An Intimate Inventory of Race and Waste

Abstract

This article focuses on Badin, North Carolina, a segregated aluminum company town established in the early 1900s and site of a current environmental justice struggle. Racialised industrial toxicity operates through quotidian relations of care, corporate and state claims to innocence, and perversion of pleasurable environments. This affective and materialist inventory illustrates how race and waste intertwined in Badin to make aluminum vital and valuable. Drawing on critical race and postcolonial studies, feminist geopolitics, and science studies, this paper argues that intimacy is a crucial analytic for understanding racial capitalism as a political and ecological project in multiple spheres including the workplace, the home, the community and the landscape.

The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism

“…Reading empire through ruination is to recognize that racialized geographies are purposefully underdeveloped for extraction, that ruins are not an aftermath, but an ongoing element of capitalism’s spatial dialectic (Purifoy, 2019). Toxins serve as a vehicle through which anti-Blackness is infused into everyday life, bodies, and spaces via intimate pathways (Vasudevan, 2019), perpetuating the naturalization of racialized geographies as damaged areas, as though Blackness itself contaminates the earth (Wright, 2018). Thus predominantly Black spaces become signified as toxic and blighted, masking the very structural forces that engender their underdevelopment (Lipsitz, 2011; Muhammad, 2010).…”

“…Black workers were consigned to the dirtiest jobs in the plant without any protective gear until the 1970s, municipal and industrial waste were deposited for over 60 years in a landfill in West Badin, the Black residential area of town, and Black residents, dependent on subsistence hunting and fishing, were more vulnerable to environmental contamination. Amplifying explicit discrimination, toxic pathways operationalize racism at a molecular scale, complicating perceptions of and attempts to prove injustice (Vasudevan, 2019). Thus territorialized ecologically and corporeally, racism condemns Black residents and workers to a generational transfer of lethal chemical exposures.…”

Grassroots Ecologies of Value: Environmental Conflict and Social Reproduction in Southern Italy

“…The call for a fair and sustainable nexus of production and reproduction, one that was not detrimental to life, resonated with concerns expressed privately by some workers. For instance, some metal‐mechanical workers I interviewed complained about the presence of asbestos along the pipeline paths in the petrochemical area, recalling how they brought asbestos home with their work overalls, which they unknowingly put in the washing machine along with their children’s clothes (see Vasudevan :9). A similar image of the factory spilling out noxious substances into the reproductive sphere, to the detriment of the most vulnerable beings—the children—had been mobilised also by the Red Stroller in a successful communication campaign in collaboration with Greenpeace at the start of a trial of Enel power plant managers in 2012, which involved allegations of “soiling” ( imbrattamento ) the cultivated fields alongside the conveyor belt transporting coal from the docks.…”

“…As the power station entered full operation in the 1990s, concerns about the consequences of industrial emissions began to shape explanations for the death of cancer of people who had never entered the factory. This “intimate inventory” of death, illness and toxicity (Vasudevan ), in addition to the stories of relatives, neighbours and friends who contracted cancer after working in the petrochemical factory, contributed to enhancing the perception of the “slow violence” (Nixon ) that exposure to polluting emissions entailed (Curcio ; Ravenda ). This perception was particularly painful when linked to children’s diseases, as recalled by a Red Stroller activist:

… in my daughter’s classroom there have been two cases of lymphoma, one when they were 10 years old, at primary school … then it happened again few years ago, at 18 years old … when I learnt about it, I was talking to a friend from Mamme No al Carbone, and we said that we wanted to do more, to be more effective [ incisive ].

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An other geography

“… 12. See Bhan (2019), Bledsoe and Wright (2019), Brown et al (2007), Cameron (2015), Catungal (2017), Coombes et al (2014), Delaney (2002), Doan (2007), Eaves (2017), Gilmore (2002, 2007), Hubbard (2011), Johnson et al (2007), Mahtani (2006), McKittrick (2006, 2013), McKittrick and Woods (2007), Nast and Pile (2005), Pratt (2004), Pulido (2002, 2018), Raghuram et al (2009), Sandoval (2018), Simone (2010), Vasudevan (2019) and Woods (2017). …”