economic justice in education, and with this ruling, the Supreme Court has set our country backward.
Bad enough.
But the high court’s decision in this matter has, as Pamela King at GreenWire puts it (paywall), “potentially presented a new hurdle for the Biden administration’s efforts to address pollution in predominantly Black communities.”
Emily Hammond, a professor and vice provost for faculty affairs at George Washington University Law School said, “This does not mean that race-conscious environmental justice efforts are doomed —but the court clearly signaled that the strict-scrutiny test has very sharp teeth. Federal, state and local governments will need to tightly craft their environmental justice policies to meet this standard.”
President Joe Biden has made environmental justice a key element of the Inflation Reduction Act and would have done more in this regard had it not been for the sandbagging of the Build Back Better Act by Republicans together with Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. Although this policy applies more broadly than the Environmental Protection Agency’s role in making such justice reality, the EPA has a good definition:
Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. This goal will be achieved when everyone enjoys:
- The same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards, and
- Equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.
Environmental injustice comes from having situated waste dumps, chemical factories, mines, refineries, and other polluting facilities in areas where a long history of redlining has disproportionately forced Black people and other people of color to live. This is not to say that white people earning low incomes haven’t also wound up in such areas. But the racial disproportion is stark. If the Supreme Court majority were ultimately to apply its rationale in the affirmative action cases to this matter, implementing truly effective environmental justice would be next to impossible.
King again:
The admissions ruling could also serve as a “blueprint and invitation” to sue over other federal actions that account for race, said Sara Colangelo, director of the Environmental Law & Justice Clinic at Georgetown University.
“In the environmental justice context, there are several factors besides race that policymakers can consider that will, as a practical matter, allow them to account for disparate pollution burdens on non-white populations,” she said.
“However,” she continued, “that prevents those policymakers from naming race for what it is — the single most influential factor on a person’s cumulative pollution exposure.”
Nobody can predict whether or not the Supreme Court Six will decide to give the middle finger to the advocates of environmental justice, but there certainly is good reason to think so.
