As meatpacking facilities became COVID-19 hotspots, the pandemic renewed the importance of longstanding claims from environmental justice and agrifood scholars. The former asserts the perceived dispensability of marginalized populations sustains environmental injustices, whereas the latter stresses that decades of industrial consolidation created structural instability in the food supply chain. This article asks how industry and government leverage existing socio-ecological inequalities to ensure the continuity of the meatpacking supply chain during COVID-19, and the implications these actions hold for workers. To answer these questions, the authors perform case studies of meatpacking facilities in three Midwestern states. This article uses the critical environmental justice framework to expand research on sacrifice zones to include hazardous worksites such as meatpacking. We find that toxic employment flourishes through firms labor practices that pass socio-ecological risks onto workers in the name of efficiency, and through a complicit state that prioritizes accumulation and consumption over workers health.

A new developmentalism is said to have taken hold in Brazil over the past decade. Incorporating multiple policy strategies, it has three main pillars: promoting inclusive growth in the home economy, engaging the international economy to underpin national development and to sustain long-term growth, and pursuing internal and external objectives through the collaboration of a strong state and a strong market. In spite of several major accomplishments, this approach has disproportionately used industrial policy tools to privilege firms in traditional sectors and foster increased reliance on commodities, tendencies that have been enabled by bureaucratic incoherence and weak oversight of public financing. This makes it unlikely that deep productive transformation, a key developmentalist objective as defined by the East Asian experience, will materialize. Dizem que nesta última década, um novo desenvolvimentalismo tomou posse no Brasil. Incorpora muitas estratégias, as quais tem três suportes principais: a promoção dum crescimento globalmente compreensivo no mercado nacional, o aumento das relações com a economia internacional para apoiar o desenvolvimento interno e sustentar o crescimento a longo prazo, e a alcance de objetivos pela colaboração entre um Estado e um mercado fortes. A pesar de várias realizações importantes, este política há empregado, desproporcionalmente, instrumentos de política industrial no sentido de favorecer as empresas dos setores tradicionais e aumentar dependência nas materias primas: uma tendência possibilidada pela incoerência nos procedimentos burocráticos e pela fiscalização fraca dos gastos públicos. Por isso é pouco provável que se realizar qualquer transformação da produção, a que deve ser um objetivo chave desenvolvimentista segundo as padrões da experiências recentes da Ásia oriental.

This article, which also serves as the introduction for this special guestedited issue, examines the history of Rural Sociology's scholarly engagement with rurality, race, and ethnicity. We examine the historical patterns of how Rural Sociology has addressed race and ethnicity, and then present results from a meta-analysis of empirical articles published between 1971 and 2020. Over time, the methodological approaches and scholarly focus of articles on race and ethnicity within Rural Sociology has gradually expanded to include more analyses of power and inequality using constructivist perspectives, and greater numbers of qualitative inquiries into the lived experiences of both white and nonwhite people. The articles featured in the special issue extend from Rural Sociology's growing attention to race and ethnicity. Together, they suggest the ways in which rural spaces are racially coded, how intersections with race and ethnicity exacerbate rural inequality, how the domination of people and the environment are co-constituted, and how practices of racism are embedded within contextually specific ecologies. In drawing attention to these contributions, we suggest future directions for the discipline's engagement with rurality, race, and ethnicity, while simultaneously suggesting the ways in which our own disciplinary racial reckoning remains incomplete.The rural United States has increasingly been at the center of a national political conversation that has explicitly or implicitly been about race and ethnicity (Halloway 2007;Lichter 2012;Pruitt 2019). This conversation was only energized by the 2016 presidential election that drew further attention to the deepening social divides of political ideology and racial anxiety, and the failed neoliberal imaginings of an Obamaera post-racial America (Banks 2018; Metzl 2019; Rodden 2019). The Trump administration only seemed to metastasize long-simmering racial fears, frustration, and anger of a nation that has struggled throughout its history with the contradictions of democracy and equality forged in the crucible of white supremacy, social inequality, and racial injustice (Du Bois 2014;Ellison 1986;Richardson 2020). These tensions assumed *We want to thank David L. Brown, Heather O'Connell, Spencer Wood, Earl Wright II, and Julie Zimmerman for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this work. Any shortcomings and/or inaccuracies are our own. This article was equally co-authored.

The critical environmental justice (CEJ) framework contends that inequalities are sustained through intersecting social categories, multi-scalarity, the perceived expendability of marginalized populations, and state-vested power. While this approach offers new pathways for environmental justice research, it overlooks the role of firms, suggesting a departure from longstanding political-economic theories, such as the treadmill of production (ToP), which elevate the importance of producers. In focusing on firms, we ask: how do firms operationalize diverse social forces to produce environmental injustice? What organizational logics sustain these inequalities? To understand the firm-level dynamics shaping treadmill acceleration and environmental injustice, we utilize two concepts-social embeddedness and managerial authority-from economic sociology research on firms. The former refers to the social and non-economic factors that guide economic decision-making, whereas the latter refers to the power that reinforces worksite hierarchies. This theoretical paper argues that social embeddedness and managerial authority interact within firms to produce an organizational logic that sustains environmental injustice and ecological disorganization. We draw from historical and contemporary evidence on sugarcane plantations in Latin America and the Caribbean, with cases ranging from the colonial period to the present day. By bringing economic sociological concepts to bear on the CEJ and ToP frameworks, we advance debates on how firm-level dynamics shape environmental inequalities.

Although the relationship between organizations and structural racism is well established, less is known about how racialization occurs within organizations. Overlooking how racial ideology is imbued in organizational logic obscures the role organizations play in reproducing structural racism. The prevalence of color-blind racial ideology further complicates the study of racialization, as most societies deny the existence of racism targeting people of color. In this article the author asks, How does color-blind racial ideology guide management decisions and the rationalization of racially unequal organizational practices? Using an extended case study method, the author examines sugar-ethanol mills in Brazil, where nonwhite workers are disproportionately exposed to hazardous risks. The author argues that the racialization of organizational practices occurs through a twofold process in which white elites use nonracial discourse to rationalize unequal outcomes and to reproduce the social conditions that steer nonwhite peoples into hazardous worksites. This article makes two contributions to the literature. First, through the discursive frames of cultural racism, naturalization, victimization, and politicized markets, the author shows how the allocation of resources and opportunities at the organizational level shapes and is shaped by racialized social systems. Second, by studying unequal relations in Brazil, the author elucidates the long-standing presence of color blindness in Iberian America while also tracing similarities and differences with color-blind racism in the United States.