Today’s Objectives

1. Environmental Racism, Public Space, & Racialized Colonization: Environmental Justice in the 21st Century: Race Still Matters pp. 184-195By Robert D. Bullard

2. Today’s Objectives • Brainstorm core characteristics of public space & environment • An Environmental Justice Framework • Impact of Racial Apartheid • Discussion of environmental racism on a global scale • Environmental Racism • Exploitation of Land, Environment, and People • Global Dumping Grounds • Understand how public space can be, is a racialized colonial project. • Case-study: Washington State University

3. Background: • Dr. MLK 1968 solidarity with black garbage workers • 1979 Northeast Community Action Group or NECAG file class-action lawsuit to block facility from being built. • Environmental Movement launched in 1982 • Committee for Racial Justice produced Toxic Wastes and Race • 1st National Study to correlate waste facility sites and demographic characteristics

4. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) • Resurrected into national spotlight with Clinton’s 1994 “Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations” executive order. • Goal was/is to ensure “all Americans a safe, healthful, productive, and aesthetically and culturally pleasing environment” (185). • However, order attempts to address environmental injustice within existing federal laws and regulations.

5. An Environmental Justice Framework • 1 – All individuals have a RIGHT to be protected from environmental degradation. • 2 – Prevention as the solution. • 3 – Shifts the burden of ‘proof’ onto polluters/big companies. • 4 – Allows for real-time experiences & “statistical weight” as evidence to infer discrimination. • 5 – Redresses disproportionate impact through “targeted actions and resources”

6. Impact of Racial Apartheid • “African Americans, no matter what their educational or occupational achievement or income level, are exposed to higher crime rates, less effective educational systems, higher mortality risks, more dilapidated surroundings, and greater environmental threats because of their race.” (188)

7. Environmental Racism • “Environmental racism refers to any policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on color” (190). • Question remains: Who Pays and Who Benefits? • Privilege and Oppression (simultaneously happening) • “…disadvantages people of color while providing advantages or privileges for whites.”

8. Exploitation of Land, Environment, & People • Deep South has become the nation’s toxic waste, or “Sacrifice Zone” (192). • Lax enforcement of environmental regulations • “look-the-other-way environmental policies and giveaway tax breaks” • Lower Mississippi River Industrial Corridor (a.k.a. “Cancer Alley”) • “It is our Third World.”

9. Global Dumping Grounds • “There is a direct correlation between exploitation of land and exploitation of people” (193). • “Radioactive colonialism” • Unwritten policies for targeting Third World nations for waste trade • NAFTA (1994) and maquiladoras production excess • Contaminated drinking water • Air pollution • Women’s Reproduction RIGHTS at a High Risk (rate of anecephaly) • E.g.: “Zoned for Slavery”

10. Guatemala Experiments: Syphilis Infections Because of US Medical Experiments • 1946-1948: US Public Health Service and Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with several Guatemalan government agencies to do medical research—financed by US govt. • Researchers interested to see if penicillin (relatively new in 1940s) could prevent infections. • 1300 people exposed to syphilis, gonorrhea, or chancroid. • Those infected included soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners, and mental patients.

11. US and the Global South • “Once upon a time, we were told that nationalization would prevent growth by limiting competition; that our countries were nothing without the companies that invested in us and so they privatized everything. Everything in our country was owned by people that had no connection to our culture, by those who never had our interests at heart, they didn’t care about our survival or well being, they just wanted to turn a profit by raping our land, by exploiting our people, our industry, and our resources.” --- Felipe Andres Coronel aka Immortal Technique, “Open Your Eyes” In The Third World (2008)

12. Group-Activity & Critical Discussion • Applying one of Bullard’s multiple case-study examples, explain how environment policies in the US perpetuate colonial legacies? • How does the movie Even the Rain depict the colonial project against People of Cochabamba? Explain how this is environmental racism. • How are racialized communities in the US and abroad inter-connected with the natural resources founded in the public-sphere: aka: the environment?

13. Colonial Spaces at WSU • How is your environment in the Palouse a racialized colonial project? • How are public spaces here at WSU discriminatory against people of color and gay and lesbian populations? (otherwise known as the minorities) • http://infogr.am/A-Short-Hist-of-WSU-According-to-Marginalized-Students/