Descriptive siting causation cannot answer what makes an outcome racist

Evidence

The “chicken-or-egg” question posed by commentators does not, however, answer the more fundamental inquiry posed by environmental justice research. The question underlying environmental justice research is normative; it asks, “What do we mean when we call an outcome racist or evidence of injustice?” The chicken-or-egg inquiry posed by these commentators is empirical; it asks, “Which came first, the waste facilities or the poor people of color?” Answering the second question does not necessarily answer the first. That is, the normative claim embedded in environmental justice research is not answered simply by a descriptive analysis of the forces that underlie a particular distributional pattern. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 322

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”