ABSTRACT
The South has been tagged as a ‘sacrifice zone’ for the rest of America's toxic waste (Schueler, 1992; Bullard, 1990). More pointedly, the assertion is that racial minorities and the lower-income classes within this sacrifice zone bear a disproportionate burden of the region's environmental problems. A serious research effort has been undertaken to legitimize this claim, nationally and regionally, with results ranging from an unequivocal ‘yes’ (UCC, 1987; Bullard, 1990; Mohai and Bryant, 1992; Pollock and Vittas, 1995) to several more recent studies suggesting ‘maybe’ or ‘maybe not’ (Chapters 18 and 19; see also Yandle and Burton, 1996; Anderson et al, 1994; Been, 1994; Been and Gupta, 1997). Past scholarly efforts, however, have focused on current outcomes with little regard to process – how the inequitable situation came into existence in the first place. Been (1994) notes that in some instances poor and minority residents living near locally unwanted land uses came to the area after the land-use siting decision had been made. Regardless of process or outcome mechanisms, blanket statements of environmental racism, certainly as applied to an entire region such as the South, demand critical review.
