Historicizing the Personal and the Political: Evolving Racial Formations and the Environmental Justice Movement

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Two HISTORICIZING THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL

Evolving racial formations and the environmental justice movement

Minorities and the environment

In nineteen eighty-five I was working on a master's thesis in geography at the University of Wisconsin. Seeking to bridge my interests in Chicana/o Studies and environmentalism, my thesis examined farmworkers' experiences and attitudes towards pesticides in California's San Joaquin Valley using a survey. I struggled to weave together these disparate intellectual traditions, as no one had previously done so. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that I had never heard of environmental justice. In fact, the concept was just developing in North Carolina at the time and was relatively localized. Having scoured the library for research that addressed the relationship(s) between people of colour and environmental issues, the most robust literature I found, if one could call it that, explored park usage patterns of various ethnic groups. Unsure what to call my field of study, I framed it as, "Minorities and the Environment".

By the late nineteen eighties the situation had changed remarkably. I had completed my master's and transferred to the Urban Planning programme at UCLA and the idea of environmental justice was spreading rapidly. My dissertation research, building on my thesis, investigated how working class Mexican Americans understood and mobilized around environmental issues. Looking back, I cannot believe my good fortune. Within a few short years my position had changed from being an intellectual outlier to being on the cutting-edge of a new field, environmental justice.

In this chapter I reflect on my engagement with environmental justice scholarship as well as the literature's minimal attention to racial formation. I first discuss my personal history with environmental justice, and then argue that ignoring the changing nature of the United States racial formation and its implications for the environmental justice movement is a major oversight. This is because such shifts influence what the environmental justice movement is (un)able to accomplish. I focus in particular on the degree to which the environmental justice movement has been able to improve the environments of vulnerable communities, given larger structural changes. While researchers have widely acknowledged the political economic changes associated with neoliberalism, race has been treated as a stable playing field. Although my chapter focuses on the United States, hopefully such an analysis will prove useful to other places. Not only do we live in a global racial formation, but racial dynamics are geographically distinct. Accordingly, more nuanced studies of race at multiple scales are needed.

Environmental justice

Has the environmental justice movement improved environmental quality?

The EJ movement and shifting racial formations

Environmental justice and the civil rights movement

The resurgence of the white nation and neoliberal multiculturalism

Conclusion

Overview

The text offers a critical examination of the environmental justice movement through the lens of evolving racial formations, highlighting the author's personal experiences and the broader implications these shifts have on the movement's effectiveness. It calls for nuanced studies and analyses that incorporate racial dynamics into environmental justice discourse.

Key Points

1The author reflects on personal experiences in the environmental justice movement
2Historical shifts in racial formation influence the current state of environmental justice
3There is a lack of systematic study on the movement's ability to improve environments of vulnerable communities
4The political landscape suggests an increasing co-optation of the movement by neoliberal policies
5Understanding the intersection of race and neoliberalism is vital for advancing environmental justice efforts.

Details

Authors: Laura Pulido
Category: Social Sciences

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