Math for the People

In the southern state of Louisiana, along the lower Mississippi River, nearly 150 oil refineries, plastics plants, and chemical facilities are located between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Environmentalists call this 85-mile-long stretch the Chemical Corridor or Cancer Alley, while industrialists adopted the name Industrial corridor to describe this region. As the name suggests, residents of this area are 50 times more susceptible to get cancer compared the national average [2.10.1.20], in some parishes the chance being even higher. In a 1991 interview, Amos Favorite, a resident of Ascension Parish on the Cancer Alley stated,

I lost my Uncle James Barber and his son Israel \(\dots\) I lost another uncle, Jorden Favorite, his wife, Pipine, and their son Isaac. Then there was another uncle, Herbert Favorite. My cousins Lizzie and Emily died in their 40s. Then there was my aunt’s husband, Josene LeBlanc \(\dots\) Our people used to live to be 95, 100, years old \(\dots\) Now even the young people are dyin’. [Reed 1991][2.10.1.18]

This is the reality of one of many families living on the Cancer Alley.

Louisiana is one of the highest producers of hazardous waste materials in the United States [2.10.1.10]. Every year, the chemical factories located in the state, especially on the cancer alley releases vast amount of carbon-dioxide and millions of pounds of poisonous chemicals, thus jeopardizing the health of the residents and the people working in the chemical facilities [2.10.1.20]. The toxic chemicals do not only pollute the air, but unsustainable waste disposal systems, chemical release from factories, and seepage of fertilizers and pesticides from agricultural production also contaminate drinking water. A study by Gottlieb, Carr, and Morris [2.10.1.15] reported that the residents of cancer alley, who get their drinking water from Mississippi river are 2.1 times more susceptible to rectal cancer compared to those who depends on an alternate source for their drinking water. Apart from cancer, skin inflammation, significant respiratory problems, and a range of other health threats have also been predominant among the people living in the cancer alley [2.10.1.17].

Although the cancer is highly predominant among all the people residing in the Cancer Alley, African American people bear a disproportionate burden of cancer mortality compared to the other racial counterparts. Between 1995 and 2006, while the cancer mortality rate of the white men and women were 250 and 167 per 100,000 population, the mortality rate of African American men and women were 395 and 214 per 100,000 population respectively [2.10.1.14]. One of the reasons behind this glaring difference in the cancer mortality rate is probably because most of the chemical factories and hazardous waste sites on the Cancer Alley are established in areas which are heavily resided by impoverished, people of color. According to Castellón [2.10.1.14] “there is little evidence that communities of color move to sites where toxic waste facilities and landfills are located. Rather, toxic waste sites are often sited in primarily poor and African American neighborhoods” [2.10.1.14]. While affluent white communities are often able to "leverage their economic and political clout" to prevent establishment of unwanted facilities in their neighborhoods [2.10.1.13], lack of political support and money, disable people of color to relocate or afford legal representations to fight big industrial facilities moving to their localities [2.10.1.14]. Such disproportionate burden of environmental harms on a particular socio-economic and racial group is called environmental racism [2.10.1.12]

In this lesson, we will explore the topic of environmental racism through the case of cancer alley. We will extract racial composition data of people living along the 85-mile-long stretch of the Chemical Corridor and use data visualization to compare and identify the disproportionate impact of the chemical factories on African American people.