Social Science Week 4 Assignment: Policy Selection and Background

1

Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice: Oppression, Policy, and Advocacy for Black Communities

Maya Winfrey

Capella University

Social Welfare Hist Plcy Prac SWK5002

Prof. Adrianne Weaver

April 26, 2026

Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice: Oppression, Policy, and Advocacy for Black Communities

Oppression and Discrimination: Mechanisms and Impact

Environmental racism is not a geographical accident, but rather the result of intentional, race-conscious, policy choices that are added to each other through the decades. In 1983, the United States General Accounting Office published a seminal report which declared that 75 percent of the communities in the regions around hazardous landfill locations were of color and this formed the initial federal acknowledgment that the distribution of industrial placements was disproportionate towards communities of color (Medical News Today, 2024). Twenty years of further study have supported and added to this finding. A 2022 study established that oil and gas wells were twice as common in formerly redlined neighborhoods as they were in non-redlined areas, establishing that the long tail of mid-twentieth century housing discrimination has an impact on current environmental exposure (Brown Undergraduate Journal of Public Health, 2024).

Health effects of this form of sitting are dire and documented. Black Americans experience higher-than-average levels of the fine particulate matter, PM2.5, of all 14 major categories of sources of this pollutant monitored by researchers, including power plants and industries, construction, and agriculture, but white Americans experience lower-than-average levels of nearly every one of those same sources (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, n.d.). According to a study conducted by the EPA in 2018, people of color were exposed to a 28% greater health burden due to facilities that produce particulate pollution compared to the general population; in the case of Black people and families, in particular, the health burden was 54% higher (Climate Reality Project, 2025). These exposures directly translate into high rates of asthma, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and cancer within Black communities. In the national context, Black children are disfavored by lead poisoning in the housing stock, which is also old and is concentrated in the historically redlined urban areas, bordering today the industrial areas.

The underlying mechanisms that cause these disparities are residential segregation, exclusionary zoning, and the political disenfranchisement of weaker communities resisting unwanted land use. The literature shows that race, regardless of income, is a predictor of pollution exposure, and racial disparities in air pollution persist across income, state, and urban-rural differences (EPA, n.d.). This is because the issue cannot be narrowed down to poverty. The Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (2022) reported that although the overall air quality in the United States has substantially improved since the Clean Air Act, it has been the white neighborhoods that have increased by a significant margin, and have left Black neighborhoods exposed to the worst quality air in the 1980s, in basically the same relative standing as of today.

Ethical Considerations Under the NASW Code of Ethics

The NASW Code of Ethics sets out explicit professional expectations for social workers in terms of environmental justice. The whole value of social justice in the Code also involves social workers seeking transformation as advocates of vulnerable and oppressed groups about poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of injustices (NASW, 2017). The Code (6.04) guides social workers to accept social and political action to broaden the availability of resources and ensure that everyone has equal access to participate in society. This mandate includes environmental racism, which involves a systematic cutting from clean air, clean water, and a fresh neighborhood to the Black communities.

Ethically, social workers cannot be passive when structural harm is a reality. The Code puts the responsibility on the practitioners to do all they can to avoid and eliminate domination, exploitation, and discrimination against any individual based on race or ethnicity (NASW, 2017). This implies that, for social workers who visit Black clients in communities surrounding industrial plants or highways, they should screen them for environmental health issues, promote environmental cleanup, and refer them to legal and policy support. Ethically, it is a deficiency in the practice level not to consider the environmental context of client health. Bigger implications towards benefiting clients are integrating environmental health evaluations into the intake protocols, collaborating with communities to attach environmental and health agencies, and endorsing community-based organizations as advocacy entities as part of the anti-oppressive and culturally competent practices.

Current Enacted Policies

The history of federal environmental justice policy is disputed. The earliest federal directive that mandated that agencies acknowledge and remedy disproportionately large and negative health or environmental outcomes in minority and low-income neighborhoods was Executive Order 12898, signed by President Clinton in 1994 (EPA, n.d.). On that basis, in 2021, President Biden signed an Executive Order 14008 that created the Justice40 Initiative, a government-wide program of directing 40 percent of the advantages of some federal investments in clean energy, clean water and climate resilience to underprivileged neighborhoods (GAO, 2025). Signed in April 2023, E.O. 14096 broadened this whole-of-government strategy to a larger group of federal agencies and mandated the incorporation of environmental justice analyses in reviews of the National Environmental Policy Act (Federal Register, 2023).

