Advancing Du Bois’s Legacy Through Emancipatory Environmental Sociology

Abstract

Environmental sociology, while dedicating significant scholarship to issues of environmental racism and environmental justice, remains a predominately white subdiscipline that has not enjoyed general relevance across sociology. One of the drivers of the dominance of white perspectives in the subdiscipline is the lack of a core theoretical pillar that anchors the importance of racism to structuring inequitable environments. W.E.B. Du Bois not only offered a foundational approach to sociological inquiry, but also a deeply material perspective on the maintenance of racial inequities. Du Bois’s approach to sociology lays the path for a liberatory approach that documents the scope of a problem, interrogates its drivers, and works with affected communities and allied resources to develop alternative models with transformative outcomes. This paper argues that an environmental understanding was original to Du Bois’s methodology as demonstrated through his concept of the total environment. He connected inequitable environments to the legacy of racial capitalism, which he saw as driven by anti-Blackness. His solution was to advance Black solidarity and community cooperatives through Pan-Africanism. Du Bois’ framework establishes an approach to conducting emancipatory environmental sociology that provides theoretical and methodological legitimacy for engaging in partnership with marginalized communities to advance their goals towards liberation.

Introduction

Catton and Dunlap’s (1978) call for the recognition of a New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) asserted that sociology historically had been operating according to a Human Exceptionalism Paradigm (HEP), where social relations were understood decontextualized from their living conditions and environmental contexts. The NEP, they argued, was not a call for understanding the environment in addition to human social relations but a new lens for understanding human relations as produced within and through material environmental conditions. As a paradigmatic shift, their call was not to add another subfield to professional sociology, but to reframe how we think about how (U.S.) sociology in general is done. Although we have not subsequently witnessed broad incorporation of an environmental lens into general sociological scholarship, environmental sociology has a unique perspective to offer that allows for an embedded analysis of social relationships within their physical contexts. Environmental sociology advances our broad understanding of how non-human contexts are overtly and covertly managed in ways that influence opportunities and impacts (e.g., political, economic, physical, etc.) for different populations.

While environment is frequently narrowly conceived as nature unspoiled by humans, environmental social sciences interconnect and interrelate human and non-human nature in order to better understand our relationship with non-human nature as well as with ourselves. As we witness the recent expanding visibility of mobilization for human rights across social locations, there has been a response to suppress the political recognition and validation of traditionally marginalized groups. This has coincided with aggressive efforts to curtail the influence of these groups through moves towards increasingly fascist authoritarian policies and cultural mindsets. While disturbing to witness, direct actions to maintain oppressive structures are not new and historically these processes have relied upon the control of resources and the construction of hostile environmental spaces to rationalize and justify the oppression of vulnerable groups. Through environmental sociology’s organization around political economic analyses that help us to understand processes that lead to contemporary environmental problems there lies a tremendous opportunity for the field to speak to these processes and articulate the synergistic co-production of environmental spaces and political outcomes across identity groups.

While we lament missed recognition of the relevance of environmental sociology for the general discipline, importantly, we have also not seen the diversification of the environmental sociology section. The American Sociological Association (ASA) section on Environmental Sociology (SES) remains predominantly white, which indicates an opportunity to consider the ways in which traditional practices within SES make it an unwelcoming space (Liévanos et al. 2021). Overall, ASA, with a total membership of 9,958 in 2022, has approximately 39% Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) membership (American Sociological Association 2023). Since 2017 (32%), this number has been steady but slightly increasing. Compared to ASA overall, SES has a lower rate of BIPOC membership at 28% in 2022, up from 19% in 2017. By comparison, the Racial & Ethnic Minorities section consistently has roughly 70% BIPOC membership between 2017–2022. Given the importance of environmental justice to environmental sociologists and our claim to a new environmental paradigm for understanding all social relations, SES should be broadly relevant and inclusive, and BIPOC membership should be at least as high as and not less than the association overall.

Since concerns were raised at the annual business meeting in 2016 about diversity within SES, a dedicated core of section members has worked to investigate the drivers of ‘white space’ within the section (Anderson 2015). As an ad hoc committee on racial equity, they conducted a survey of SES members which found that in addition to discrimination, microaggressions, and being made to feel unwelcome in the section (43%), BIPOC faculty and students felt that the dominant research topics (53%) and literatures (52%) did not reflect their priorities and interests (Mascarenhas et al. 2017). Participants suggested better inclusion of frameworks that theoretically advance critical race theory, racism and science, urban environmental health, settler colonialism and anticolonialism, and intersectionality. The committee co-edited a special issue of Environmental Sociology in 2021 which called for a concerted effort to expand the environmental sociological canon, to counter the white spaces of environmental sociology, and increase the broad relevance of environmental sociology outside of the section.

