The single-bad-actor search obscures structural causes of environmental racism

Evidence

Focusing on the structural dynamics of grassroots struggles, particularly as these struggles interact with the state/public apparatus, also shifts the attention away from individual actors and the fruitless search for clearly identified perpetrators. As we explain in chapter 3, the insistence on establishing a linear, causal connection between disproportionate outcomes and a “single bad actor” permeates our society’s legal and social understandings of racism and injustice. This prevailing understanding obscures the forces at work in producing environmental racism, however, by disaggregating communities and institutions and by isolating them from their social settings. By looking at the political economy of distributional outcomes, we hope to articulate a broader causal analysis and understanding of environmental racism. This broader analysis, in turn, forces us to go beyond framing the problem as merely a distributive one—certain communities get an unfair environmental burden— and to reconceptualize grassroots activism as more than an attempt to disrupt the decisions of private corporations and state agencies. Instead, grassroots struggles are a crucial arena in which to restructure social relations through systems of localized environmental decision making. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 97

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the book’s central thesis on the limits of framing environmental racism as a linear, perpetrator-driven harm — previewing the intent-standard critique.
• XREF: Direct bridge to the Legal Systems half of the polyad — the narrow-intent causality frame versus structural/political-economy causalities. — connects to: Analyzing environmental racism requires structural, procedural, and normative frames jointly — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 334; One company sited every toxic waste incinerator in communities of color — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 66; Empirical distributional studies only scratch the surface of environmental racism’s causes — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 292 (+6 more)
• SEED: Article angle: how the American legal insistence on finding a ‘single bad actor’ structurally blinds courts to systemic environmental racism.

Broader Connections

• Framing discrimination as individual hate obscures its structural and policy-based causes #expands (0.85) — Evelyn Alsultany, Antisemitism and Islamophobia The…, 34
• Environmental injustice persists without racist intent because bias is structurally embedded #expands (0.85) — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 221
• Environmental racism is a symptom of broader ongoing racial discrimination #expands (0.80) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 338
• Correlational studies cannot by themselves establish that environmental racism siting is causal #qualifies (0.80) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 308