Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California

Abstract

Geographic studies of environmental racism have focused on the spatial relationships between environmental hazards and community demographics in order to determine if inequity exists. Conspicuously absent within this literature, however, is any substantive discussion of racism. This paper seeks to address this shortcoming in two ways. I first investigate how racism is understood and expressed in the literature. I argue that although racism is rarely explicitly discussed, a normative conceptualization of racism informs the research. Not only is this prevailing conception overly narrow and restrictive, it also denies the spatiality of racism. Consequently, my second goal is to demonstrate how various forms of racism contribute to environmental racism. In addition to conventional understandings of racism, I emphasize white privilege, a highly structural and spatial form of racism. Using Los Angeles as a case study, I examine how whites have secured relatively cleaner environments by moving away from older industrial cores via suburbanization. I suggest that the historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white privilege and have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism. Thus, in addition to interpreting racism as discriminatory facility siting and malicious intent, I also examine a less conscious but hegemonic form of racism, white privilege. Such an approach not only allows us to appreciate the range of racisms that shape the urban landscape, but also illuminates the functional relationships between places—in particular between industrial zones and residential suburbs, and how their development reflects and reproduces a particular racist formation.

Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant

“…Investigation into such strategies has begun, and much of it has involved empirical examinations of new movements among marginalized urban populations who advocate some form of renewed democratic control (e.g., Keil, 1998;Pulido, 2000). Among those academics who are searching for an alternative to neoliberal disenfranchisement, many have begun to explore 'the right to the city' as a promising possibility (Holston, 1999;Holston and Appadurai, 1999;Isin, 1996Isin, , 2000Isin and Wood, 1999;Rights to the city, 1998Rights to the city, , 2002Sandercock, 1998;Sassen, 2000;Smith, 1993;Soja, 1996Soja, , 2000.…”

US Metropolitan-area Variation in Environmental Inequality Outcomes

“…Nevertheless, in only 7 of the 61 largest US metropolitan areas did Hispanic 1 Several good qualitative case studies have been written that go beyond hypothesis testing in an attempt to build detailed and nuanced explanations of the environmental inequality formation process (for example, see Boone and Modarres, 1999;Boone, 2002;Hurley, 1995;Maantay, 2002;Pulido, 2000;Pellow, 2000;Pellow and Park, 2002) 2 The Black/Hispanic median household income ratios are included in Table 1 because the income inequality hypothesis applies to all racial and ethnic groups.…”

Forestry development, water scarcity, and the Mapuche protest for environmental justice in Chile

“…Both approaches are relevant in this work, given the historical intervention of the state and private capital in both the dispossession of Mapuche's common lands and forestry development. Finally, C) what is termed the movement for environmental justice and recent applications to water justice (PULIDO, 2000;HOLIFIELD, 2001;BOLIN et al, 2005;CUTTER, 2005;SIKOR et al, 2014;ZWARTEVEEN ET AL, 2014), which we propose as an analytical framework for research the socio-ecological conflict between the state, forestry corporations and Mapuche people.…”

“…Certain social groups like Latinos and African-Americans have suffered the effects of environmental degradation with greater intensity than have others (PULIDO, 2000;BOLIN ET AL, 2005). In our case study, the racialized ethnic group that has been most affected by environmental degradation and water scarcity associated with forestry development is the Mapuche.…”

“…Consequently, we have analyzed environmental injustices arising from the environmental governance technologies in the south of Chile. For more than a century these technologies have permitted the strategic unfolding of what has been termed in the context of the environmental justice approach as "white privilege" (PULIDO, 2000). In a first phase this took place through the imposition of state sovereignty over Mapuche territory, subsequently consolidated through neoliberal forestry development, which intensively exploits soil, native forest and water resources.…”