Despite having much theoretical exposition on the origins, evolution, and impacts of the modern capitalist system, environmental sociological perspectives tend towards macroeconomic analyses with less emphasis on developing interconnections between macro-level structures and the situated phenomenology of lived experiences, individual agency, and political opportunities. Environmental sociology is dominated by ecological Marxist perspectives, which focus on large structural processes, such as the drivers of capitalist extraction via the treadmill of production, but the consequences of the modern capitalist system are not born out equally across different social locations. Environmental sociology has not yet developed a foundation upon which to deeply explore interrelationships within the modern system of racial capitalism. Environmental sociology lacks an entry point for scholars focused on understanding the modern racial system that does not require them to identify as a Marxist to be deemed relevant to SES. This creates a barrier in particular to the incorporation of scholars of color and others who, based on their expertise and their own lived experiences, may prioritize different processes in understanding the organization of communities and their environmental contexts.

In recent years, a chorus of scholars has proclaimed the need to recognize William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) as a founding figure in sociology (Kramer and Charles 2014; Morris 2015; Wilson et al. 1996; Wright II 2016). In his influential book The Scholar Denied, Aldon Morris (2015) argues that Du Bois was intentionally disregarded for his contributions to sociology due to prevalent racism within the formative discipline. Du Bois was largely dismissed by Chicago School scholars such as Robert E. Park. Du Bois also had a long running feud with Booker T. Washington due to Du Bois’s refusal that Black Americans should accept status as second-class citizens best fit for trade labor. Washington’s influence on Park in particular, Morris contends, led to an invalidation and erasure of Du Bois’s work. Morris asserts that had Du Bois’s scholarship been integrated into the sociological canon from the beginning, it would have provided a critical foundation for methodological and theoretical sociological scholarship as a whole (Morris 2017).

Burawoy (2021) argues that in these increasingly uncertain times, Du Bois presents an important challenge to the traditional sociological canon. His scholarship, although prioritizing the implications of capitalism, focuses on the role of race in constructing and facilitating structural exploitation and inequity. It challenges us to engage with an explicitly moral gaze to work to reimagine the limits of possibility. This calls upon sociologists to be reflexive of how we live in the systems we study, to operate across disciplinary boundaries to advance creative inquiry, and to engage publicly with our work to participate in activities that work to dismantle structures of oppression. By expanding the canon to fully incorporate Du Bois, it would not only provide new directions of inquiry but, as Burawoy contends, also challenge SES scholars to reconsider and reconstitute dominant environmental sociological theoretical frames.

In this paper, I argue that the integration of Du Bois’s scholarship into the canon of environmental sociology provides an historical foundation upon which to ground a deep direction of environmental sociology that explores the functioning of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in constructing inequitable, racialized environments. To lay a framework for an emancipatory approach to environmental sociology, I begin by showing the relevance of environment to Du Bois’s scholarship and how he approached racial disparities as deeply grounded in the material environmental living conditions of Black populations. Despite this engagement, we find little substantial incorporation of his work into environmental sociological scholarship. Next, I show that while Du Bois’s analysis was political economic, as he understood the mechanism of harm to be driven by capitalism, unlike Marx Du Bois saw the American context to be explicitly made possible through systemic racial oppression. Rather than offering a Black version of Marxism, Du Bois argued that racism and colonialism are fundamental in establishing our modern system of exploitation and only through humanizing processes may this system be undone (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). Grounded within Du Bois’s efforts to advance Pan-Africanism, in the subsequent section I argue that the use of Du Boisian analysis of anti-Blackness points to the importance of Black community cooperatives and offers a rationale for the transformative potential of community-driven science. Because Du Bois’s scholarship points specifically to the significance of anti-Blackness in the construction of the modern world system, I reflect on a critical perspective that advances anticolonial environmental sociology as a potentially competing frame. I argue that the duality of these perspectives is essential to allow for critical nuance and avoid casual reductive analyses that obscure differential impacts on populations sometimes positioned antagonistically under racial capitalism. Having addressed this potential critique, I summarize some of Du Bois’s implications for an emancipatory approach to environmental sociology. As an invitation to Du Bois’s work, I do not intend these implications to be exhaustive or authoritative. I hope that they advance a conversation that collectively explores how his contributions and critiques of his work from Black feminist, queer, Indigenous, and disability scholars can expand what we count as environmental sociology. Finally, I illustrate briefly how adoption of an emancipatory environmental sociological perspective has looked through my own research efforts in Flint, Michigan.

