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.

Immigration, mobility, and environmental injustice: A comparative study of Hispanic people’s residential decision-making and exposure to hazardous air pollutants in Greater Houston, Texas

“…Among the minority of US-born Hispanics who have experienced enhanced intergenerational mobility, their broadened range of choice (coupled with detachment from living Hispanic communities) has led them to residential locations with reduced exposures to HAPs. Thus, unjust environmental exposures for the majority of US-born Hispanics have been reproduced through constrained sociospatial mobility rooted in their disadvantaged minority status, within the historical-geographical context of a US Sunbelt metropolis wherein a system of white-Anglo privilege has disproportionately exposed Hispanic (and black) neighborhoods to the most toxic externalities of urban growth (Pulido, 2000).…”

An environmental justice assessment of public beach access in Miami, Florida

“…Moreover, the concept of white privilege is a salient although under-researched topic in quantitative EJ scholarship. With the exceptions of Pulido (2000), Freudenburg (2005), and Lipsitz (1995), few empirical studies have focused on privilege instead of racism (Park & Pellow, 2011). In contrast, tourism and leisure researchers have explicated the privilege of tourists at the expense of native-born and immigrant workers serving tourists in places such as Aspen, Colorado, and Miami Beach, Florida (Paisley & Dustin, 2011;Park & Pellow, 2011).…”

“…Park and Pellow (2011) have posited that "environmental privilege exists whenever environmental injustice occurs" (p. 5). Pulido (2000Pulido ( , 2015 asserts that understanding racism requires unpacking the complementary notion of white privilege. Race and place are mutually constitutive; and desirable places such as parks and beaches are racially coded based on conceptions of environmental privilege (Brahinsky, Sasser, & Minkoff-Zern, 2014;Hankins, Cochran, & Derickson, 2012;Park & Pellow, 2011).…”

Space and Social Theory in Geography

“…The 'naturalness' of whiteness -the assumption that it is not an ethnicity, hence not constructed, a position that equates ethnicity with nonwhites -is a large part of the power of institutionalized racism. Pulido (2000) points out that white privilege takes many forms and that its existence is typically rendered invisible. Racism can be intentional or unintentional, although, as she notes, "by reducing racism to a hostile, discriminatory act, many researchers.miss the role of structural and hegemonic forms of racism in contributing to such inequalities" (2000,12).…”

“…Likewise, 'natural' hazards are not seen as natural, but closely tied to the social processes that generate differential vulnerability and susceptibility to floods, earthquakes, and other disasters, almost invariably along class, gender, and racial lines. Mounting concerns over environmental justice have politicized the analysis of health-related issues such as air quality and exposure to toxic wastes (Pulido, 2000). Finally, as anthropogenic climate change becomes increasingly visible as one of the world's most pressing social and environmental issues, human geographers have explored the political dynamics swirling around this issue (Demeritt, 2001;Wainwright, 2010).…”