It's because in the US historically black neighborhoods have a unique history of racism and disinvestment.

Here's an article about what happened literally where I'm sitting: https://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEE...

Stories like this played all all over the US. Read up on Robert Moses for example.

Not that you intended it, but your comment veers close to the sort of "why do black people always talk about racism" thought ending cliche or similar demands to be "colorblind" that ultimately are only functionally used to shut down conversations about extant and continuing racism.

That's a misreading of the term in the same way saying that the phrase 'black lives matter' imply white lives don't matter

The point is that this type of environmental pollution only is allowed to happen in poor areas that are disproportionately black because of decades of systemic racism like red lining.

If that concept makes you uncomfortable, that's a good thing, it should. But you should resist the urge to deny the existence of ideas that are inconvenient

> It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance.

I read it the other way: that it simply wouldn't happen in a white neighborhood.

The phrase implies that powerful companies know that historically black neighborhoods don’t have the resources to mount a legal defense against abnormal pollution from data center generators, so the smart choice is to put all the pollution near historically black neighborhoods.

The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs so that megacompanies don’t have to spend more money to keep our environment clean.

It's because it's part of a more general pattern where bad things like this are preferentially done to black people. It's the same with highway locations. For some reason, when choosing where to demolish to build a highway, they prefer to demolish neighbourhoods with mostly black people.