"don't discrimihate 'case you done read a book or two..."

Oh André; cutting edge wisdom finds no greater champion than Outkast. When all you have is a hammer indeed... It seems environmental-justice-ism looks to publications, studies, reports, et al, that simply reinforce the presumptions already made. Corporations are malevolent and hate minorities. Obviously. They grab their big toxic pistols and take aim at low income, black or Latino neighborhoods, and fire away with gleeful disregard for the health of ethnic America.

When all you have is the race-card, the whole world looks like a bigot.

The most brilliant point made in "Break Through" about the reason that poor (to wit, minority) neighborhoods bear the brunt of toxicity is price. No company, operating on the bottom line, would ship waste to expensive real estate. The forces driving industrial waste to poor neighborhoods is the same reason that the poor were driven there in the first place: cost. If minorities were more economically integrated into American markets, than they could mobilize out of these so-called toxic slums.

Obviously this is far more difficult that just giving jobs to poor blacks or Latinos (or Russians, or Hmong, or regular ole' poor white folk). But acknowledging that the problem is one of economics rather than corporate environmental maliciousness is the first step in meaningful discourse about solutions.

True, there are generations of minorities, especially black Americans, who have been excluded from equal participation in the economy, but lets start with education, business development, and so on, rather than pointing fingers and reiterating that rich, white corporate America is out to get everyone. By prioritizing a stabilization of economies, we willl stabilize the environment.

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he might give a damn when industrial waste lights his river on fire.

And let's face it, empty bellies are easy to fill not just with disregard for long-term environmental consequences, but also ethnic blame and hatred, religious fanaticism, and savage political collusion. Dissent becomes taboo, free thought becomes contraband.

I suppose any weak-willed faux-intellectual will not willingly give credit to ideas that undermine the foundations of his or her thought. EJism is no different.
What we need is a renaissance away from the specialization of intellect so that we may look at at challenges holistically.