Chapter 10: Racialized Environments PDF

Chapter 10: Racialized Environments Racialized Environments • • • • • From the Chapter: Structural Environmental Racism Environmental Justice Settler Colonialism Whiteness and Nature • Before we get to the Chapter I’d like to take a few slides to talk about Racial makeup and history in the US an...

Chapter 10: Racialized Environments Racialized Environments • • • • • From the Chapter: Structural Environmental Racism Environmental Justice Settler Colonialism Whiteness and Nature • Before we get to the Chapter I’d like to take a few slides to talk about Racial makeup and history in the US and Canada • Your chapter talks the American case exclusively • America has a pretty unique racial history and some things will apply differently in other places because we are talking social structure today and structural racism Race in America • Americans are 60 % White, with very large Hispanic (20%) and Black (13%) populations and smidges of other things – The Indigenous population is less than half of one percent. • The Black population in the US: • mostly has its roots in enslavement and most Black Americans have ancestors who were enslaved. • For most of American history, Black people were physically not allowed to be where white people were. • American Blacks still live largely segregated today – Certain neighborhoods – sometimes whole cities like Atlanta have very high Black populations (in some neighborhoods its near 100%). White communities in the US continue to have very low numbers of Black Americans living in them much of the time, even when other races are more commonly seen (like Asian Amercans- who are spacially much more mixed) • The Hispanic population: • has a very large base in undocumented migration in large numbers to poor paying under the table jobs in agriculture and service going back generations – even a couple hundred years. Overtime unsanctioned or poorly sanctions residential construction has taken place, creating in some cases huge ethnic neighborhoods with incredibly shoddy housing and no plumbing and sanitation. In more recent years these numbers have been added to by desperate border jumping asylum seekers • In the US there is a health and mortality gap and an income/wealth gap that benefits whites (and Asians) and disadvantages Blacks and Hispanics. • Blacks live on average 5 years less than whites for example. Race in Canada • In Canada 70% or so are white with smaller groups of other things (7% south Asian, 5% Indigenous, 5ish% Chinese, 4% Black, 2% Arab, 1.5% Hispanic etc.) • In Canada 40% of all people are within one generation of migration (they are a migrant themselves or at least one of their parents was one). • This is true of the vast majority of all visible minority groups (since the vast majority of migrants to Canada are non-white and have been since the late 60s. IOW excepting Indigenous Canadians, the majority of non-white Canadians are just getting here in big picture terms. • So though Canada has certainly always had ethnic minorities, it doesn’t really have a history of any particular large ethnic or racial minority with a long structural history. • In Canada, all groups except Indigenous Canadians live longer than white Canadians and are healthier. The income gap in Canada is smaller and more complicated too. Our migration system leans heavily on Economic migration – so our migrants are better educated on average than Canadians as a whole and only do slightly less well economically US and Canada a couple more points • The US is much less economically equal than Canada • Our GINI is .32 or so and in the US its .47 • Excepting Indigenous communities, poor Americans are more segregated, less infrastrurally secure, have access to a smaller social safety net and are and personally poorer than poor Canadians • Poverty is substantially more connected to Race in America than in Canada • The story of American harm to Indigenous People is longer and even more intense than the Canadian story • Yet our Indigenous population is much larger than the American one and have at least limited control or speaking power over considerably more treaty land than is generally true in the US • Means that the issues are ‘bigger’ here in some ways • Affect more people • More environmental issues/resources etc. at play Structural Racism • Structural racism refers to the systemic patterns and social outcomes associated with assigning people to, and discriminating by race • Race is understood, critically, to be a socially assigned category, a social construction • Discussed previously with regard to Race: Thomas Theorem: situations perceived as real are real in their consequences • When we decide some people belong in a separate, inferior group we treat them as inferior or ignore their interests as a baseline • It means that the social structures we create also assumes their inferiority or ignores their interests in an embedded, often invisible way • Our assumptions about the world and the institutions we create based on them reinforce each other • We will see that the intersections and overlapping of race and class in a capitalist social structure is particulary important • Structural Environmental Racism: • Applying the basic understanding of structural racism to the creation and distribution of environmental goods and bads and noting and structurally explaining how they are unevenly distributed by race Structural Environmental Racism • Structural racism accounts for many decisions that are stubbornly locked in place by sociopolitical forces, habits, and interests • A first example: Flint Water Crisis • In 2016, several thousand children in the city of Flint Michigan tested positive for dangerously elevated levels of lead in their blood. Why? • The city’s public water supply contained high levels of lead from old infrastructure • This was a horrific environmental and public health disaster at a scale that affected African American residents of the city overwhelmingly • Flint is a majority Black city • Flint is a poor city in a relatively poor State Figure 10.1 Elevated blood lead levels in children associated with the Flint drinking water crisis Environmental Justice • Environmental Justice • stresses the need for environmental equality • equitable distribution of environmental goods and environmental bads between people, no matter their race, ethnicity, or gender • Environmental racism • notion that race, ‘more than any other factor’ (says your text), accounts for the disproportionate exposure of minority