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (P.L. 117-169) allocated about 370 billion to the climate transition and 60 billion specifically to environmental justice investments, making it the largest effort in U.S. history to commit resources to environmental justice (NCBI, 2025). Although the Clean Air Act is not an environmental justice law itself, it gives the EPA legal power to address the air pollutants, which are disproportionately affecting Black communities. The action on the state level has also made progress; in New Jersey, an example of a dedicated Environmental Justice Law passed in 2024, before certain facilities may be approved within an overburdened community, servers will be required to conduct an environmental impact analysis (NJ State Policy Lab, 2025).

Effects of policies and limitations

These policies have had uneven success. The Clean Air Act has also generated nationwide aggregate air quality improvements, but has not resulted in equal distribution of improvements, which has been accompanied by racial disparities in exposure or has even increased them (JASN, 2022). Justice40 Initiative: As of November 2023, 518 qualifying programs in 19 agencies have been identified through the Justice40 Initiative, though the Government Accountability Office has stated that continued measurement of whether benefits reaching disadvantaged populations is challenging, and the initiative was terminated in January 2025 (GAO, 2025). The cancellation of both E.O. 14008 and E.O. 12898, on January 20, 2025, by Executive Order 14148, and the order to abolish all federal environmental justice offices, constitute a significant limitation of the policies that have left the impacted communities without the federal infrastructure that has been developed over thirty years (Congress.gov, 2025).

Key policy constraints include enforcement gaps, inadequate community participation mechanisms, and the absence of a standalone federal environmental justice statute with binding legal requirements. It is only natural that executive orders are so weak that they can be reversed in January 2025, which is the case. Policy gains can be swept away overnight without codification by Congress. Also, cumulative impact assessments, where the burden of multiple sources of pollution in one community would be measured, have not been consistently practiced, so regulators tend to assess the impact of individual facilities independently of their cumulative impact on neighborhoods already overburdened.

Advocacy Methods: Strengths, Challenges, and Next Steps

Environmental justice advocacy can be fueled in various forms, each with its own strengths and drawbacks. CBP-based participatory research enables residents to record and report local environmental damages, which form evidence bases that underpin litigation and legal action. Efforts by grassroots coalitions, like the one that brought about the original Environmental Justice movement in the 1980s, have a history of forcing policy concerns. Environmental and civil rights litigation has been successful as a method of legal advocacy against discriminatory permitting decisions on the case-by-case level. Legislation promotion - such as the introduction of a federal Environmental Justice Act - envisages the possibility of sustainable, enforceable defense.

The main problem with all these approaches is the power asymmetry between the affected communities and the industry and the government, which must address this problem. Regulatory procedures are also time-consuming, complex technically and are costly, and disadvantageous to communities with less Economic and legal means. The rollback of federal environmental justice infrastructure in 2025 has shifted a larger share of the advocacy burden to state and local governments, which are highly diverse in their commitment and capacity to do so. In response to these issues, social workers and concomitant advocates can act to foster capacity-building in frontline communities, advance state-level levels of environmental justice legislation where federal safeguards have been rescinded, forge coalition-building that weds environmental justice to housing, health, and economic equity movements, and propose reinstatement and codification of federal environmental justice requirements into law.

References

Beard, S., Freeman, K., Velasco, M. L., et al. (2024). Racism as a public health issue in environmental health disparities and environmental justice: Working toward solutions. Environmental Health, 23, 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-024-01052-8

Brown Undergraduate Journal of Public Health. (2024). Racial disparities in urban city planning: 'Environmental racism.' Brown University. https://sites.brown.edu/publichealthjournal/2024/04/04/racial-disparities-in-urban-city-planning-environmental-racism/

Climate Reality Project. (2025). Environmental racism. https://www.climaterealityproject.org/environmental-racism

Congress.gov. (2025). Trump administration environmental-justice-related executive orders: Potential implications for EPA programs (IF12922). Congressional Research Service. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12922

Federal Register. (2023, April 26). Revitalizing our nation's commitment to environmental justice for all (E.O. 14096). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/04/26/2023-08955/revitalizing-our-nations-commitment-to-environmental-justice-for-all

Government Accountability Office. (2025). Environmental justice: Agency actions to implement past Justice40 Initiative (GAO-25-107516). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107516

Medical News Today. (2024, January 11). Environmental racism: Research, current events, and global impact. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/environmental-racism

National Association of Social Workers. (2017). NASW code of ethics. https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English

National Institutes of Health. (2025). Emerging public health and environmental justice concerns of Black communities. NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK611582/

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). Study finds exposure to air pollution higher for people of color regardless of region or income. https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/study-finds-exposure-air-pollution-higher-people-color-regardless-region-or-income

