EJ litigants win environmental claims while civil rights claims go unreached

Evidence

Not surprisingly, claims of environmental racism have not fit into the existing judicial construction of racism. The invariable judicial response has been to reject environmental racism claims for failure to prove the requisite discriminatory intent attached to an identifiable perpetrator, notwithstanding demonstrations of disparate impact and discriminatory outcomes. For example, in R.I.S.E., Inc. v. Kay, a federal district court found no discrimination in the siting of a landfill in a predominantly African American area of a county despite evidence that, during the past twenty years, the County Board of Supervisors had approved three other landfills that were placed within one mile of neighborhoods that were respectively 100 percent, 95 percent, and 100 percent African American. … The proposed landfill in R.I.S.E. would have been placed within half a mile of a population that was 64 percent African American and 36 percent white. The population of the County was 50 percent African American and 50 percent white. Moreover, in the one instance where the County Board of Supervisors had opposed a landfill in the County, the surrounding community was predominantly white. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 327 (#expands, via linked claim)

All of the equal protection lawsuits that have been decided by the courts have encountered the same problem of proving intentional discrimination: after Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976), the equal protection clause is no longer a viable cause of action in most cases. In three reported cases, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, East Bibb Twiggs Neighborhood Association v. Macon-Bibb County Planning & Zoning Commission, and R.I.S.E., Inc. v. Kay, community groups were tripped up by the intent requirement. In these cases, neighborhood groups challenged the siting of a garbage dump in a predominantly African American neighborhood on equal protection grounds, and in all cases the neighborhood groups lost because, the courts held, the groups had not shown an intent to discriminate on the part of local decision makers. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 1121 (#builds-on, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Equal protection lawsuits over waste siting fail on the intent requirement — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 1121; Courts reject impact-based environmental racism claims absent proven intentional discrimination — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 327

Related

• Courts reject impact-based environmental racism claims absent proven intentional discrimination (similarity 0.88)
• Equal protection lawsuits over waste siting fail on the intent requirement (similarity 0.87)
• Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster — From the Ground Up Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (similarity 0.80)
• No federal constitutional environmental-justice claim has ever prevailed (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Courts reject impact-based environmental racism claims absent proven intentional discrimination #expands (0.85) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 327