The movement for “environmental justice” and against “environmental racism” began in the 1980s. Its premise is that racial minorities, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, suffer disproportionately from pollution.

The data supporting this premise are underwhelming, as Christopher H. Foreman Jr. notes in The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice, his new analysis of the movement. Studies often define “minority community,” for example, to include any area where the percentage of nonwhites exceeds the national average, so that a community may be labeled “minority” even though the vast majority of its residents are white. Not only is there little evidence of a correlation between race and the enforcement of pollution laws, but what evidence there is suggests that facilities in minority areas have actually been assessed higher penalties than those elsewhere. “Much of the seminal environmental-justice research,” Foreman concludes, “has been called into serious question.”