“It’s because of residential segregation and housing discrimination,” he said. “Race is more potent, is more powerful for predicting where these landfills, incinerators, garbage dumps highways freeways and other kinds of facilities. Systemic racism will drive those things that people don’t want to other places where those populations, those communities, basically said they are expendable, they can be sacrificed. That’s how we get the concentration of pollution in Louisiana’s cancer alley, southwest Detroit, Philadelphia.”
Co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance, Elizabeth Yeampierre says “I can’t breathe” takes on a dual meaning for Black and Brown Americans.