My goal here is to call for a collective reorientation that would work to establish a Du Boisian tradition within environmental sociology. I argue that allowing space for a Du Boisian perspective provides the necessary theoretical foundation for developing an impactful and transformative approach to environmental sociology, which moves from documenting environmental marginalization to working in partnership with communities to access the resources they require to transform their living conditions. By anchoring environmental research in Du Bois’s legacy, we find not only historical legitimacy for public sociology but also an outright obligation to hold liberatory praxis as a core tenet of our work to address global environmental injustices.

Total Environment

Born in Massachusetts in 1868, Du Bois was an early American sociologist, a prolific author, and a human rights activist who fought for both Black liberation and freedom for all oppressed peoples. Du Bois’s sociology was inductive and grounded in empirical, scientific research that explored both the actions of individuals through their personal agency and the patterns of social conditions that provided evidence for the influence of social structures (Morris 2015). He believed that inductive methodologies were necessary to objectively investigate the context of Black life in America, as deductive methods drew from preexisting and prejudicial theoretical frameworks (Jakubek and Wood 2018). Du Bois was the first scholar to conduct a systematic study of race using empirical, scientific methods, rather than what he described as ‘car window’ sociology, which he said was rooted in prejudice and anecdote (Du Bois 1899b; Zuberi 2004).

Du Bois’s formulation of race indicated that rather than shaped by biology, race is a construct derived from relations of ‘power, discrimination, and entrenched oppression’ (Du Bois 1903, 1945; Morris 2015, 35). Du Bois argued that race theorists who were his contemporaries relied on a false biological notion of race justified through scientific racism. He countered that race is an artifact of prejudice formed though an economic rationale that had its roots in colonialism (Clark and Foster 2003). Du Bois’s work delineated a phenomenology of racism and showed how racialized social structures shape racial subjectivities (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). His best known work to this effect is in his development of the idea of ‘double consciousness’ in Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois 1903).

Du Bois was committed to understanding the condition of Black Americans, revealing the mechanisms of their oppression, and working to confront the scaffolding that maintains racial inequities. His earliest work examined rural Black Belt communities where he studied Black farmers and their loss of land (Du Bois 1898, 1899a, 1901, 1904; Gilbert, Sharp, and Felin 2002). He studied Black communities experiencing change and used official census and property records to document those changes (Carrillo, Quisumbing King, and Schafft 2021). Du Bois documented how Black landowners were often forced to sell their land, lacked access to government programs to support investments for improvement of or to purchase land, and experienced racial discrimination in sales and lending (Carrera and Flowers 2018; Gilbert et al. 2002). His rural sociology demonstrated the importance of land ownership for Black people to experience a sense of independence leading to participation in political processes, such as the Civil Rights Movement.

Du Bois’s seminal analysis, The Philadelphia Negro, offers an early model for the study of the social organization of cities (Du Bois 1899b). In it he presented a systematic analysis of more than 5,000 Black residents living in Philadelphia’s seventh ward. For this work, Du Bois conducted surveys and interviews, scoured archival data, and compiled statistics to characterize the living and social conditions of Black residents in the city. While The Philadelphia Negro has been praised as being ‘part of the canon of Black literature’ (Wilson et al. 1996), its contribution to other areas of sociology has historically been overlooked. Even within the sociology of race, despite being published nearly twenty years later, Thomas and Znaniecki’s (Thomas and Znaniecki 1918) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America is often credited with establishing the field. Published more than twenty-five years later, Park, Burgess, and McKenzie’s (1925) The City is referenced as setting the stage for urban empirical work by developing a model for cities as urban ecosystems. The contemporary study of human ecology draws its foundation from the ecological model introduced in The City.

