The rePercussion Section: Black Cancer
Black Cancer
by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist
February is National Cancer Prevention Month. It’s also Black History Month. Let’s look at the two together. And let’s start with Black history.
Before the Civil War, the lower Mississippi River Valley south of Baton Rouge was lined with slave plantations and sugarcane. But with a twist. The enslaved people who lived here didn’t just labor in the cane fields. They also labored in the mills that turned the cane into processed sugar and on the transportation systems that connected the mills to the fields.
In this way, Louisiana slavery was industrial as well as agricultural. Recent reporting by environmental journalist Nick Cunningham describes how this historical anomaly set the stage for a petrochemical build-out in Black communities along the Lower Mississippi in what has been called, since the 1980s, “Cancer Alley.”
Starting in the first half of the 20th century, the industrial infrastructure that had once turned cane into granulated sugar was incrementally repurposed for the task of turning oil and gas into chemicals and plastics. After various waves of development, most recently spurred on by the fracking boom, more than 150 petrochemical plants now line the 130-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
To be sure, both Black and white communities co-exist within this sinuous river valley. New research shows, however, that cancer-causing pollution from the industrial facilities is highly concentrated in Black-majority neighborhoods and that racial disparities in emissions from these facilities are pronounced.
Specifically, communities of color are exposed to levels of industrial emissions that are 7 to 21 times higher than their white counterparts. This dramatic difference, as shown by an analysis of census tract data, is “not attributable to industrial infrastructure or labor supply.”
In other words, yes, industry clusters around infrastructure. But that can’t explain why industry in southern Louisiana congregates in predominantly Black neighborhoods within a larger group of neighborhoods that have infrastructure.
In other words, the disparity in pollution burden is not because contemporary Black communities just happen to be located nearest the industrial infrastructure.
In other words, the permitting system itself is racist.
From the authors of the new research: “Immediate action is needed to address this discriminatory effect of industrial permitting in Louisiana, and future research should focus on the role of state permitting in environmental injustice more broadly.”
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Are the starkly elevated levels of cancer-causing air pollution in Black-majority communities in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley actually linked to elevated cancer rates? The new answer is yes.
Unsurprisingly.
The old answer was almost certainly also yes, but it was hidden by the units used by the state cancer registry to collect geographical data on cancer incidence.
The Louisiana Tumor Registry codes spatial data by parish (known as counties in other states). And when you map this data, it shows that, as a geographic area, the parishes sandwiched between Baton Rouge and New Orleans suffer no higher rates of cancer than the statewide average.
On average, there are no more tumors growing in the bodies of people living in the parishes contained within the petrochemical zone than there are anywhere else in the state.
This fact allows Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson Greg Langley to rebuke the phrase “Cancer Alley” by saying, “We have not seen higher cancer incidence over large areas of the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.” [emphasis added.]
This has been the official state’s position—Cancer Alley does not exist—for at least three decades.
But you can’t see with the wrong glasses on.
The lower Mississippi River is a twisting and turning thread that wends its way diagonally through these “large areas.” If high rates of cancer follow the course of the river, they will not appear as a clump within the blockish shapes of the parishes that are oriented along north-south and east-west compass directions.
Credit: Richard Misrach; Kate Orff; Aperture Foundation; 2012; Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center
Twenty-five years ago, my own colleague at SEHN, Ted Schettler, looked at the state’s analysis and noticed that cancer data reported by parish would include people both near and much farther away from the river corridor itself. Thus, “it was easy for excess cancer outcomes in the corridor to be obscured in state cancer data. I wrote a commentary noting the need for more granular data, including census tract and neighborhood data.”
And now that’s happened. In 2018, the Louisiana Tumor Registry finally allowed researchers to access cancer incidence rates coded by census tract, which reveals what’s going on at the neighborhood level and allows researchers to zero in on what’s happening along the winding banks of the river corridor.
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A January 2022 study, published in Environmental Research Letters, showed that Blacks living in the lower Mississippi River in southern Louisiana suffer higher cancer rates and that this excess is attributable to higher air pollution in Black and impoverished communities.
Cancer Alley exists.
According to the research team:
We found that severely polluted, predominantly Black neighborhoods in Louisiana have abnormally high numbers of cancer cases…accounting for demographics, accounting for poverty status of that neighborhood. And so the data really demonstrate that pollution exposure is one of multiple reasons why Louisiana has one of the highest cancer rates in the U.S.
The researchers who did this analysis—and who are also the authors of the study finding 7 to 21-fold higher levels of industrial emissions in Black neighborhoods—do not work for any federal agency. They are Gianna St. Julien and Kimberly Terrell.
St. Julien graduated in 2020 from the University of Louisiana in Lafayette with a B.S. degree in environmental science. Terrell is a Ph.D. biologist. Both work at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic where they specialize in engagement with underserved communities.
Which is to say, these two women spend their workdays listening to clients who live along the fence lines of the petrochemical industry clustered along the lower Mississippi River, and the observations and stories they hear guide their direction of their research.
In a recent interview, St. Julien was asked what motivated her to bring clarity to the issue of Cancer Alley. Her response:
We have clients that are represented by the clinic telling us their firsthand experiences…So we wanted to look at the science and see if it actually supported their claims….We hear that there are constant diagnoses, whether it’s family members or neighbors, of cancer and other diseases. These are people who are living there for their whole lives.
