Sarah Adams-Schoen
Sarah Adams-Schoen
University of Oregon School of Law
Sarah Adams-Schoen’s research focuses on how federal, state and local laws perpetuate racial segregation and other racial injustices, including environmental injustices. She can talk about how focusing on personal preferences, such as “white flight,” lets state governments off the hook for their role in impoverishing majority Black cities and contributes to more state and federal actions that worsen the crisis in Mississippi's capital and other majority Black cities.
Quote for use
“Solutions to the water crisis in Jackson require reckoning with the state and federal actions that keep Jackson and other majority Black cities like Flint and Memphis in the red.”
Key Points from Sarah Adams-Schoen
Historically, scholars identified "white flight" as the cause of city-suburb racial segregation patterns, but current research identifies state and federal policy as key drivers of these patterns.
Failure to recognize the causal role of government policies results in at least three outcomes that have perpetuated Jackson's water crisis.
- The State of Mississippi can continue to take actions that worsen Jackson’s crisis—like diverting federal infrastructure funding away from Jackson—while characterizing the city government as incompetent and corrupt.
- The EPA can continue ordering Jackson to fix its water infrastructure, as it has since 2020, without addressing the reason the city lacks funds needed to comply with this order.
- Federal constitutional remedies will remain elusive because courts cannot fashion a remedy for harms caused by personal preferences, but they can require a state to remedy a crisis its discriminatory actions caused.
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