In Philadelphia, Du Bois was particularly interested in understanding the living conditions of Black residents who moved from Southern communities. It was a continuation of his rural work as he explored the transition of rural Black Americans into an urban setting. In the Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois (1899b) dedicated chapters to ‘The Environment of the Negro’ and ‘The Health of Negroes.’ Characteristics of environment included housing conditions, dampness in cellars, fuel storage, number of inhabitants in a dwelling, street and sidewalk conditions, water access in general, access to hot and cold water, sewer connections, shared or private bathrooms or outhouses, bathtub access, sanitation and waste accumulation, street lighting, and presence of privies. He declared, ‘for so large and progressive a city its general system of drainage is very bad; its water is wretched, and in many other respects the city and the whole State are “woefully and discreditably behind almost all other States in Christendom”‘ (Du Bois 1899b, 162–163). Du Bois described that,

broadly speaking, the Negroes as a class dwell in the most unhealthful parts of the city and in the worst houses in those parts; which is of course simply saying that the part of the population having a large degree of poverty, ignorance and general social degradation is usually to be found in the worst parts of our great cities (Du Bois 1899b, 148).

To understand the health of Black residents in Philadelphia, Du Bois examined sanitation conditions.

The influence of bad sanitary surroundings is strikingly illustrated in the enormous death rate of the Fifth Ward—the worst Negro slum in the city, and the worst part of the city in respect to sanitation. On the other hand the low death rate of the Thirtieth Ward illustrates the influences of good houses and clean streets in a district where the better class of Negroes have recently migrated (Du Bois 1899b, 150–151).

He continued, ‘Bad ventilation, lack of outdoor life for women and children, poor protection against dampness and cold are undoubtedly the chief causes of this excessive death rate’ from tuberculosis (Du Bois 1899b, 152). Dorceta Taylor (2009) describes The Philadelphia Negro as ‘the earliest systematic neighborhood study of its kind that employs an analysis recognizable in contemporary environmental justice framing…Du Bois links the study of housing and living conditions to racial inequality, differential access, low quality of life, discrimination, crowding, high cost of living, ill health, and wage inequality’ (172).

For environmental sociologists, Du Bois’s understanding of environment is most consistent with that advanced by environmental justice activists who have a pragmatic understanding of ‘environment,’ which they argue ‘encompass[es] all aspects of daily life…’ and includes the places ‘where we live, work, and play’ (Alston 1992, 28; Feldman and Hsu 2007). As investigated by Du Bois, environment includes housing condition, public spaces, water access and quality, water temperature, stormwater and sewage infrastructure, energy affordability, refuse, household plumbing, air quality, access to healthy foods, lighting, and bathroom availability. Moreover, sanitation takes on particular significance for its intimate connection to racialized concepts around waste, cleanliness, purity, and decay as well as its overall importance for the promotion of public health.

Du Bois’s broad conceptualization of environment is an important sociological anchor for environmental justice scholars who have historically been criticized for lacking a strong theoretical frame. Du Bois characterized the environment as including the interrelationships between one’s physical and social conditions. He called this the ‘total environment’ in his 1940 autobiographical text Dusk of Dawn.

The result is that men are conditioned and their actions forced not simply by their physical environment, powerful as mountains and rain, heat and cold, forest and desert always have been and will be. When we modify the effects of this environment by what we call the social environment, we have conceived a great and important truth. But even this needs further revision. A man lives today not only in his physical environment and in the social environment of ideas and customs, laws and ideals; but that total environment is subjected to a new sociophysical environment of other groups, whose social environment he shares but in part (Du Bois 2007, 68).

Through his total environment analytic, Du Bois’s investigation of the experiences of Black Americans embedded in their material living conditions showed that racial formation is contextualized within material and ecological circumstances (Wells 2019).

Despite Du Bois’s fundamentally ecological framing of race, environmental sociologists have not integrated Du Bois’s holistic approach into the theoretical frames of the discipline but instead invoke his scholarship narrowly. To this point, the SES’s recent effort to diversify the canon at the time of this writing includes 148 references covering topics related to race, ethnicity, and intersectionality. Of those, only 31 include references to Du Bois, where many are merely citations and others include only one to two relating to Du Bois. Four of the 148 include more than a few sentences that engage Du Bois’s works. Similarly, in the journal Environmental Sociology with now more than 300 publications, six mention ‘Du Bois,’ two of which go into depth: Murphy (2021) and Clark et al. (2018).

