Civil rights veterans supplied the structural lens on environmental racism

Evidence

Civil rights activists brought three things to the Environmental Justice Movement: a history of, and experience with, direct action, which led to similar exercises of grassroots power by the Environmental Justice Movement; a perspective that recognized that the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards was not random or the result of “neutral” decisions but a product of the same social and economic structure which had produced de jure and de facto segregation and other racial oppression; and the experience of empowerment through political action. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 130

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘not neutral but structural’ claim is the theoretical spine joined to the legal intent-standard critique the reader wants from this book. — connects to: Environmental justice emerged from fusing civil rights racial critique with anti-toxics economic analysis — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 141