In a country plagued by slave-based and Jim Crow power structures–from the police force to the filibuster to the consistent voter suppression–racism remains a hot topic in political debate. While many of these issues, consistently used to maintain the racist status quo, continue to be vital in our conversations about dismantling racism, one topic gets a lot less coverage in the current media: Environmental racism. A common reaction to such a glaring phrase is most likely “What?? How can the environment be racist?” This reaction may make sense on a surface level: the environment cannot be racist; it has no consciousness or ability to discriminate. However, the world’s, and more specifically America’s, climate policy remains discriminatory towards the BIPOC community, forcing the effects of climate change towards them. “Why might this be?” one may ask, “shouldn’t our anti-climate change policy be helping stop this?” But, as with many political issues, the answer is far more complicated. Environmental racism, an issue that policy experts, sociologists, and anthropologists continue to focus on, has many different approaches. Some may believe that reformations are not enough to solve a problem like this. Others believe that it is so far ingrained into our world that the only way to get rid of it is a complete reconstruction of society. For now, the answer remains unknown. However, one thing everyone agrees on: something must be done.
Environmental racism, however, is not an issue that only hurts BIPOC people in danger zones. This issue reaches far beyond that, leading into problems similar to the one we are all living through today: the coronavirus. Harriet A. Washington, an award-winning writer and medical ethicist, writes in a piece entitled “How Environmental Racism is Fueling the Coronavirus Pandemic” how the disproportionate impact on minority groups is one of the many reasons that the coronavirus pandemic is able to spread so quickly. Washington shows that due to the unhealthy living conditions that the country forces many in BIPOC communities to endure, they often grow up with weaker immune systems, more likely to acquire and spread a virus. When this is included on top of the virus’s current transmissibility, the likelihood of spread becomes impossible to avoid. “Social distancing is impossible,” says Washington, “for someone who lives in a crowded flat and must work cheek by jowl in a meat-packing plant.” A country already providing a lackluster response to a deadly pandemic has been creating the perfect circumstances for such a pandemic to spread and kill for many years.
Washington, in the same article, describes the causes of environmental racism. The countries’ policies and how they are built based on a flawed “bottom-down” ideology have created the conditions making this spread so easy. “The main culprits,” she claims, “include indifference and ignorance, inadequate testing of industrial chemicals, racism, housing discrimination, corporate greed and lax legislation from, in the United States, a weakened Environmental Protection Agency.” The state and corporations have been ignoring the terrible impacts of the standard practices they continue to implement worldwide. In response to this, Washington puts the role onto the people, claiming that “to combat these, society must actively take responsibility.” Environmental Racism, she shows, is an immense issue with many different causes and many different effects. So how, as Washington suggests, should society take responsibility?
An answer to her questions comes from Laura Pulido, a social scientist at the University of Oregon. She provides a simple yet incredibly complex solution: we can’t. Pulido, a Mexican woman who grew up in a world surrounded by racism and sexism, began studying activism and geography when she first learned about Harriet Tubman. In her birth nation, it’s easy to see why she believes that this change is not possible. The government that we have created in America, she argues, is so far removed from these issues and so woven into the causes that no policy, law, or tax break can save us from the legacy of environmental racism. The only reasonable response, she shows, is to leave the western capitalism that our society has been built on behind. Instead of passing new laws, regulations, taxes, Pulido believes we should allow our current society to dissolve and form anew.
In a 2016 paper on the continuing Flint Water Crisis, Pulido writes that this crisis is the perfect example of capitalism allowing specific race groups to be put to the curb, even in the context of a “liberal” society: “The people of Flint are so devalued that their lives are subordinated to the goals of municipal fiscal solvency,” claims Pulido. But, you may be thinking: What does Flint have to do with race? Wasn’t the water poisoned for everyone? Pulido explains that capitalism cannot explain the tragedy at Flint, and neither can racism. Only both together have that power. “Racism is a constituent logic of capitalism,” she says, explaining that capitalism and racism have become so intertwined in the modern world that you cannot have capitalism without creating a systemically racist society. “Their value,” Pulido describes, “is in their general expendability.” This expendability allows for the government and corporations, for the sake of profit, to allow catastrophic practices because the ones impacted are the surplus of black and indigenous people. White people were harmed in the Flint crisis, one may say, so the practice cannot be racist. However, the people of Flint did not suffer through their poisoned water because they were poor, nor because they were black. Instead, they suffered because the city is increasingly poor and black.
