SUMMARY

Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Project 02-99: Incorporating Environmental Justice and Equity Principles and Data into Airport Decision-Making provides resources to educate and support airport practitioners integrating environmental justice, equity principles and data into airport decision-making. Airports (and the impacted communities that surround them) need resources to carefully assess and respond to inequitable outcomes, particularly with respect to impacts felt by airport passengers, the airport workforce, and the airport-adjacent communities whose environments are impacted by airport development and operations. This document is one of two research publications associated with ACRP Project 02-99.

To adequately incorporate environmental justice, equity principles, and data into airport decision-making processes, it is critical for practitioners to understand the historical context of current conditions. This publication provides evidence that the structural origins of inequity, as experienced in the United States, can be traced back to four broad conceptual themes: group-based othering (Chapter 2), settler colonialism (Chapter 3), economic systems of racial capitalism (Chapter 4), and systemic oppression (Chapter 5). Where Chapters 2 through 5 focus on key concepts and provide specific examples pertinent to the air transportation system today, Chapter 6 begins to explore the aspirational goal of an inclusive, equitable, and just airport planning and decision-making process. Chapters 2-6 each begin with a one-page “Insight Warm-Up” that lists the learning goals for the chapter and short prompts about the relevant historical context, lenses and ways of knowing, and present-day legacies in aviation. Overall, this publication intends to improve a reader’s knowledge of systemic racism within the United States, as well as improve their understanding of the links between historical instances of harm to outcomes that persist within the aviation industry today (with a focus on airports where applicable).

The intended audience for this document includes practitioners who are tasked with setting forth equitable policies and procedures, practitioners who are responsible for prioritizing projects and fiscal allocations, planners whose work includes designing infrastructure and implementing engagement strategies, and practitioners tasked with collecting, analyzing, and reporting on equity-related data, among others. Each chapter contains specific learning objectives that guide airport practitioners to reflect on a range of systemic inequalities and consider ways to intervene on current practices within their industry, within their organization, or through their specific role.

The research team sought to highlight lived experiences and offer qualitative depictions of the ways people experience inequities in terms of airport planning, siting, and operations. This publication illustrates the meaning of terms like environmental justice and equity by exploring the ways people experience the processes by which inequities occur within transportation and airport planning. As described throughout this publication, those processes are fostered by racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-indigeneity. This publication’s narrative approach to illustrating environmental justice and equity is an analytical departure from the (more common) practice of listing brief definitions or brief descriptions of inequities, which often lead to over-simplification or ‘checklist-thinking’ that can undermine efforts to orchestrate more equitable processes and outcomes.

Key findings contained in this publication include the following topics.

The Legacy and Impact of Systems of Othering

Othering is a social phenomenon, derived from systems of influence and power, whereby individuals or groups are marked, sorted, and grouped based on apparent differences. Harm from othering appears when these mechanisms of division are used to establish and reinforce systems of oppression. The founding of the United States was rooted in notoriously violent forms of othering, the genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement of people stolen from Africa. The construct of race was imposed by colonizers as a means of asserting power and division.

Today, othering remains a foundational factor in the ways an individual understands and/or experiences race (as well as other identity markers such as religion and gender) within society. Present-day examples of othering across the history of aviation include:

• Profiling and harassment of religious groups like post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment and hate crimes against people who were perceived to be Muslim.
• Profiling and harassment of gender groups.
• Sexual harassment and assault.
• De-prioritization of services for disabled passengers.
• Challenges accommodating non-English speakers and wayfinding.
• Practices of exclusion and tokenism in the workforce.
• Monuments of white supremacy.

Racialized Othering

Racialization is an aspect of othering that is of particular concern in the aviation sector. Racialization focuses on the experience of race, asserting that it is a process that happens to people as opposed to a biological identity. Because race is a socio-cultural experience, the ways in which identity markers come to be and are defined are inconsistent and unreliable in terms of factual, measurable realities; yet those identity markers create dominant ideals that inform how society, institutions, and communities are constructed and governed. One way that racialization has persisted is through the construction of whiteness as an ideal or superior notion of personhood in the United States. In fact, to know white supremacy is to know all forms of oppression and discrimination; and it is critical that institutions, including transportation agencies, understand the methodologies and frameworks associated with the study of systemic oppression.

The processes of racialized othering impose limitations on the mobility of racialized people. The interests of whiteness aided in the enslavement, criminalization, and demobilization of racialized people. White institutions have often utilized violence, aggressive policing, displacement, and even death to limit the mobility of Black and Indigenous people. Violent tactics to control mobility are observed throughout United States history from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Trail of Tears, the Bloody Sunday in Selma, immigration detention centers, and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in 2020.

