Race and Environment Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Race is a problematic social classification that classifies different groups of people by particular physical attributes. Skin color is the most common identifier of racial difference. Some researchers, especially in the areas of genetics and educational psychology, continue to assert the scientific meaning and biological sources of racial differences; increasingly, however most scholars agree that racial categories cannot be thought of as biological in origin. Thus, rather than being given in nature, race must instead be recognized as a social construction, meaning that distinct human races have no real biological basis, but instead reflect subjective discriminations by individuals and societies. Though imaginary, therefore, race has very real consequences for people’s lives. Race and racism are products of both social organization and cultural representation, rather than the result of innate characteristics and hereditary factors.

The theory of racialization has been crafted to understand the social and historical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. Racial formation is linked to the evolution of hegemony, and the way in which society is organized and ruled. In other words, race is a political categorization scheme that maintains the prevailing distribution of power and privilege in a society. Despite the continuous temptation to think of race as an essence-as something fixed, concrete, and objective-the reality is that if changes occur in social, economic, and political life, racial categories can also be manipulated, altered, and transformed. “Whiteness” in the United States is the quintessential example of how racial categories shift as a result of changing circumstances and the reconfiguration of the dominant social hierarchy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Irish, Southern Europeans, and Jews were classified as “nonwhite” by the Anglo-Saxon majority. With the end of World War II, however, the American racial order was reconfigured as the color line was drawn around, rather within, Europe. Thus, the category of “white” expanded, while the category of “nonwhite” took on new meaning.

Racialization is both a macro-level social process, as well as a micro-level experience of everyday actions, claims, and struggles. Dominant groups exercise much power and privilege over minority groups as the racialized “Other.” The historical experiences of Asian Indians and Chinese in the United States, for instance, demonstrate the power of racialization in creating and sustaining racial categories and racial hierarchies during a particular historical period. When they first arrived on American shores in the mid-19th century, Asian Indian and Chinese labor migrants encountered both de facto (practice) and de jure (law) racial discrimination. The combination of social tensions and economic competition provoked much hatred toward both Asian groups. Exclusionary national immigration and naturalization laws and restrictive state legislation on marriage, landholding, and voting-including anti-miscegenation laws and anti-alien land laws-reflected this prejudice. These discriminatory regulations were combined with prohibitive social practices to ensure that Asian Indians and Chinese would be cast as racialized minorities in American society well into the 20th century. Classified as “nonwhites,” both groups were barred from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens and both groups experienced continuous socioeconomic inequity. The exclusionary era resulted in declining Asian Indian and Chinese immigration and population, extreme sex ratio imbalances, limited occupational choices, and forced spatial segregation in isolated communities.

The spatial dimension of the racialization process-also known as the ways in which the spatial segregation of different racial groups into separate communities and territories both produces and reflects specific racial ideologies-is a growing topic of concern among scholars. In other words, many are beginning to recognize that racialization cannot be understood apart from the spaces within which the process takes place. Racial identities are not only socially constructed but also spatially constituted. Thus, new questions have emerged around the issue of race, particularly in regards to: (1) the forms of racism and racial inequality that operate through geographical patterns, processes, and ideas; and (2) the ways in which racial boundaries (both material and ideological) become struggles of both territory and positionality with society. Restricting access to and through space is one of the most consistent ways to limit the economic and political rights of “nonwhite” groups. Through spatial control (in schools, housing, public facilities, and transportation), “first class” citizens are separated from “lesser” groups. At the same time, saying that one is from a certain place provides others inside and outside of that place with information about the person’s status and identity. All of these processes reinforce and maintain racial categories in place.

Thus, the human landscape can be read as a landscape of exclusion, whereby weaker groups in society are forced to live in less desirable environments. The result is a highly segregated environment, where race intersects with class to create a fragmented landscape. Suburbs, enclaves, and ghettos become concrete spaces around which racial boundaries are inhabited, naturalized, and reinforced.

Environmental Racism

One manifestation of the ways in which space and race intersect is when spatial segregation results in disproportionately higher numbers of people of color being subjected to environmental and health risks when compared with other groups. It is a fact that neighborhoods with higher proportions of “nonwhites” are most likely to be downhill, downwind, and downstream from major sources of environmental contamination. At the same time, these neighborhoods are considerably more likely to be located close to hazardous waste treatment sites and/or dumping centers.

This form of exclusion, known as environmental racism or environmental injustice, occurs through both overt and subtle methods. Obvious methods include the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste disposal and the purposeful siting of polluting industries in or adjacent to the poorest communities, as well as zoning ordinances that force dumps and industries to be built in particular locations. But more invisible methods are also at work here, particularly when “white” privilege systematically, though unconsciously, creates particular spatial boundaries and spatial codes of exclusion. These codes allow “whites” to distance themselves from industrial pollution and toxic waste dumps, and consequently, from “nonwhites” as well. Certainly, most “whites” do not necessarily intend to hurt or discriminate against people of color, but because they are unaware of the privileges they receive simply from being “white,” and because they gain so many benefits from their “whiteness,” they inevitably do. It is precisely because so few “whites” are conscious that their actions, without malicious intent, may undermine the well-being of “nonwhites” that “white” privilege, along with its spatial manifestations, is so powerful and pervasive.

Certainly, race and racial categorization affects societies deeply and in multiple ways that are not always easily identified, separated, and catalogued. Part of the task of understanding the influence of race is to try to identify and tease apart the many influences of this categorization, while remaining conscious of the ways in which this classification scheme is constantly transforming. In this way, we can begin to understand race as an entrenched axis of inequality and as a central determinant in perpetuating inequity in society.

Bibliography:

Peter Jackson, ed., Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography (Allen & Unwin, 1987);
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006);
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd (Routledge, 2004);
Paula Rothernberg, ed., Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (Worth Publishers, 2004);
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, rev. (Back Bay Press, 1998).