{"id":36563,"date":"2023-01-24T13:31:28","date_gmt":"2023-01-24T13:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/?p=36563"},"modified":"2023-01-24T13:31:28","modified_gmt":"2023-01-24T13:31:28","slug":"how-the-white-house-found-ej-areas-without-using-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/24\/how-the-white-house-found-ej-areas-without-using-race\/","title":{"rendered":"How the White House found EJ areas without using race"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The White House was widely criticized a year ago for not using racial demographics to identify disadvantaged communities that would be targeted for extra climate aid.<\/p>\n
The nation\u2019s leading advocates for environmental justice were furious, saying that race must be considered because biased policies like redlining had forced minorities into heavily polluted neighborhoods that are vulnerable to climate impacts.<\/p>\n
But the colorblind approach has succeeded at prioritizing minority neighborhoods, an E&E News analysis shows. <\/p>\n\n<\/section>\n
The White House strategy comes as an unprecedented amount of attention is being given to environmental justice. In addition to the federal initiative, a dozen states are beginning to incorporate race into decisions about environmental spending and the location of polluting facilities.<\/p>\n
While the White House chose to omit race and ethnicity as indicators in selecting disadvantaged communities, it analyzed dozens of environmental and demographic factors that in many cases are closely correlated with race, such as income levels and exposure to pollution.<\/p>\n
The Biden administration used that methodology to avoid a legal confrontation with the Supreme Court, which appears poised to strike down racial preferences in college admissions and possibly in other areas. The administration\u2019s race-neutral approach was crafted after federal judges in three separate rulings in 2021 blocked a debt-relief program for minority farmers that sought to compensate them for the Agriculture Department\u2019s history of discrimination.<\/p>\n
The strategy is now winning praise from former critics and legal scholars who say it appears to be on strong legal footing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they are using effective proxies to avoid a challenge and still getting outcomes that have the results of rectifying hundreds of years of racism, then that is a good thing,\u201d Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in an interview.<\/p>\n
The center had urged the White House to account for race when identifying disadvantaged communities, saying last year that \u201cdiscrimination, racism, and anti-Black sentiment are the primary reasons that people of color bear a disproportionate burden of environmental harm.\u201d<\/p>\n
The White House list of disadvantaged communities is a cornerstone to President Joe Biden\u2019s Justice40 initiative, which aims to direct 40 percent of federal climate and revitalization funding to underserved areas that are overburdened by pollution.<\/p>\nResidents navigated the streets of their flooded neighborhood in Georgetown, S.C., after record rainfall in 2015. | Sean Rayford\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
The race-neutral strategy was applied to a screening tool created by the White House Council on Environmental Quality that selected 27,000 disadvantaged communities as potential recipients of federal efforts related to climate, the environment and development. The feature is called the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n