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

TitleRethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California
Publication TypeJournal Article
AuthorsPulido, Laura
JournalAnnals of the Association of American Geographers
Volume90
Issue1
Pagination12-40
ISSN0004-5608
AbstractGeographic 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.
Notes'White privilege and white supremacy: Critical geographer Laura Pulido draw attention to the political economy of space shaped by other forms of racism (ie not just institutional racism), including white privilege (Pulido 2000) and white supremacy (Pulido 2015)\nThese go beyond the “first generation” of environmental justice research, which focused on the siting of pollution sources\nWhite privilege as a “highly spatial and structural form of racism” (Pulido 2000) – not just about discriminatory practices, but also hegemonic racism\nWhite privilege: Pena 1999 (and find other cites in Pulido 2000) notes that POC and immigrants bear the burdens both of environmental destruction and of environmental protection (white communities shifting burden)\nWhat this kind of critical work does is:\nEnviro racism helps us understand racism ,especially its spatiality (Pulido 2000)\nAlso show the relationships between different places (like industrial zones and residential suburbs) to reproduce racist formations, demonstrating racism as a dynamic sociospatial process\n - kecox' 'Three issues that contrubute to a narrow conception of racism:\n1) emphasis on individual facility siting\n2) role of intentionality\n3) uncritical approach to scale\n - kecox'
URLhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00182
DOI10.1111/0004-5608.00182