Clean and White
A History of Environmental Racism in the United States
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Clean and White offers a history of environmental racism in the United States focusing on constructions of race and hygiene
When Joe Biden attempted to compliment Barack Obama by calling him “clean and articulate,” he unwittingly tapped into one of the most destructive racial stereotypes in American history. This book tells the history of the corrosive idea that whites are clean and those who are not white are dirty. From the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis Public Workers strike of 1968 through the present day, ideas about race and waste have shaped where people have lived, where people have worked, and how American society’s wastes have been managed.
In the wake of the civil war, as the nation encountered emancipation, mass immigration, and the growth of an urbanized society, Americans began to conflate the ideas of race and waste. Certain immigrant groups took on waste management labor, such as Jews and scrap metal recycling, fostering connections between the socially marginalized and refuse. Ethnic “purity” was tied to pure cleanliness, and hygiene became a central aspect of white identity.
Carl A. Zimring here draws on historical evidence from statesmen, scholars, sanitarians, novelists, activists, advertisements, and the United States Census of Population to reveal changing constructions of environmental racism. The material consequences of these attitudes endured and expanded through the twentieth century, shaping waste management systems and environmental inequalities that endure into the twenty-first century. Today, the bigoted idea that non-whites are “dirty” remains deeply ingrained in the national psyche, continuing to shape social and environmental inequalities in the age of Obama.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this ambitious and occasionally dense volume, Zimring (Cash for Your Trash), associate professor of sustainability studies at the Pratt Institute, tackles environmental racism his term for "racial discrimination in environmental policy making" as it relates to waste and waste management. He focuses on historical factors and examines "the social and cultural constructions of race and hygiene in American life from the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis Public Works Strike of 1968." Sections titled "Dirty Work, Dirty Workers" and "We Are Tired of Being at the Bottom" respectively address sanitation-related businesses begun by immigrants and labor conflicts in the South. Zimring explains that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jewish and Italian immigrants worked in the scrap metal and rag trades, which did not require large capital investments. With equal awareness, he contextualizes the 1968 strike in Memphis, when African-Americans demanding better conditions walked off the job noting that this strike was what had brought Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, where he was assassinated. Zimring's work can get bogged down by numbers, particularly census data, but readers who can get past the crush of statistics will find his examination enlightening.