In an essay released at approximately the same time describing the relationships between environmental racism, racial capitalism, and state-sanctioned violence, Pulido expands on the idea that the ecological suffering is not solely due to being poor or solely to being black but, instead, being on the intersection of the two. Pulido describes the capitalist history of America, from land laws designed to provide land for White people to the legacy of slavery, leaving behind a racialized labor system. In fact, one of the main opposition stances to the abolition of slavery was the economic toll such abolition would require. Pulido continues to describe how, like slavery, capitalism continues to use people by making them seem lesser or like they have gotten what they deserve. “Specifically,” Pulido describes, “capitalism functions by restructuring nature. And since humans are nature, we must recognize that capitalism is reproducing itself by restructuring humans on a cellular level.” This history of racism in America, subdividing us into groups and keeping being black and being poor so interconnected, while also restricting black voices in modern media, as well as at the ballot box, has allowed profit to be easily made by cities, states, and corporations at the expense of poor black people while giving just enough leeway to convince the general public that we all ‘have a chance.’
This leads to Pulido recognizing the societal solution: the teardown and the build-up. The people of the United States and the world cannot remain responsible for the consistent tragedies, such as what has happened in Flint and the violence allowed by the state on a daily basis. Pulido claims that “If environmental racism is part of racial capitalism, then its regulation becomes the province of the state.” The state is responsible for the corporations, the profit, and the consequences applied to their people. A government focused on putting profit over people cannot stop environmental racism–no matter the policy. The state must take responsibility, something not allowed under the capitalist system we preside under.
The state and the corporations recognize that by attacking specific groups of people already looked down on by society, they can sway off any public outcry against them. As Pulido says, “the fact that it is disproportionately people of color who are bearing the burden of industrial pollution enables industry to continue despite a mounting death toll.” One may then go to claim that society still has a responsibility: fight back against the state. However, as Pulido argues, “even when people lose faith in the state, they often still turn to it because there is no other apparent alternative.” A capitalistic society leaves no room for actual change: just for the temporary ability to claim things will change while neglecting the more significant structural change required to build the new, inclusive society from the ashes of the old.
Dr. Terressa Benz, a professor at Oakland University, discusses the Flint water crisis in a very similar way to Pulido, discussing the neoliberal failures leading into the crisis. Benz outlines how the current role of the state in our lives is not enough to protect its constituents as it “conceals racial inequality and racism behind the free-market ideology of a merit-based system.” As long as the neoliberalist society continues to defend the free-market and continue to act ‘colorblind,’ it can never fully address the systemic racism in our society. Even in one of the most significant victories that the environmental justice movement has, the 1994 executive order by Bill Clinton, was still a failure. The order did not commit any resources to the cause and “failed to create any system of accountability or standards of equity, while including limits on judicial review.” Benz continues to discuss the history of neoliberal failures, followed by the Flint government touting many of the same beliefs and laws. “By celebrating the indictment of individuals,” Benz argues, “an over-reliance on our punitive apparatus is created, which in turn perpetuates, rather than challenges, the free-market anti-regulation policies that led to the situation in the first place.” The neoliberal movement continues to argue based on public relations and free-market meritocracy, despite the fact that those were the things that led to the original crisis in the first place. Benz argues, just like Pulido, that by continuing to attempt to put the band-aid of neoliberalism on-top of the ongoing crisis of environmental racism, we can never truly solve the problem.
How might Washington respond to Benz and Pulido? In the same paper mentioned earlier, Washington ends with, “We must remember that if we don’t confront environmental racism directly, we cannot overcome it.” Pulido and Benz follow this advice to the T, confronting not only the political right’s lack of ability even to acknowledge climate change but the neoliberal capitalist movement that leads to these exact same issues. Whether or not Washington agrees with their methods, Pulido and Benz attack the issue right on the nose. While Washington may argue for a larger societal movement, placing the future responsibility of solution onto the people, calling for them to fight for safer policies and a permanent solution to the issue, Pulido and Benz argue for an entirely different solution. They say that the issue can be solved: we can live in a world without environmental racism, and even more so, without the negative impacts of climate change. By completely changing economic systems, we, as a people, can finally live in a world where the horrendous inequalities and real-world issues can finally be solved. Not because of profit, not for more power, but in order to save and protect lives. The world is not subject to live with these problems: it can eradicate them. Just not the way it has been trying. The state is the one responsible for the issues at hand, and the state is responsible for fixing them. The society the people want, the one free of the environmental racism plaguing the country, is not achieved through policy changes, higher corporation taxes, or sending letters to the state. Instead, the solution is to change the world we live in. This society free of racism is possible, a society where the impacts of climate change would not just be proportional but gone altogether.
