Centuries of racial discrimination have shaped American society, leaving lasting disparities in housing, wealth, health and environmental conditions. Across the country, low-income areas and communities of color face disproportionate exposure to pollution and other environmental hazards, reflecting a long history of inequitable public policies and practices. These unequal burdens are central to the fight for environmental justice, even as longstanding civil rights protections and efforts to address racial inequality are being weakened and dismantled.
Now, a proposal to remove race and ethnicity from the decennial census threatens to make racial disparities even harder to identify and address. For decades, the environmental justice movement has relied on these data to identify communities facing disproportionate pollution burdens and determine where pollution reductions are most needed to protect public health. Removing race from the Census would not eliminate racial inequality. It would simply make these disparities harder to measure, understand, and address.
I saw firsthand why these data matter during my years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ), where I led the development and use of EJScreen, a national environmental justice mapping tool. Decades of housing policies, zoning decisions, and industrial development have created a landscape where pollution-producing facilities and other environmental hazards are often concentrated in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. EJScreen helped make these patterns visible, by providing a consistent, data-driven way to examine environmental disparities across the country. Yet, last year, the Office of Environmental Justice and EJScreen were closed, and the federal government’s commitment to this work has likewise ceased. Current efforts to remove race from Census data threaten to undermine one of the foundational sources of information supporting environmental justice work and other initiatives to address inequality across the nation.
Racial Data and the U.S. Census
The U.S. Census has collected information on race since the first federal census in 1790, but the history of those data is complicated. From the beginning, racial classification and population counts were intertwined with the country’s struggle over slavery and political power. During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Southern states sought to count enslaved people toward their representation in Congress, even though those individuals were denied basic rights and treated as property. Northern states opposed counting enslaved people in this way, arguing that slaveholding states should not gain additional political power from a population they denied the right to vote. The resulting Three-Fifths Compromise stipulated that three-fifths of an enslaved person would be counted for purposes of congressional representation. This provision did not grant enslaved people rights. Instead, it allowed slaveholding states to increase their political representation based on a population they continued to enslave. So, when the first Census was conducted in 1790, counting people by race was already embedded in the political system.
Over time, however, the role of racial data evolved. Data that had once been used within systems of racial classification and inequality became an essential resource for those working to challenge discrimination and advance civil rights. During the civil rights movement, racial data helped expose disparities in political representation, housing, employment, and access to public resources, providing evidence to support efforts to address longstanding inequities. Census data became central to redistricting and the enforcement of civil rights laws, helping government agencies, researchers, and advocates document discrimination and evaluate the effectiveness of legal protections. Today, these data serve a much broader purpose, helping us understand persistent racial disparities, examine the effects of public policies, and identify where more action is needed to advance equity.
Environmental Justice
The environmental justice movement is similarly inseparable from the availability of racial and demographic data. In 1982, protests erupted in Warren County, North Carolina, over plans to locate a landfill containing contaminated soil in a predominantly Black, low-income community. The protests drew national attention and became a defining moment in the emerging environmental justice movement, helping connect the struggle against environmental pollution with the broader fight for civil rights. Building on these concerns, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice published Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States in 1987. Drawing on census demographic information and data on hazardous waste facilities, the landmark report found that race was the strongest single predictor of where hazardous waste facilities were located. The report gave communities and advocates powerful evidence to support what many had experienced firsthand, demonstrating that environmental burdens were not distributed equally and that racial data could help expose and challenge those inequities.
The federal government began incorporating environmental justice into its work in the 1990s, establishing EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and directing agencies to examine how environmental and health risks affected different populations. Race and ethnicity data became essential to these efforts, helping identify communities disproportionately burdened by pollution, inform enforcement and permitting decisions, guide investments, and give communities evidence to challenge decisions that threatened their health and neighborhoods.
History of the EJScreen
In the 2010s, EPA’s development of EJScreen marked a major advancement, combining nationally consistent environmental and demographic data in an accessible mapping tool that allowed government agencies, researchers, and communities to identify pollution burdens and examine how they overlapped with communities of color and low-income populations. The tool helped turn data into a practical resource for environmental analysis, advocacy, and decision-making. Other federal initiatives and state tools expanded these applications, using demographic, environmental, and health data to identify overburdened communities and inform policies and resource allocation.
In 2025, the administration closed EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and shut down federal environmental justice tools, including EJScreen and others. After decades of federal investment in data and tools that helped expose and address environmental disparities, this retreat threatens not only the infrastructure supporting environmental justice, but also the ability to measure who bears the greatest burdens and whether government policies are making a difference.
Future of EJ Analyses
With the federal government stepping away from this work, researchers, academics, nonprofits, and community advocates are working to preserve EJScreen’s legacy while building the next generation of environmental justice data and mapping tools. Through the Environmental & Health Data Analysis Trust (EHDAT), I am working to develop an open-source, accessible platform that builds on the foundation of EJScreen while expanding the data, methods, and capabilities available to communities, researchers, and policymakers. The goal is not simply to recreate a tool that has been lost, but to build something more flexible and responsive to real-world needs, capable of helping answer critical policy questions about cumulative environmental burdens, public health, and the communities most affected.
For me, this work is a continuation of what first drew me to environmental justice, using data and evidence to help communities document the burdens they face and push for change. Today, we have more powerful data, better analytical methods, and more sophisticated mapping technologies at our disposal. We have an opportunity to put these tools directly into the hands of communities, strengthening their ability to question government decisions, demand action where it is needed, and ensure that public policies better protect the people they are meant to serve.
But none of this work can reach its full potential without reliable data on race and ethnicity from the U.S. Census. Environmental and health data can tell us where pollution is concentrated and where disease rates are high, but without demographic information, our ability to understand who is affected and identify racial disparities is severely diminished. The consequences extend far beyond environmental justice mapping. The loss of reliable racial data would undermine research into heart disease, stroke, cancer, and other health disparities. For heart and brain health research in particular, these data are critical to understanding why conditions such as heart disease and stroke disproportionately affect some racial groups and how environmental exposures and other social factors may contribute to these differences. The consequences also extend to work on housing, education, voting rights, and civil rights enforcement.
This blog offers just a snapshot of what is at stake. Across countless fields, researchers and advocates depend on these data to understand inequality, evaluate policies, and identify where action is needed. Without reliable race and ethnicity data, we lose the ability to accurately measure disparities, develop effective tools and policies, and hold institutions accountable for addressing inequality.
What Can You Do?
The U.S. Census Bureau has proposed a rule to prohibit including race and ethnicity questions in the decennial census. Members of the public have until November 2 to submit comments about the impact of these changes. Learn more about the proposed changes and how to comment at HandsOffOurCens.us.
From the civil rights movement to environmental justice, race and ethnicity data have helped turn lived experiences into evidence, challenge longstanding assumptions, and hold institutions accountable. They remain essential to understanding whether our policies are working, whether communities are benefiting equitably from public investments, and whether we are making meaningful progress toward a more just society. We should be asking how to collect better data, use them more responsibly, and ensure they serve the public good, not whether we should stop counting altogether.
We cannot fix what we refuse to measure, and we cannot measure progress toward equality if we make inequality invisible.