Apparently the country is suffering from an outbreak of environmental racism. At least, the New York Times tells us so. The problem with this claim is that it doesn’t pay any attention to reality.
The actual truth is that, in general and on average, the black population of the country is poorer than the population as a whole. It’s also true that folks like living next to nice green parks and don’t like living next to polluting factories. This means that living by parks tends to be more expensive than living next to factories. The claim that blacks disproportionately live by factories is not a function of racism, but poverty.
We should all agree that income levels should not be determined by race or skin color. We should work to make sure opportunity is offered to all. But we shouldn’t mistake poverty for environmental racism.
We’re also given the example of Mount Vernon in New York. This was covered by the Guardian a few months back. The sewage system in this area hasn’t been upgraded in a century and tends to back up into peoples’ bathrooms. Not exactly desirable. But why hasn’t it been upgraded in a century? Mount Vernon doesn’t seem very different from next-door New Rochelle. Taxation rates and total revenues seem similar. But New Rochelle doesn’t have this problem. Why not? Who knows, maybe spending $36 million on employee benefits and $1.3 million on the sewers isn’t quite the way to allocate the budget?
This failure of the local government is used as proof that it’s all the rest of us who must now pay. The federal government must sort out that sewage system. Yet the entire justification for local government is that some issues are best handled locally. The local voters do, after all, have the power to insist upon changes. A regular vote means it is possible to vote out the people who have failed to upgrade the sewage system for a century. And that it’s possible to elect a new government to perform the necessary tasks.
We might even start to ask the bigger question. If the people of Mount Vernon aren’t willing to vote for a sewage system that works, why should the rest of us be interested in solving their problem?
