Color-blind racial ideology and beliefs about environmental inequality among local US government officials

ABSTRACTRecent scholarship argues that racial oppression by the state is central to the formation of environmental inequalities, calling into question reliance on the state to achieve environmental justice. Others argue that the state is not monolithic and is the only institution capable of wielding sufficient power to address environmental inequalities. I engage with this discussion through a survey of US local government officials (N = 691). I find that officials tend to engage in color-blind environmental racism; that is, officials tend to understand issues of environmental inequality through the lens of color-blind racial ideology. Findings support the arguments of critical environmental justice scholars who question the state’s inherent capacity to respond to issues of environmental racism. However, variance in officials’ views also suggest that the state is a site of political contestation with many officials both recognizing the reality of environmental inequality and racism and supporting government intervention to address it.KEYWORDS: Environmental justicegovernment officialspolicy supportcolor-blind environmental racism Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. While attitudinal survey researchers often treat ‘I’m not sure’ or equivalent answers as missing, in this case the measure is not attitudinal. Because this is a question of accuracy – the ability to identify factually correct statements – ‘I’m not sure’ in this case is, in fact, inaccurate. To evaluate the appropriateness of this decision, I (a) ran a set of sensitivity analyses in which the ensuing regression analyses were re-run with an accuracy measure that treats ‘I’m not sure’ as missing and (b) examined a series of t-tests that compared the number of ‘I’m not sure’ responses by demographic characteristics of education, political identity, gender, and income. Regarding the former, the new regression results did not yield any meaningful differences in coefficients, standard errors, or statistical significance. Regarding the latter, respondents without a college degree (compared to those with a college degree) and Republicans (compared to Democrats) had slightly (.4 and .5, respectively) more ‘I’m not sure’ responses, indicating what was likely a form of social desirability bias: avoiding answering ‘no’ by answering ‘I’m not sure’. But in this case this would justify rather than challenge the coding used here.2. A significant caveat to the finding that a majority of respondents support environmental justice policy is that the question used to evaluate support does not distinguish between universalistic, poverty-based, or race-based policies. That is, by using a more generically framed question, respondents were able to infer a number of possible forms that policy could take. Given the strong relationship between color-blind racial ideology and beliefs about environmental inequality – especially support for policy – it is likely that future research would find substantial differences in how local government officials view environmental justice policy if it were targeted at racially marginalized communities most in need of policy support.