Racial Capitalism

From the sociological canon, environmental sociology has drawn most heavily from Karl Marx, who was influential for Schnaiberg’s (1980) theory of the treadmill of production, which explains that the drive for profit demands ever increasing levels of production. O’Connor (1988) pointed to a second contradiction of capitalism, which asserts that in addition to undermining labor, as Marx established, capitalism also undermines the natural resources needed to continue production. Additionally, Foster (1999) identified the metabolic rift, which looks to Marx’s analysis of capitalist agriculture and how it removes nutrients from rural spaces, deposits them as wastes in urban spaces, and has no integral mechanism for restoring nutrients to rural land. Given the dominance of these theoretical traditions within environmental sociology, Du Bois’s in-depth engagement with Marxism offers a complementary perspective and, as Burawoy would say, an opportunity to reconsider much of environmental sociology.

Much like Marx, Du Bois advances a political economic analysis of the modern world. Clark, Auerbach, and Zhang (2018) note that ‘throughout [Du Bois’s] life, he addressed questions related to ‘land, labor, and the color line,’ using ‘this analysis to explain how the origins of the global capitalist system and imperialism created the hierarchies among nations and the social and racial divisions between peoples,’ which generated and perpetuated historical patterns of environmental inequities’ (54). They continue, ‘these historical developments of capitalism led to a radical reorganization of the relationship between humans and the larger physical world, creating distinct patterns related to the international racialized division of labor and environmental injustice’ (Clark et al. 2018, 58).

Itzigsohn and Brown (2020) argue that Du Bois’s political economy differs from Marx’s analysis in four important ways. First, Du Bois emphasized that capitalism operates through colonialism and racialization, which are persistent mechanisms of creating social order, rather than unfortunate steps along a pathway towards the creation of a global working class. Second, where Marx expected the emergence of a unified class consciousness, Du Bois argued that a veil separated different groups from inclusion as fully human and this separation served to produce specific racial subjectivities. Third, this racialization process serves to fracture, produce blindness to systemic violence, and inhibits collective action. Finally, for Du Bois state power is constructed at the intersection of class and racial dominance, whereas Marx focused on class power. Itzigsohn and Brown note that the unit of analysis for Marx was the free factory worker, while for Du Bois it was the Black slave. These key differences point to important implications for not only understanding how the modern system emerged but also how it can be transformed. Du Bois’s interpretation suggests that class unity and economic equity cannot be achieved without addressing racism and the fundamental mechanisms that lead to entrenched patterns of dehumanization.

Although read by many as an explicitly Marxist text, Du Bois’s (1935) analysis in Black Reconstruction emphasizes the essential role of racial oppression through slavery in the emergence of contemporary capitalism. In this work, Du Bois laid bare the experiences of freedmen around the time of Reconstruction (1865–1877) showing how the use of slave labor for the profit of wealthy white plantation owners contributed to the formation of racial hostility between poor whites and freed slaves. With the end of slavery, poor whites were in direct competition with Black workers who had been systematically dehumanized through 246 years of legal chattel slavery.

…the poor white clung frantically to the plantar and his ideals; and although ignorant and impoverished, maimed and discouraged, victims of a war fought largely by the poor white for the benefit of the rich planter, they sought redress by demanding unity of white against Black, and not unity of poor against the rich or of the worker against the exploiter. This brought singular schism in the South. The white planter endeavored to keep the Negro at work for his own profit on terms that amounted to slavery and which were hardly distinguishable from it. This was the plain voice of the slave codes. On the other hand, the only conceivable ambition of a poor white was to become a planter. Meanwhile the poor white did not want the Negro put to profitable work. He wanted the Negro beneath the feet of the white worker…When, then, he faced the possibility of being himself compelled to compete with the Negro wage worker, while both were hirelings of a white planter, his whole soul revolted (Du Bois 1935, 130–131).

Whereas combatting systematic economic oppression by wealthy planters could have led to alliances between poor white and Black workers, through historical analysis, Du Bois revealed the social pressures that pushed towards the formation of a collective of ‘whiteness’ across class boundaries.

