Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1291, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Feb 24;18(5):2217. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18052217.
In 2014, city and state officials channeled toxic water into Flint, Michigan and its unevenly distributed and corroding lead service lines (LSLs). The resulting Flint water crisis is a tragic example of environmental racism against a majority Black city and enduring racial and spatial disparities in environmental lead exposures in the United States. Important questions remain about how race intersected with other established environmental health vulnerabilities of gender and single-parent family structure to create unequal toxic exposures within Flint. We address this question with (1) an "intercategorical ecology" framework that extends the "racial ecology" lens into the complex spatial and demographic dimensions of environmental health vulnerabilities and (2) a multivariate analysis using block-level data from the 2010 U.S. decennial census and a key dataset estimating the LSL connections for 56,038 land parcels in Flint. We found that blocks exposed to LSLs had, on average, higher concentrations of single-parent white, Black, and Latinx families. However, logistic regression results indicate that the likelihood of block exposure to LSLs was most consistently and positively associated with the percentage of single-father Black and single-mother Latina families, net of other racialized and gendered single-parent family structures, socioeconomic status, and the spatial concentration of LSL exposure.
2014 年，城市和州政府将有毒水引入密歇根州弗林特市，并将其输送至该市分布不均且腐蚀严重的铅供水管线（LSL）中。由此引发的弗林特水危机是针对一个以黑人为主的城市实施环境种族主义的悲惨案例，也是美国环境铅暴露在种族和空间上持续存在差异的一个例证。人们仍然关注一些重要问题，例如种族如何与其他既定的环境健康脆弱性（性别和单亲家庭结构）相互作用，从而在弗林特市造成不平等的有毒物质暴露。我们使用（1）“跨类别生态学”框架来解决这一问题，该框架将“种族生态学”视角扩展到环境健康脆弱性的复杂空间和人口维度，以及（2）使用来自 2010 年美国十年一次人口普查的街区层面数据和一个关键数据集进行多元分析，该数据集估计了弗林特 56038 个地块的 LSL 连接情况。我们发现，暴露于 LSL 的街区平均拥有更高比例的白人、黑人以及拉丁裔单亲家庭。然而，逻辑回归结果表明，无论其他种族化和性别化的单亲家庭结构、社会经济地位以及 LSL 暴露的空间集中情况如何，暴露于 LSL 的街区可能性与单身父亲黑人家庭和单身母亲拉丁裔家庭的比例最一致且呈正相关。