populations to environmental and public health dangers • 1987 report Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States reported that 3/5 African Americans and Hispanic Americans live in communities with what the EPA called an “uncontrolled toxic waste site.” Environmental Justice • Why? • Environmental hazards, waste, and noxious facilities tend to be sited in and around minority and low-income communities • There is much evidence to support a direct correlation between proximity to dangerous things, like lead smelters and toxicwaste dumps, to minority and low-income communities • Race has found to be the more determinant factor than class with regards to hazardous sitings (in America) • Lets remind ourselves and look in more detail at a London ON example waste treatment facilities: • https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0141491,81.2485886,1249m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu • What is on the east and what kinds of people live there (down wind)? What is on the west (up wind)? The Environmental Racism Gap • Called the Environmental Racism Gap: Non-white communities in the United States live with polluting land uses and threats to their health more than whites • To a lesser or more specific extent, true in Canada too • In the US case, text discusses the gap as having emerged in part because protecting the most vulnerable populations and addressing differential exposures has fallen behind efforts to protect the general population (which themselves have fallen behind) • Protections in general are declining and more so for any vulnerable groups • The concept of racial capitalism helps us understand the gap by linking the origins, growth, and continuation of capitalistic economic practices to the ways that people have been, and continue to be categorized by race Infrastructural Poverty • Structural inequities create and reinforce environmental and infrastructural injustices • At least 1.5 million people in the United States have no connection to water systems, and no sewage connection Figure 10.2 Infrastructural poverty Environmental Justice: Redlining • A clear American example on the workings of structural racism related to processes of economic growth and disenfranchisement: • Redlining was the historic practice used by the HOLC and the Federal Housing Authority in the United States to map areas as “risky” for loans or investment. As a result, banks refused to loan to homeowners and planners discouraged infrastructural development in said areas. • Areas identified as “high risk” coincided directly with the homes and neighborhoods of people of color, regardless of economic class and ability to maintain credit • living in a district that had been redlined based on race decades ago correlated directly with current day prevalence of cancer, asthma, poor mental health, and people lacking health insurance Settler Colonialism • As an institutional system, settler colonialism enshrines limited rights and representation of Indigenous people in the areas they formally controlled. • As a cultural system, settler colonialism enforces a kind of “forgetting” about Indigenous histories of land management and stewardship • Rooted in ecological experience and culture, and maintained through indigenous languages, Indigenous Ecological Knowledge has been overlooked and overwritten by the knowledge system of settlers Settler Colonialism • Under settler colonialism, land was taken from Indigenous populations either through forcible treaties, or outright violence Sovereignty is important! • Because Menominee sovereignty over land has been upheld, their relationship to the land is maintained • Menominee Nation combines traditional stewardship with an economically functional timber industry that results in a remarkably well preserved and biodiverse area of land. Asserting Indigenous Environmental Sovereignty • There is a pervasive tendency for highly impactful resource decisions to be imposed on native lands typically against the desires of Indigenous leadership and communities • For example: mines and energy infrastructure; Dakota Access Pipeline, etc. • Text on the American situation: • We are finally seeing a trend toward treating Tribal communities as sovereign and giving them a stronger voice at the table for environmental decision-making not only on reservation land, but also on lands ceded by Native Nations more than a century in the past. In America. Settler Colonialism Canada • A very prominent Canadian Example • Oil and Gas pipline expansion through Indigenous land or that will impact Indigenous rights to environmental resources but ignores or violates their actual rights to conference and decision making: • The Wet'suwet’en issue and protests explained by them: • https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/arti cles/wetsuweten-explained • CBC discussing the arrests • https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/britishcolumbia/wet-suwet-en-protesters-blockpipeline-site-again-1.6293000 • Amnesty International objects to the criminalization of the protestors: • https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2 023/03/criminalization-wetsuweten-landdefenders/ Settler Colonialism Canada • Another prominent example access to safe clean water in Indigenous Communities • Remember these communities are often in places that aren’t very appropriate for the people they are supporting (because they were assigned through treaties) • Canada is supposed to have a fiduciary responsibility to treaty communities • Yet in 2015 there were nearly 200 communities with permanent boil water advisories • The current government has been addressing these as part of its mandate • But these issues have been around for decades at least and barely registered for Canadians as a whole, despite the huge impact • https://www.sacisc.gc.ca/eng/1506514143353/153331713066 0 Whiteness and Nature • Why has nature has long been thought of as “white?” • Access to “nature,” the outdoors, environmental experience, and recreation, historically has not been equally accessible for all communities (i.e. ”Jim Crow” laws) • While 38% of the US population are from minority communities only 22% of national park visitors in 2014 were minority. This has been described as the “adventure gap.” • These tendencies account for the skew in who participates in environmental fields • Acknowledging that some visions of “nature” are signed as “white” space allows us to rethink and overcome the assumptions to make room for more equity and fairness