Airports themselves can serve as monuments of racist histories. Airport namesakes can serve as legacies of white supremacy. For example, Benjamin Franklin Stapleton was a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan and served as mayor of Denver, Colorado from 1923-1931 and from 1935-1947. Stapleton was instrumental in appointing and facilitating KKK members into city leadership positions during his tenure. Stapleton was also known for his commitment to major public works projects, including the Denver

Municipal Airport, which opened in 1929. The airport was renamed Stapleton Airfield in honor of the mayor in 1944, then renamed again (Stapleton International Airport) in 1964 when the airport expanded commercial service offerings. Stapleton International Airport was eventually replaced by the newly constructed Denver International Airport in 1995 on land annexed from nearby Adams County. After Stapleton International Airport closed, the Stapleton land area retained the neighborhood name Stapleton until 2020.

Due to early and ongoing racial and gender-based discrimination, the aviation industry continues to be coded as a White and cisgendered male industry, making it prone to the exclusion and tokenism of marginalized people. For example, according to a survey conducted for ACRP Research Report 161, “one in four international passengers can read only a little English, or none at all.” Many U.S. airports only provide wayfinding signage in English. Additionally, people with disabilities are also experiencing inequities while flying. Single-aisle aircraft are not required to have a wheelchair accessible bathroom onboard. Personal wheelchairs are too wide for aircraft aisles, so people who use wheelchairs are transferred by airline staff to an airline “aisle chair” to get them to their seat. Transfers are often uncomfortable and can result in injuries if they go awry.

Gendered Othering

Airport travel for transgender and nonconforming people can be a hostile experience, particularly when there is distinction between the gender marked on one’s travel documents and one’s perceived gender presentation while passing through airport security (Abini 2014). “Transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience a form of mobility that is altered, shaped, and informed by a broader cultural system that normalizes violence and harassment towards gender minorities” (Lubitow et al. 2017). To understand the transportation-related experiences of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual/aromantic/agender (LGBTQIA+), it is useful to understand the broader experiences of othering, which show up in or are impacted by the built environment. Several overlapping inequities are related to LGBTQIA+ mobility.

While there are very few focused studies regarding the unique experiences of gender minorities, gender-based violence is evident in the studies that sought to understand the experiences of women in aviation. In 2018, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA released a survey of over 3,500 flight attendants representing 29 U.S. airlines which documents how pervasive harassment remains in the industry. Almost 70 percent of respondents have experienced sexual harassment in their career as a flight attendant. In the year prior to the survey, 35 percent of respondents reported verbal sexual harassment from passengers and 18 percent experienced physical sexual harassment from passengers (Association of Flight Attendants 2018).

Moreover, the transportation industry plays a vital role in human trafficking. It enables traffickers and their victims to move from place to place, meeting supply and demand, evading law enforcement and removing victims from familiar surroundings (Yagci Sokat 2022). Air transport is one mode of transport used by traffickers and their victims. Just as air transport facilitates movement of people and cargo around the world, it also facilitates human trafficking.

Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonialism

Racial capitalism can be defined as “the process of gaining social and economic value from the racial identity of another person” primarily through the commodification of racialized bodies (Leong 2013). The legacy of Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery continues to produce outcomes such as violence, cultural erasure, and modern slavery. Such outcomes include:

• Dispossession of indigenous persons
• Violent acquisition and control of land
• Legacies of settler colonialism within aviation
• Geographic isolation of tribal nations
• Tribal nations lacking access to airport facilities
• Disruption of sacred sites
• Disruption of land sovereignty
• Segregated workforces
• Mass incarceration and criminalization

Significant barriers for tribal nations to participate in American federal aviation planning process include maintaining sovereignty, managing the tribal land base, securing financial and knowledge capital, inadequate political recognition and inclusion, and ongoing experiences of epistemic injustice. In aviation planning involving indigenous groups, there can be concerns about how specific indigenous knowledge is shared and protected. This concern is most pronounced in the protection of sacred sites, wherein tribal knowledge-holders guard precise location information. This tribal practice conflicts with mapping approaches and knowledge production norms used by aviation planners, who may be interested in avoiding disrupting such sites. This knowledge exchange is further marred by harmful histories and practices, where sacred sites (when precise location is known) become the object of aviation tourism for observation and consumption. Variations in land ownership practices and governance complicate the fundamentals of cooperating on federally funded airport development programs, as well as transportation planning more broadly, within tribal lands. In 2022, the Cherokee Nation signed the first compact under the department’s Tribal Transportation Self-Governance Program (TTSGP, established 2020), which enables the Cherokee Nation to plan and oversee its own road construction and transit projects “without having to seek federal permission and oversight” (Rowley 2022).