In a country plagued by slave-based and Jim Crow power structures–from the police force to the filibuster to the consistent voter suppression–racism remains a hot topic in political debate. While many of these issues, consistently used to maintain the racist status quo, continue to be vital in our conversations about dismantling racism, one topic gets a lot less coverage in the current media: Environmental racism. A common reaction to such a glaring phrase is most likely “What?? How can the environment be racist?” This reaction may make sense on a surface level: the environment cannot be racist; it has no consciousness or ability to discriminate. However, the world’s, and more specifically America’s, climate policy remains discriminatory towards the BIPOC community, forcing the effects of climate change towards them. “Why might this be?” one may ask, “shouldn’t our anti-climate change policy be helping stop this?” But, as with many political issues, the answer is far more complicated. Environmental racism, an issue that policy experts, sociologists, and anthropologists continue to focus on, has many different approaches. Some may believe that reformations are not enough to solve a problem like this. Others believe that it is so far ingrained into our world that the only way to get rid of it is a complete reconstruction of society. For now, the answer remains unknown. However, one thing everyone agrees on: something must be done.
Environmental racism, however, is not an issue that only hurts BIPOC people in danger zones. This issue reaches far beyond that, leading into problems similar to the one we are all living through today: the coronavirus. Harriet A. Washington, an award-winning writer and medical ethicist, writes in a piece entitled “How Environmental Racism is Fueling the Coronavirus Pandemic” how the disproportionate impact on minority groups is one of the many reasons that the coronavirus pandemic is able to spread so quickly. Washington shows that due to the unhealthy living conditions that the country forces many in BIPOC communities to endure, they often grow up with weaker immune systems, more likely to acquire and spread a virus. When this is included on top of the virus’s current transmissibility, the likelihood of spread becomes impossible to avoid. “Social distancing is impossible,” says Washington, “for someone who lives in a crowded flat and must work cheek by jowl in a meat-packing plant.” A country already providing a lackluster response to a deadly pandemic has been creating the perfect circumstances for such a pandemic to spread and kill for many years.
Washington, in the same article, describes the causes of environmental racism. The countries’ policies and how they are built based on a flawed “bottom-down” ideology have created the conditions making this spread so easy. “The main culprits,” she claims, “include indifference and ignorance, inadequate testing of industrial chemicals, racism, housing discrimination, corporate greed and lax legislation from, in the United States, a weakened Environmental Protection Agency.” The state and corporations have been ignoring the terrible impacts of the standard practices they continue to implement worldwide. In response to this, Washington puts the role onto the people, claiming that “to combat these, society must actively take responsibility.” Environmental Racism, she shows, is an immense issue with many different causes and many different effects. So how, as Washington suggests, should society take responsibility?
An answer to her questions comes from Laura Pulido, a social scientist at the University of Oregon. She provides a simple yet incredibly complex solution: we can’t. Pulido, a Mexican woman who grew up in a world surrounded by racism and sexism, began studying activism and geography when she first learned about Harriet Tubman. In her birth nation, it’s easy to see why she believes that this change is not possible. The government that we have created in America, she argues, is so far removed from these issues and so woven into the causes that no policy, law, or tax break can save us from the legacy of environmental racism. The only reasonable response, she shows, is to leave the western capitalism that our society has been built on behind. Instead of passing new laws, regulations, taxes, Pulido believes we should allow our current society to dissolve and form anew.
In a 2016 paper on the continuing Flint Water Crisis, Pulido writes that this crisis is the perfect example of capitalism allowing specific race groups to be put to the curb, even in the context of a “liberal” society: “The people of Flint are so devalued that their lives are subordinated to the goals of municipal fiscal solvency,” claims Pulido. But, you may be thinking: What does Flint have to do with race? Wasn’t the water poisoned for everyone? Pulido explains that capitalism cannot explain the tragedy at Flint, and neither can racism. Only both together have that power. “Racism is a constituent logic of capitalism,” she says, explaining that capitalism and racism have become so intertwined in the modern world that you cannot have capitalism without creating a systemically racist society. “Their value,” Pulido describes, “is in their general expendability.” This expendability allows for the government and corporations, for the sake of profit, to allow catastrophic practices because the ones impacted are the surplus of black and indigenous people. White people were harmed in the Flint crisis, one may say, so the practice cannot be racist. However, the people of Flint did not suffer through their poisoned water because they were poor, nor because they were black. Instead, they suffered because the city is increasingly poor and black.
