North Charleston residents stand outside of a corner store during flooding.
https://www.postandcourier.com/rising-waters/flooding-intensifies-charleston-regions-racial-and-wealth-inequities/article_7a5f724c-afc6-11ea-b878-2795af874a5b.html
23.5 million Americans live in low-income neighborhoods with no access to fresh food or “food deserts”. The lack of supermarket and food access in low-income, minority neighborhoods is not a coincidence. Food deserts are largely a result of environmental racism.
Environmental racism occurs when minority communities are placed in conditions that are hazardous to their quality of life such as pollution, toxic waste, and in this instance, lack of access to affordable fresh food.
Historically, food desserts were created using redlining. Redlining was an effort made by banks, insurers, and the federal government in the 1930s to place black and impoverished homeowners in the same neighborhoods. Redlined neighborhoods were denied basic services such as health care and grocery stores and as a result we see a lack of these basic services in minority communities today. For example, in North Charleston, where residents have notoriously dealt with environmental racism, there is a notable lack of accessible grocery stores and supermarkets. One of the only grocery stores in the Rosemont neighborhood, Teddy Foster Grocery, is consistently flooded and left inaccessible to residents. Nearly all of North Charleston qualifies as a food desert as shown by this map published by the Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC).
Food insecurity in the Charleston area. Areas marked in red are qualified as food deserts by DHEC. https://gis.dhec.sc.gov/fooddesert/
Access to food is a fundamental human right and an indicator of a strong society, and it plays a crucial role in the environmental justice movement. Food deserts can lead to increased rates of diabetes and obesity in the communities they are present in. Additionally, not having access to supermarkets can further amplify the impacts of environmental racism. Residents of communities impacted by environmental racism are likely to have increased rates of cancer, respiratory issues, and other long term medical conditions that are further aggravated by poor diets as a result of food deserts.
Addressing environmental racism is crucial to understanding how food deserts form and how to prevent and eradicate them. Historically and even today, minority and impoverished communities lack access to affordable, fresh food. Doing this disproportionately increases their rate for hunger and diet based diseases.
New York Law School Racial Justice Project., "Unshared Bounty: How Structural Racism Contributes to the Creation and Persistence of Food Deserts. (with American Civil Liberties Union)." (2012). Racial Justice Project. Book 3. http://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/racial_justice_project/3
Hobbs, Stephen, and Rickey Ciapha Dennis. “Flooding Intensifies Charleston Region's Racial and Wealth Inequities.” Post and Courier. The Post and Courier, September 22, 2020. https://www.postandcourier.com/rising-waters/flooding-intensifies-charleston-regions-racial-and-wealth-inequities/article_7a5f724c-afc6-11ea-b878-2795af874a5b.html.
“Reading: Environmental Racism.” Lumen. Accessed October 16, 2020. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/alamo-sociology/chapter/reading-environmental-racism/. “The Socio-Economic Significance of Food Deserts.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, June 29, 2011. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/the-socio-economic-significance-of-food-deserts.