greenRELAY

In my freshman year of college, I wrote a term paper about integrative school busing in Los Angeles and its relationship to urban sprawl and residential segregation. Part of it discussed two decisive Supreme Court cases, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Miliken v Bradley, both of which argued that American neighborhoods were inherently segregated; the former used that argument to force integration by bus in public schools  and the latter to end it. Either way, our most powerful judicial body has declared more than once that residential segregation is a natural aspect of American society, and that all of its symptoms, such as segregated public schools, have resulted from this apparently immutable social fact.  I argued that minority schools, and neighborhoods in general, are disproportionately burdened by this segregation because it denies them easy access to invaluable sociocultural capital, to connections to the more affluent world, and to the values, behavior and ideologies of power, an understanding of which is required to transcend the limits of structural, racial and socioeconomic marginalization. I now realize that the maintenance of segregated neighborhoods has made environmental, industrial and transportation injustice almost too easy to achieve and easier to ignore.

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglass S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, clarifies how segregation, federally financed or not, is an institution that has supported “other racially discriminatory processes and binds them together into a coherent and uniquely effective system of racial subordination” (8). Contrary to our Supreme Court’s rationale, Massey and Denton point out that “America chose to strengthen the walls of the ghetto,” and that, for a pair of decades after emancipation, black segregation was minimal (19). With the new century came a very deliberate new urban order that physically separates the dominant groups from the monorities, magnifying and naturalizing the harmful effects of other types of discrimination. An “oppositional” “Culture of Segregation” has consequently developed in urban ghettos, one that often clashes with the values of power, making integration extremely difficult (8). American neighborhoods are not intrinsically segregated, and their separation has not only prevented any significant number of minorities from achieving sustained upward social mobility, it has created a path of least resistance down which decision-makers can march to the beat of an exploitative drum, concentrating environmental hazards in ghettos.

Because minorities remain economically disempowered and politically underrepresented, their neighborhoods are targets for the placement of polluting industries. Los Angeles is no exception; it is divided first by race and then by socioeconomic class. With minorities ghettoized, dirty industry thrives conveniently out of sight and out of the minds of the people who have the politico-economic power to change and prevent environmentally unjust practices. Well shielded from the brunt of the problem by physical and imaginary color lines, the city’s elite have allowed and encouraged freeways over clean and efficient public transit, corporate development over community gardens, police over education, over the environment, over everything:

2008-09 LA City Budget Summary, p.8

Los Angeles Apartheid structures the city so as to force the heaviest social and environmental burdens onto minorities by maintaining enclaves of poverty and unemployment, violence and incarceration, instability and hopelessness. The environment includes more than issues of air quality and global warming: quality education, clean streets, green space, a sense of freedom, mutual respect, reasonable control, and honest representation contribute to the community health and safety that encourages residents to want to care about their environment, a feeling that is notably absent from LA’s poor black and hispanic ghettos.