“That we may live”: Pesticides, plantations, and environmental racism in the United States South

Abstract

This article situates pesticides as technologies marked by both continuities and discontinuities from previous modes of agrarian racism in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the United States South. Attention to the historical-geographical specificity of pesticide intensification, I argue, provides the means to understand pesticide intensification as a mode of what I term agro-environmental racism. Anti-Black racism shaped the politics of pesticides, underpinning policies and material practices that were destructive of both the environment and human welfare in the Delta and beyond. The structures and ideologies of plantation racism helped position the Delta as one of the most pesticide-intensive sectors of U.S. agriculture during the mid-20th century—a particularly consequential period for both the intensification of pesticides and the formation of contemporary environmentalism. Pesticides were defended by agro-industrial interests as technologies supporting agricultural production—and particularly that of cotton, the most pesticide-intensive commodity crop. Simultaneously, they were figured as technologies crucial to a normative way of life. Although pesticides were articulated without explicit mention of race by the 1960s, I argue that the freedom struggle activism of the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union and Fannie Lou Hamer provide context necessary to explain the pesticide politics of the Delta’s plantation bloc. These mobilizations to enact more just, sustainable, and livable geographies were an indictment of a plantation politics which put the health of cotton and profitability of plantations above all else.

Ecological costs of discrimination: racism, red cedar and resilience in farm bill conservation policy in Oklahoma

“…As the USDA spends millions to try to fight red cedar, they are precluding their own success. So, much like Williams (2018) found that racism toward Black farm workers on plantations in the South in the middle of the 20th century facilitated the rise of pesticide use, our case study illustrates that there are numerous ‘ecological costs to discrimination’ in agriculture.…”

An Arkansas Parable for the Anthropocene

“…A number of more recent environmental histories of the Delta put questions of race and environmental justice center stage in their analysis. See, for example, Saikku (2005), T. M. Davis (2011), Johnson (2013), andB. Williams (2018).…”

Pipeline Logic and Culpability: Establishing a Continuum of Harm for Sacrifice Zones

“…Rivers with a high discharge rate like the Mississippi River made an ideal location in light of coming regulations (Allen, 2001: 179). Even more chemical plants and refineries began dotting the landscape of former plantation lands, where multiple generations of descendants of slaves and sharecroppers lived (Williams 2018). "A number of these plants bought their riverfront property from former white plantation owners who then moved, leaving their poorer and minority neighbors behind" (Allen 2001).…”