African American members of Congress tend to vote more favorably on environmental issues than other congressional groups. That finding comes from a new study that looks at how black Americans think about environmental issues. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has more:
Transcript
African American members of Congress tend to vote more favorably on environmental issues than other congressional groups. That finding comes from a new study that looks at how black Americans think about environmental issues. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
The study’s researchers say they wanted to find out whether the old conventional wisdom that African-American are not as concerned about the environment as white Americans held up under scrutiny. Past studies have shown that’s not true for the general population. Paul Mohai is a researcher at the University of Michigan. He says the next step was to find whether that held true in policy-making decisions. So the researchers looked at the votes of the Congressional Black Caucus.
“And we found over a two decade period that their pro-environmental record tended to be better than other groups in Congress.”
More pro-environment than either white Democrats or Republicans. Mohai says with the number of African-Americans in Congress doubling since the early 1980s, the environmental movement might find it has strong allies in the black members of Congress.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.