text: Sacrifice zones are areas where residents are subjected to heightened levels of pollution and hazardous materials, despite the adverse impacts on their health.
  Sacrifice zones are part of a legacy of environmental racism and environmental injustice that has resulted in people of color being significantly more likely than white people to experience polluted air and groundwater.
  Those who live in sacrifice zones are far more likely to develop conditions such as asthma, respiratory disease, and cancer as a result of their environment.
  Causes
  There are four factors which lead to environmental racism: lack of affordable land, lack of political power, lack of mobility, and poverty. Cheap land is sought by corporations and governmental bodies. As a result, communities which cannot effectively resist these corporations and governmental bodies and cannot access political power cannot negotiate just costs. Communities with minimized socio-economic mobility cannot relocate. Lack of financial contributions also reduces the communities' ability to act both physically and politically. Chavis defined environmental racism in five categories: racial discrimination in defining environmental policies, discriminatory enforcement of regulations and laws, deliberate targeting of minority communities as hazardous waste dumping sites, official sanctioning of dangerous pollutants in minority communities, and the exclusion of people of color from environmental leadership positions.