The origins of the racist outcomes of spatial harm can also be traced back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (Wilkerson 2011). The first massive investment in transportation systems in the United States, the railroad system, was created to facilitate the transport of Black people—who were considered cargo, not human beings—in the role of trade and capitalism (Yusoff 2018). The history of racialized people in America is the United States includes a history of legal and social limitations that seeks to control or limit movement, behavior, culture, and decision-making (Nicholson and Sheller 2016). This legacy has evolved into what can be characterized as an outright criminalization of the movement and mobility of Black people in the United States. Today, the relationship between criminalization and transportation is often linked to fare evasion or eating on transit (Smith and Clarke 2000). The inability to pay for transportation may lead to charges, fines, or even arrests (Menendez et al. 2019). The failure to pay these fines can become a “failure to comply with a court order” charge that can lead to imprisonment.

Another example of racial capitalism within transportation includes the mistreatment of Black and Latinx essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic (Pirtle 2020). Despite the global state of emergency, essential workers, who were mostly Black or Brown (Gwynn 2021) were pressured to work to provide “essential” services including grocery workers, transit workers, airport workers, etc. (Williams et al. 2020). Many of the jobs that airports offer are low-skill and low-wage occupations, such as baggage handlers, cabin cleaners, and retail workers, often hired through third-party contractors. Outsourcing these positions has enabled airlines to maintain low wages for these occupations, as wages for

outsourced workers are usually lower than wages for directly- hired workers in the same occupations. Some airports have introduced living wage ordinances to mitigate against the effects of an unstable, inexperienced workforce. One of the first instances was at the San Francisco International Airport in 2000, which established minimum compensation and training standards for airport workers whose jobs impact safety and security.

Mass Incarceration

Mass incarceration is also a function of racial capitalism. Airport facilities exist within the larger system of prisoner transport and detention. The Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System (JPATS) had over 92,000 prisoner movements by air in fiscal year 2021 (U.S. Marshals Service 2022). Airports may contain their own holding facilities for temporary holding of incarcerated persons who are being transported and for detainment of traveling passengers (Fiorilli 2019). Policing or limiting access to public space in and near airports is a present-day legacy of systemic oppression related to both mobility and place. Intentionally designing public spaces to exclude, restrict, and alienate certain populations is unjust. For example, limits to facility access during overnight hours, anti-sit-lie measures, defensive design, and hostile architecture are intentional policy or design choices that make public spaces (including airports, pre-security) uncomfortable or unpleasant to occupy for a long period of time.

Racial profiling in airports has been one mechanism for criminalizing movement in airports. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents use “cold consent” encounters as a tactic to approach travelers whom they have either randomly selected or whom they have determined is exhibiting behaviors consistent with drug trafficking, with the goal of obtaining their consent to speak with and search the traveler. The cold consent tactic is known to be “more often associated with racial profiling than contacts based on previously acquired information” (Office of the Inspector General 2015, i). From 2020 to 2021, the Clayton County Police Department logged the racial identity of 378 persons they stopped on airport jet bridges and 56 percent were reported as Black (Abusaid 2022). Due to civil forfeiture laws in Georgia, the police can keep 100 percent of cash seized during cold consent searches even if the owner has no connection to a crime.

Airports are also used to transport immigration detainees. In September 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis, known for his anti-immigrant stance, used taxpayer funds from Florida’s migrant relocation program to fly 48 asylum-seeking migrants from San Antonio, Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. However, the migrants assert they were misled by officials and unaware that Martha’s Vineyard was their destination. The Florida Department of Transportation paid $1.5 million to Vertol Systems Company Inc., an aviation business based in Florida whose owner is a campaign contributor to DeSantis, to transport the migrants. The legality of DeSantis’ actions remains under investigation for a variety of reasons including allegations that the flights constituted human trafficking and that the aviation services paid in advance to Vertol Systems Company Inc. were not rendered (Morrow 2022; Klas 2022). This example shows that aviation networks can be exploited for political posturing in a manner that causes harm to vulnerable men, women, and children.

Systemic Oppression

The experiences related to othering and racial capitalism are described by social scientists through theories of systemic oppression. Systemic oppression has many manifestations and tactics. When it comes to the transportation planning (and other land use-related sectors) oppression typically manifests as forms of displacement, exclusion, and confinement. Other key aviation-related experiences with systemic oppression include:

• Oppression related to mobility.
• Criminalization of movement/freedom of Black and Indigenous persons.
• Structural racism, racial profiling, and discrimination.
• Oppression related to place.
• Racial exclusion and early zoning practices.
• Racially restrictive covenants.
• Exclusionary and expulsive zoning.
• Real estate assessment and racism.
• Redlining, urban renewal, and segregated suburbs.
• Civil rights reforms and the persistence of housing discrimination.