1

Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice: Oppression, Policy, and Advocacy for Black Communities

Maya Winfrey

Capella University

Social Welfare Hist Plcy Prac SWK5002

Prof. Adrianne Weaver

April 26, 2026

Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice: Oppression, Policy, and Advocacy for Black Communities

Oppression and Discrimination: Mechanisms and Impact

Environmental racism is not a geographical accident, but rather the result of intentional, race-conscious, policy choices that are added to each other through the decades. In 1983, the United States General Accounting Office published a seminal report which declared that 75 percent of the communities in the regions around hazardous landfill locations were of color and this formed the initial federal acknowledgment that the distribution of industrial placements was disproportionate towards communities of color (Medical News Today, 2024). Twenty years of further study have supported and added to this finding. A 2022 study established that oil and gas wells were twice as common in formerly redlined neighborhoods as they were in non-redlined areas, establishing that the long tail of mid-twentieth century housing discrimination has an impact on current environmental exposure (Brown Undergraduate Journal of Public Health, 2024).

Health effects of this form of sitting are dire and documented. Black Americans experience higher-than-average levels of the fine particulate matter, PM2.5, of all 14 major categories of sources of this pollutant monitored by researchers, including power plants and industries, construction, and agriculture, but white Americans experience lower-than-average levels of nearly every one of those same sources (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, n.d.). According to a study conducted by the EPA in 2018, people of color were exposed to a 28% greater health burden due to facilities that produce particulate pollution compared to the general population; in the case of Black people and families, in particular, the health burden was 54% higher (Climate Reality Project, 2025). These exposures directly translate into high rates of asthma, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and cancer within Black communities. In the national context, Black children are disfavored by lead poisoning in the housing stock, which is also old and is concentrated in the historically redlined urban areas, bordering today the industrial areas.

The underlying mechanisms that cause these disparities are residential segregation, exclusionary zoning, and the political disenfranchisement of weaker communities resisting unwanted land use. The literature shows that race, regardless of income, is a predictor of pollution exposure, and racial disparities in air pollution persist across income, state, and urban-rural differences (EPA, n.d.). This is because the issue cannot be narrowed down to poverty. The Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (2022) reported that although the overall air quality in the United States has substantially improved since the Clean Air Act, it has been the white neighborhoods that have increased by a significant margin, and have left Black neighborhoods exposed to the worst quality air in the 1980s, in basically the same relative standing as of today.

Ethical Considerations Under the NASW Code of Ethics

The NASW Code of Ethics sets out explicit professional expectations for social workers in terms of environmental justice. The whole value of social justice in the Code also involves social workers seeking transformation as advocates of vulnerable and oppressed groups about poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of injustices (NASW, 2017). The Code (6.04) guides social workers to accept social and political action to broaden the availability of resources and ensure that everyone has equal access to participate in society. This mandate includes environmental racism, which involves a systematic cutting from clean air, clean water, and a fresh neighborhood to the Black communities.

Ethically, social workers cannot be passive when structural harm is a reality. The Code puts the responsibility on the practitioners to do all they can to avoid and eliminate domination, exploitation, and discrimination against any individual based on race or ethnicity (NASW, 2017). This implies that, for social workers who visit Black clients in communities surrounding industrial plants or highways, they should screen them for environmental health issues, promote environmental cleanup, and refer them to legal and policy support. Ethically, it is a deficiency in the practice level not to consider the environmental context of client health. Bigger implications towards benefiting clients are integrating environmental health evaluations into the intake protocols, collaborating with communities to attach environmental and health agencies, and endorsing community-based organizations as advocacy entities as part of the anti-oppressive and culturally competent practices.

Current Enacted Policies

The history of federal environmental justice policy is disputed. The earliest federal directive that mandated that agencies acknowledge and remedy disproportionately large and negative health or environmental outcomes in minority and low-income neighborhoods was Executive Order 12898, signed by President Clinton in 1994 (EPA, n.d.). On that basis, in 2021, President Biden signed an Executive Order 14008 that created the Justice40 Initiative, a government-wide program of directing 40 percent of the advantages of some federal investments in clean energy, clean water and climate resilience to underprivileged neighborhoods (GAO, 2025). Signed in April 2023, E.O. 14096 broadened this whole-of-government strategy to a larger group of federal agencies and mandated the incorporation of environmental justice analyses in reviews of the National Environmental Policy Act (Federal Register, 2023).