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In November 2021, the nonprofit newsroom Propublica conducted an investigation of its own.
Using data processing software and modeling tools developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), this team of reporters created detailed maps of cancer-causing industrial pollution and discovered potential alleyways of cancer running through Black communities all across the nation.
In parts of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley alone, the ProPublica team estimated a lifetime cancer risk for residents at up to 47 times greater than what the EPA says is acceptable.
And looking across the United States as a whole, the team found that, on average, census tracts where most residents are Black have more than double the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollution than of majority-white communities.
Overall, residents living in U.S. census tracts where the majority of the population are people of color are exposed to 40 percent more cancer-causing industrial air pollution than tracts where the residents are mostly white.
These findings prompted EPA administrator Michael S. Regan to travel to some of the communities featured in the Propublica investigation.
As part of his itinerary in Louisiana, Regan visited the Fifth Ward Elementary School in St. John the Baptist Parish where air monitoring data showed concentrations of the likely carcinogen chloroprene at 11 times the EPA guidelines—with spikes sometimes reaching 83 times higher than the acceptable limit on the school grounds.
The school sits just 1500 feet from the Denka chemical company that produces chloroprene. Of the 402 students who attend Fifth Ward, 75 percent are Black.
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Chloroprene causes cancer by mutating genes. It is used to manufacture synthetic rubber. Its chemical precursor is 1,3-butadiene, which was first made in industrial quantities in Germany in the run-up to World War II.
Anticipating a supply chain disruption that would cut off access to natural rubber, which is sourced from tropical trees and vines, German chemists at IG Farben went to work making petrochemical copolymers of styrene and butadiene that could be used to manufacture tires.
In the 1930s, the world’s rubber plantations were largely under the control of the British Empire.
So here we are, back on the plantation.
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In January 2022, Concerned Citizens of St. John filed a civil rights complaint with the EPA against the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) and the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH).
Signed also by several other groups, the complaint invoked Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents the federal government from funding state agencies whose policies, by intent or by effect, discriminate based on race. From the complaint:
LDEQ and LDH have violated that prohibition by subjecting Black residents of St. John the Baptist Parish to disproportionate air pollution and related harms from various facilities, including ethylene oxide from various sources and chloroprene from a neoprene production facility. St. John the Baptist Parish is a majority Black parish, and, due to LDEQ’s and LDH’s failures, its residents face the highest cancer risk from air pollution in the nation.
In October 2022, the EPA responded. In a 56-page letter sent to the health and environmental agencies named in the complaint, the agency ordered the state of Louisiana to examine how polluting industries harm the health of its Black residents.
It also urged the state to move students out of the Fifth Ward Elementary School and noted that 93 percent of the residents who live within a mile of the Denka chemical plant are Black, compared to 50 percent in the parish as a whole.
And it raised questions about the failure to consider cumulative cancer risks for residents living near a proposed Formosa plastics plant in nearby St. James Parish where ethylene oxide and benzene emissions would be added to air that is already gravely compromised from dozens of other petrochemical plants. The proposed Formosa site is in a census tract where 90 percent of residents are Black, disproportionate to the parish as a whole.
Quoting at length from The Atlantic (“Louisiana Chemical Plants are Thriving Off of Slavery”) and the Georgetown Environmental Law Review, the EPA letter emphasized the history of injustice that lies behind these demographics:
Much of Cancer Alley is rural and made of unincorporated towns, meaning that these communities do not have local governance over their affairs. Thus, the parish they are located in has jurisdiction and can establish rules of governance in the town. Most unincorporated communities were created when slavery ended and groups of free black people…were able to buy strips of land at the edges of plantations….The plantations directly adjacent to these black communities…were sold to industries dependent on river access to ship goods, chemicals, and petroleum products.
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Ethylene oxide is made from natural gas. Or sometimes from petroleum. It’s considered a human carcinogen and is linked to both breast and lymph cancers.
Benzene is naturally occurring vapor found in crude oil. It can also be produced using petroleum feedstocks as a starting point. Benzene is a known human carcinogen. It’s a proven cause of three kinds of leukemia, multiple myeloma, and lymphoma.
For most cancers, Black people have the highest death rates and the shortest survival of any racial/ethnic group in the United States.
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When announcing National Cancer Prevention Month, the American Association for Cancer Research emphasized the importance of modifying risky behaviors. These include “smoking, excess body weight, physical inactivity, excessive exposure to the sun.” Not included in the list: “living on the perimeter of a former slave plantation that has been turned into a 2400-acre petrochemical complex that turns fossil fuels into plastics.”
When announcing the withdrawal of air permits for the proposed Formosa plant that would border the town of Welcome in St. James Parish, 19th District Court Judge Trudy M. White said that Louisiana regulators had failed to account for cumulative exposures from multiple sources in a community already suffering from carcinogenic air pollution.
In her ruling, Judge White also said this:
The demographics of Welcome reflect its roots as a place once dominated by plantations, populated by the enslaved ancestors of present-day residents…the blood, sweat and tears of their Ancestors is tied to the land. Remarkably, the Black residents of Welcome are descendants of men and women who were kidnapped from Africa; who survived the Middle Passage; who were transported to a foreign land; and, then sold on auction blocks and enslaved. Their Ancestors worked the land with the hope and dream of passing down productive agricultural untainted land along the Mississippi land to their families [emphasis in original].