Historian Rod Clare summarizes this frustration when inquiring “where can Black people go and when can they go there?” (Clare 2016). Promptly after the passage of the 13th Amendment and the procedural abolishment of slavery in 1865, Jim Crow laws were introduced to limit the freedom and movement of Black people in the United States. In response to the Jim Crow laws, the Negro Motorist Green Book was published by Victor Green as a guide for Black people. It identified the businesses that allowed Black patrons throughout the United States (Green 1936). The Green Book was one of the many ways Black people adapted to constraints of mobility and movement that were pervasive during Jim Crow.

The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling validated the segregation of all modes of public transportation in the South. From 1865 to 1967, there were “more than four hundred state laws, constitutional amendments, and city ordinances legalizing segregation” (Brenman 2007). The Plessy v. Ferguson decision laid the groundwork for utilizing laws and courts to limit the movement of Black people and other racialized people. United States zoning focused on land use separation and segregation of various population groups. Expulsive zoning practices tend to de-industrialize White neighborhoods while industrializing racialized neighborhoods, frequently leading to the concentrated disruption and destabilization of Black communities. This practice deteriorates neighborhood conditions, creates environmental hazards, and lowers property values for homeowners. Consequently, expulsive zoning practice has been identified as a primary driver of contemporary environmental justice challenges in racially segregated urban neighborhoods (Whittemore 2017b).

In Jim Crow Terminals, Anke Ortlepp specifically documents the racial history of airport facilities that, as with other transportation modes, contributed to racial segregation, dehumanization, and trauma. Ortlepp puts forth, “[This study] looks at airports as racially coded geographies of mobility and consumption and scrutinizes the ways in which their spatial ordering and material fabric affected both Black and white Americans. It conceives of aviation as a spatial apparatus that not only reflected racism but also created a modernized version of racial discrimination as a southern way of life. This way of life came under attack in the post-war decades when the Civil Rights Movement questioned ideologies of race and also claimed and repurposed the (segregated) spaces that gave built expression to these ideologies” (Ortlepp 2017, 11). While the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 prohibited air carriers from discriminating against airline passengers on the basis of racial background, municipally owned airports were overt in their discriminatory policies and practices. From the 1940s to the 1960s, airports were particularly hostile toward racialized people: barring them from using the restroom and certain terminal eating establishments, segregating seating and waiting areas, and demolishing Black communities for the construction of airport terminals. These discriminatory practices were most pervasive in the South

but were present across the United States varying “from place to place even with states, reflecting the local character of the legal landscape…and sometimes airport managers made the rules” (Ortlepp 2017, 26).

Environmental Justice

Contemporary aviation planning includes analyses regarding the inequities associated with environmental justice impacts in or near airport communities. There are methodological concerns regarding the practice of environmental justice analysis across the transportation sector, including airport facility planning. Most frequently, these concerns are related to: the nature of the environmental impacts that are investigated (e.g., challenges in incorporating climate change), the informational value of quantitative metrics (e.g., existing noise metrics might not necessarily articulate actual human health impacts), the methods for selecting comparison geographies (e.g., hyper-local comparison geographies mask regional social inequities when high concentrations of marginalized groups are located near the airport), and the methods for defining and mapping various marginalized population groups (e.g., communities may not be defined in a manner consistent with their cultural identities, and they may be under-sampled by formal census data collection processes).

Black and Brown communities bear the brunt of environmental injustice, degradation, and pollution. The tactics and justifications that are displayed through environmental racism are extensions of the legacies of redlining policies, restrictive covenants, ghettoization of Black and low-wealth communities, white flight, and increased policing and criminalization of racialized people (J. D. Roberts et al. 2022). As of 2018, over 150 organizations have established a coalition to achieve a Just Transition from current systems of harm and oppression to a new set of systems rooted in equity to repair the effects of the experience of racialization, to end environmental injustice, to restore Indigenous sovereignty, and to provide reparations for the descendants of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (Climate Justice Alliance 2018). The framework is conceptualized in the Red Black and Green New Deal (RBG New Deal) (Donaghy and Jiang 2021). The RBG New Deal goes on to state that climate justice is racial justice and that new systems must prioritize the safety, dignity, and well-being of the most systemically divested communities in the United States.

Scholarship that forms the basis of the RBG New Deal supports the notion that airport planning and operations represent an area of impact that could reasonably be developed as a version of environmentally just, climate responsive infrastructure that seeks redress for past harms. The RBG New Deal is a community-driven response to social and environmental injustices. This framing of mobility justice invites transportation planners to ask political and ethical questions about transportation systems and recognize how those systems contribute to (or detract from) freedom of movement at the individual scale, the city scale, and the global scale.