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (P.L. 117-169) allocated about 370 billion to the climate transition and 60 billion specifically to environmental justice investments, making it the largest effort in U.S. history to commit resources to environmental justice (NCBI, 2025). Although the Clean Air Act is not an environmental justice law itself, it gives the EPA legal power to address the air pollutants, which are disproportionately affecting Black communities. The action on the state level has also made progress; in New Jersey, an example of a dedicated Environmental Justice Law passed in 2024, before certain facilities may be approved within an overburdened community, servers will be required to conduct an environmental impact analysis (NJ State Policy Lab, 2025).

Effects of policies and limitations

These policies have had uneven success. The Clean Air Act has also generated nationwide aggregate air quality improvements, but has not resulted in equal distribution of improvements, which has been accompanied by racial disparities in exposure or has even increased them (JASN, 2022). Justice40 Initiative: As of November 2023, 518 qualifying programs in 19 agencies have been identified through the Justice40 Initiative, though the Government Accountability Office has stated that continued measurement of whether benefits reaching disadvantaged populations is challenging, and the initiative was terminated in January 2025 (GAO, 2025). The cancellation of both E.O. 14008 and E.O. 12898, on January 20, 2025, by Executive Order 14148, and the order to abolish all federal environmental justice offices, constitute a significant limitation of the policies that have left the impacted communities without the federal infrastructure that has been developed over thirty years (Congress.gov, 2025).

Key policy constraints include enforcement gaps, inadequate community participation mechanisms, and the absence of a standalone federal environmental justice statute with binding legal requirements. It is only natural that executive orders are so weak that they can be reversed in January 2025, which is the case. Policy gains can be swept away overnight without codification by Congress. Also, cumulative impact assessments, where the burden of multiple sources of pollution in one community would be measured, have not been consistently practiced, so regulators tend to assess the impact of individual facilities independently of their cumulative impact on neighborhoods already overburdened.

Advocacy Methods: Strengths, Challenges, and Next Steps

Environmental justice advocacy can be fueled in various forms, each with its own strengths and drawbacks. CBP-based participatory research enables residents to record and report local environmental damages, which form evidence bases that underpin litigation and legal action. Efforts by grassroots coalitions, like the one that brought about the original Environmental Justice movement in the 1980s, have a history of forcing policy concerns. Environmental and civil rights litigation has been successful as a method of legal advocacy against discriminatory permitting decisions on the case-by-case level. Legislation promotion - such as the introduction of a federal Environmental Justice Act - envisages the possibility of sustainable, enforceable defense.

The main problem with all these approaches is the power asymmetry between the affected communities and the industry and the government, which must address this problem. Regulatory procedures are also time-consuming, complex technically and are costly, and disadvantageous to communities with less Economic and legal means. The rollback of federal environmental justice infrastructure in 2025 has shifted a larger share of the advocacy burden to state and local governments, which are highly diverse in their commitment and capacity to do so. In response to these issues, social workers and concomitant advocates can act to foster capacity-building in frontline communities, advance state-level levels of environmental justice legislation where federal safeguards have been rescinded, forge coalition-building that weds environmental justice to housing, health, and economic equity movements, and propose reinstatement and codification of federal environmental justice requirements into law.

References

Beard, S., Freeman, K., Velasco, M. L., et al. (2024). Racism as a public health issue in environmental health disparities and environmental justice: Working toward solutions. Environmental Health, 23, 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-024-01052-8

Brown Undergraduate Journal of Public Health. (2024). Racial disparities in urban city planning: 'Environmental racism.' Brown University. https://sites.brown.edu/publichealthjournal/2024/04/04/racial-disparities-in-urban-city-planning-environmental-racism/

Climate Reality Project. (2025). Environmental racism. https://www.climaterealityproject.org/environmental-racism

Congress.gov. (2025). Trump administration environmental-justice-related executive orders: Potential implications for EPA programs (IF12922). Congressional Research Service. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12922

Federal Register. (2023, April 26). Revitalizing our nation's commitment to environmental justice for all (E.O. 14096). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/04/26/2023-08955/revitalizing-our-nations-commitment-to-environmental-justice-for-all

Government Accountability Office. (2025). Environmental justice: Agency actions to implement past Justice40 Initiative (GAO-25-107516). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107516

Medical News Today. (2024, January 11). Environmental racism: Research, current events, and global impact. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/environmental-racism

National Association of Social Workers. (2017). NASW code of ethics. https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English

National Institutes of Health. (2025). Emerging public health and environmental justice concerns of Black communities. NCBI Bookshelf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK611582/

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). Study finds exposure to air pollution higher for people of color regardless of region or income. https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/study-finds-exposure-air-pollution-higher-people-color-regardless-region-or-income