Our Next Door Neighbors

During my childhood years, I remember moving from one house to another in Central Los Angeles. From what I remember my parents always had a difficult time finding a home near the schools my brother and I attended too. I remember the fights my parents would get into because my mom wanted a stable and better home for me and my brother. To her, she deemed it an important aspect to a brighter future. She dreamed of a nice house with a front lawn, in a friendly neighborhood, where my brother and I could get along and play with the other kids from the block. However, every house we moved into had its problems. In most of the houses, the issue was the condition of the house, whether it had several leaks to being infested with pest. Eventually she saved up enough money to buy herself a house. Off she went house hunting with a friendly real estate agent. I remember on several occasions she would pick us up after school and take us to see the houses. However, all the house were far from where went to school and always had a catch. In one particular time, the real estate agent had taken us to an abandoned house which need a lot of repairs. The house had missing roof pieces, wild animals had made it their home, and there was a bad infection of flees and woodlice. My mother had seen enough, she told the real estate agent that she wanted an affordable, but livable house in a relatively good neighborhood, near our school and that if he couldn't provide her with a house to match that description she would find someone else who can. A couple of days later she was shown a house ten minutes away from our school that matched her criteria. However, the house was next to the 10 East freeway. After a semester of going over and learning the various forms of racism, I now know that what she experienced is environmental racism.
According to Tanya Maria Golash-Boza (2015), environmental racism is when there are "institutional policies and practices that deferentially affect the health outcomes or living conditions of people and communities based on race or color" (pg. 345). In the U.S., people from a low income neighborhood and of color are the most likely to be segregated into neighborhood that contain and expose people to environmental hazards, such as waste facilities, railroads, highways/freeways, etc. My personal story is just one example of many that have to settle down living with these hazards threats nearby because of their socioeconomic status and race. According to Tanya Maria Golash-Boza (2015), "in 2000, neighborhoods with hazardous waste facilities were, on average, 56 percent non-white..." These facilities ensure to not only affect the community's health with medical problems, but also limit the available space for needed resources to improve their health, such as parks and clinics.
I believe that environmental racism is a prevalent form of racism in today's society. Even with policies embedded to help people of color, housing segregation is still a modern day problem because it is now expressed in an invert manner, which makes it hard to pin point as racism. It also doesn't help that because people of color feel their voices will never be heard, they don't normally make a stand for what they know is wrong. These two factors in combination with other factors make it difficult to make a change for the better.