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Race and Environmental Equity
INTRODUCTION
The link between racial segregation and multiple social adversities is a central feature of the American landscape. A well-documented fact is the nexus of concentrated poverty and the spatial isolation of African Americans (Massey and Denton, 1993; Wilson [1987] 2012), a connection that spans decades and remains stubbornly persistent. Nationwide, for example, close to a third of Black children born between 1985 and 2000 were raised in high-poverty neighborhoods compared with just 1% of White children (Sharkey 2013). The racial stratification of America's urban neighborhoods is not just about group differences in income--affluent Blacks typically live in poorer neighborhoods than the average lower-income White resident (Perkins and Sampson, 2015). Black neighborhoods also disproportionately experience higher rates of unemployment, single-parent families, teenage childbearing, violence, incarceration, and high school dropout (Sampson 2012).
Less studied but equally important is the neighborhood divide by race in the fundamentals of physical health and well-being. As with compounded social deprivation, indicators of compromised health, such as infant mortality, low birth weight, heart disease, and cancer, tend to be the highest in racially-segregated, poor neighborhoods (Krieger 2014; Williams and Collins, 2001). The recognition that Black neighborhoods endure a disproportionate share of physical health burdens is not new. Over a hundred years ago, W. E. B. Du Bois demonstrated that Blacks in Philadelphia dwelled "in the most unhealthful parts of the city" (1899, p. 148). Near the middle of the twentieth century, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton mapped "disease and death" (1945, p. 205) in Black Metropolis, revealing higher rates of tuberculosis and infant mortality in Chicago's Black communities. Although health conditions have generally improved since these classic works, contemporary research largely confirms that Black neighborhoods still rank higher on multiple indicators of poor physical health (Acevedo-Garcia and Lochner, 2003).
Yet as the crisis in Flint Michigan revealed (Goodnough 2016), there is a major health scourge that has not been subjected to the same analytic scrutiny at the neighborhood level as other health indicators--lead poisoning. Unlike longstanding health concerns, it was not until relatively recently that a sizable body of research built up and converged in concluding that lead is a major neurotoxin that impairs cognitive,...