In an essay released at approximately the same time describing the relationships between environmental racism, racial capitalism, and state-sanctioned violence, Pulido expands on the idea that the ecological suffering is not solely due to being poor or solely to being black but, instead, being on the intersection of the two. Pulido describes the capitalist history of America, from land laws designed to provide land for White people to the legacy of slavery, leaving behind a racialized labor system. In fact, one of the main opposition stances to the abolition of slavery was the economic toll such abolition would require. Pulido continues to describe how, like slavery, capitalism continues to use people by making them seem lesser or like they have gotten what they deserve. “Specifically,” Pulido describes, “capitalism functions by restructuring nature. And since humans are nature, we must recognize that capitalism is reproducing itself by restructuring humans on a cellular level.” This history of racism in America, subdividing us into groups and keeping being black and being poor so interconnected, while also restricting black voices in modern media, as well as at the ballot box, has allowed profit to be easily made by cities, states, and corporations at the expense of poor black people while giving just enough leeway to convince the general public that we all ‘have a chance.’
This leads to Pulido recognizing the societal solution: the teardown and the build-up. The people of the United States and the world cannot remain responsible for the consistent tragedies, such as what has happened in Flint and the violence allowed by the state on a daily basis. Pulido claims that “If environmental racism is part of racial capitalism, then its regulation becomes the province of the state.” The state is responsible for the corporations, the profit, and the consequences applied to their people. A government focused on putting profit over people cannot stop environmental racism–no matter the policy. The state must take responsibility, something not allowed under the capitalist system we preside under.
The state and the corporations recognize that by attacking specific groups of people already looked down on by society, they can sway off any public outcry against them. As Pulido says, “the fact that it is disproportionately people of color who are bearing the burden of industrial pollution enables industry to continue despite a mounting death toll.” One may then go to claim that society still has a responsibility: fight back against the state. However, as Pulido argues, “even when people lose faith in the state, they often still turn to it because there is no other apparent alternative.” A capitalistic society leaves no room for actual change: just for the temporary ability to claim things will change while neglecting the more significant structural change required to build the new, inclusive society from the ashes of the old.
Dr. Terressa Benz, a professor at Oakland University, discusses the Flint water crisis in a very similar way to Pulido, discussing the neoliberal failures leading into the crisis. Benz outlines how the current role of the state in our lives is not enough to protect its constituents as it “conceals racial inequality and racism behind the free-market ideology of a merit-based system.” As long as the neoliberalist society continues to defend the free-market and continue to act ‘colorblind,’ it can never fully address the systemic racism in our society. Even in one of the most significant victories that the environmental justice movement has, the 1994 executive order by Bill Clinton, was still a failure. The order did not commit any resources to the cause and “failed to create any system of accountability or standards of equity, while including limits on judicial review.” Benz continues to discuss the history of neoliberal failures, followed by the Flint government touting many of the same beliefs and laws. “By celebrating the indictment of individuals,” Benz argues, “an over-reliance on our punitive apparatus is created, which in turn perpetuates, rather than challenges, the free-market anti-regulation policies that led to the situation in the first place.” The neoliberal movement continues to argue based on public relations and free-market meritocracy, despite the fact that those were the things that led to the original crisis in the first place. Benz argues, just like Pulido, that by continuing to attempt to put the band-aid of neoliberalism on-top of the ongoing crisis of environmental racism, we can never truly solve the problem.
How might Washington respond to Benz and Pulido? In the same paper mentioned earlier, Washington ends with, “We must remember that if we don’t confront environmental racism directly, we cannot overcome it.” Pulido and Benz follow this advice to the T, confronting not only the political right’s lack of ability even to acknowledge climate change but the neoliberal capitalist movement that leads to these exact same issues. Whether or not Washington agrees with their methods, Pulido and Benz attack the issue right on the nose. While Washington may argue for a larger societal movement, placing the future responsibility of solution onto the people, calling for them to fight for safer policies and a permanent solution to the issue, Pulido and Benz argue for an entirely different solution. They say that the issue can be solved: we can live in a world without environmental racism, and even more so, without the negative impacts of climate change. By completely changing economic systems, we, as a people, can finally live in a world where the horrendous inequalities and real-world issues can finally be solved. Not because of profit, not for more power, but in order to save and protect lives. The world is not subject to live with these problems: it can eradicate them. Just not the way it has been trying. The state is the one responsible for the issues at hand, and the state is responsible for fixing them. The society the people want, the one free of the environmental racism plaguing the country, is not achieved through policy changes, higher corporation taxes, or sending letters to the state. Instead, the solution is to change the world we live in. This society free of racism is possible, a society where the impacts of climate change would not just be proportional but gone altogether.
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