Constructing insignificance: critical race perspectives on institutional failure in environmental justice communities

ABSTRACT

Environmental justice (EJ) literature rarely offers an explicit theory of race to explain processes of disparate environmental exposure and recourse in non-white and low-income communities. Failing to do so, analyses of environmental inequality risk eliding a central driver of environmental racism. Based on a case study of a contested birth defect cluster in California, this article traces the ways in which the evidence of environmental health harms are rendered conceptually invisible by the institutions mandated to protect public health and the environment. Turning to a theoretical model of contested illness mobilization, I demonstrate the value of critical race perspectives to clarify the production and maintenance of intersecting, cumulative harms without recourse in communities of color. Centered on racially veridical analyses, EJ scholarship can more precisely analyze the recalcitrance of dominant group interests. Ultimately, this enables theorization of the distinct landscape of exposure and recourse in subaltern versus favored bodies and space.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• environmental racism
• critical race theory
• environmental health
• dominant epidemiological paradigm

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Phil Brown, Christopher Chambers, Miguel Montalva, Neenah Estrella-Luna, Elisabeth Wilder, Tracy Perkins, Michael Murphy, Manuel Vallee, the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute at Northeastern University, and three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Pellow (2000) writes that while environmental racism is an example of an environmental injustice, the term environmental inequality encompasses structural dynamics that include, ‘the unequal distribution of power and resources in a society’ (582).

2. From 2009 to 2013, I worked in communications and development at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment in California, a nonprofit organization that has provided legal and organizing support to groups in Kettleman City and throughout the San Joaquin Valley since 1992. As such, I was present in courtrooms, community and state-organized meetings, rallies, and press conferences pertaining to the Kettleman City birth defect cluster and infant mortalities. For the purposes of this article, I focus the state response to this community and NGO identified cluster.

3. Critical political economic perspectives within environmental sociology align with some aspects of critical race orientations towards the state under capitalism, specifically the characterization of the state as an extension of elite class interests and nearly constant struggle (Bracey 2014; Downey 2015; Faber 2008; Foster, Clark, and York 2011; Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg 2004; Pellow 2000; Schnaiberg 1980). While many scholars conceptualize the exploitation of the land and bodies of people of color as logical within capitalist systems, this field typically does not offer explicit definitions of race, or critically interrogate the centrality of white supremacy as a material and ideological necessity within a racial capitalist system (Feagin and Ducey 2017; Pulido 2015; Robinson 1983/2000).

4. The California aqueduct runs adjacent to SJV communities like Kettleman City, bringing clean water to residents of Southern California, currently inaccessible to residents of Kettleman City.

5. Class I hazardous waste facilities are permitted to take dangerous wastes and banned toxic substances such as: pesticides, dry-cleaning chemicals, oil wastes, and solvents, among others. (Cal EPA 2006).

6. Personal correspondence.

7. See Minnesota Department of Health ongoing biomonitoring and New Hampshire Department of Public Health biomonitoring in response to growing community outcry regarding drinking water contamination from per- and poly-fluorinated compounds.

8. Certainly this bifurcation of favored and subaltern populations and space is a generalization, and there is often overlap between these ongoing, historically informed, processes (Pellow 2000). I do not wish to discount the exploitation of land and labor in frontline zones of extraction and waste disposal with significant white populations. Furthermore, I do not argue that one group or region’s suffering is more or less concerning than another’s, absolutely no person or child should be harmed in the interest of profit. However, I do argue that it is necessary to analyze how bodily harm and appeals for institutional recourse are shaped by race, class, and regional subject positions (of other significant variables not attended to here) (Bracey 2016; Brown 2007/2013; Bullard 1990; 1994; Bullard and Wright 2009, 2012; Epstein 1996; Farrell 2012; Harrison 2011; Klawiter 1999; Morello-Frosch, Pastor, and Sadd 2001; Morello-Frosch et al. 2002; Morello-Frosch and Jesdale 2006; Murphy 2006; Pulido 1996a; 2000; 2015; 2016).

9. In one of many administrative legal efforts to deny the expansion of the Kettleman Hills Facility, the community health survey was completely dismissed as evidence by one SJV judge.

10. SJV EJ groups and advocates have partnered directly with public health academics including Jonathan London, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Manuel Pastor, and Jim Saha, among others, to devise cumulative impact exposure methods and indices that Cal/EPA and US EPA have gradually and selectively adopted.

11. The Kettleman City birth defect cluster joins a legacy of community-identified birth defect and cancer clusters without identifiable environmental causes in low-income Latino California communities. Two community-identified birth defect clusters were found in the only other California communities that contain Class I hazardous waste facilities: Buttonwillow and McFarland (Natural Resources Defense Council 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a US National Science Foundation training program grant [SES-1260828].

Notes on contributors

Lauren Richter

Lauren Richter is a PhD candidate in sociology at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on environmental sociology, environmental justice, environmental health, and critical race theory. She is a 2017–2018 Switzer Environmental Fellow.