Cedric Robinson’s (1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, which coined the term racial capitalism, says that in Black Reconstruction Du Bois addresses the most important contradiction of the American myth of democracy—slavery. Du Bois (1935) argued that slavery was essential for the specific form of capitalism that developed in America, wherein Black labor was the foundation of white wealth accumulation, not just for plantation owners but also for white Northern capitalists. Northern capitalists, through control of markets and political influence, were able to set the price of agricultural goods from the South, pressuring plantation owners to exploit the labor of slaves. The low cost of agricultural goods made possible by the low cost of Black labor, Du Bois reasoned, allowed for the accumulation of profit within manufacturing and commerce on the global scale, increasing the wealth and influence of Northern capitalists. For him, racism rationalized the dehumanization and exploitation of Black laborers, and spurred hostility in white workers who ultimately did not want to identify with Black workers as one universal working class. Rather, sentimental abolitionists served to benefit capitalists through increasing wage competition and reducing the cost of labor. Du Bois contended that democracy was advanced ‘only because democracy was curbed by a dictatorship of property and investment which left in the hands of the leaders of industry such economic power as insured their master and their profits’ (Du Bois 1935, 46).

Anderson (2017) refutes the claim that Marxism accurately accounts for the threat that white labor poses to Black labor and argues, ‘in this context, Marxism loses much of its descriptive and prescriptive power’ (743). He offers that the reason for the failure of Marxism to adequately understand the Black condition is because of its tendency to obscure the mechanisms through which exploitation of Black Americans occurs (Anderson 2017). Anderson (2017) describes Du Bois as ‘a Black radical alternative to Marx,’ insisting that scholars who characterize Du Bois as a Marxist do so only through dismissing his adherence to Pan-Africanism (734).

…Black thinkers are only taken seriously as thinkers insofar as they offer corrective contributions to a Western tradition that enjoys unquestioned hegemony…By positioning Du Bois within the Marxist tradition, scholars…attempt to make Du Bois relevant to a world defined by Whiteness by demonstrating his contributions to that world. Because Du Bois’s thought is seen as filling a conceptual gap in Marxism, his work becomes a supplement to the Western project rather than a challenge to it (Anderson 2017, 734).

Anderson (2017) notes that at the time of its publication Black Reconstruction was not received as a Marxist text and Black Marxists rejected his work as Marxian. Instead, they described Du Bois as a ‘racialist.’ Anderson shows how Du Bois’s Crisis editorials, published contemporaneously to Black Reconstruction illustrate Du Bois’s criticisms of Marxism.

The lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers. It is white labor that deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies him affiliation with trade unions, expels him from decent houses and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination … It is no sufficient answer to say that capital encourages this oppression and uses it for its own ends … the bulk of American white labor is neither ignorant nor fanatical. It knows exactly what it is doing and it means to do it (Anderson 2017, 743; Du Bois 1933a, 104).

In Du Bois’s (1921) Manifesto to the Second Pan-African Congress, he disputed the notion that the solution to exploitation was to be found in a union of white and Black laborers, the great proletariat revolution. Rather, the greatest threat to the wellbeing and liberation of Black laborers was not white capitalists but other white laborers:

If we are coming to recognize that the great modern problem is to correct the maladjustment in the distribution of wealth, it must be remembered that the basic maladjustment is in the outrageously unjust distribution of world income between the dominant and suppressed peoples; in the rape of land and raw material, and monopoly of technique and culture. And this crime white labor is particeps criminis with white capital (7).

Throughout his life Du Bois positioned racism as a fundamental mechanism through which global economic exploitation occurs.

We recognise that the problem of completely emancipating the black labour in the Southern United States and giving to coloured Americans their full rights as citizens according to individual merit, is but a local phase of the vastest and most insistent problem which the world faces to-day—the problem of humanity. How far is the world composed of an aristocracy of races, unalterable and unmoveable, by which certain peoples have a right to rule and exploit all others, with no hope of equal rights and privileges among men within any reasonable time? (Anderson 2017, 741; Du Bois 1911, 313).

In his later years, Du Bois emphasized the importance of establishing an economic base for Black communities, which he saw as essential in order to secure political and civil rights (Du Bois 1944; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). This insight points to the interrelated co-construction of economic and political condition within the overarching structure of racial capitalism.

At the end of his life, Du Bois joined the Communist Party and expressed sympathy for the Russian and Chinese governments, without offering critique for their oppressive regimes. While some see this as final acceptance of Marx’s analysis, others argue that Du Bois saw Russia and China as strategic allies in the development of a unique implementation of socialism for Africa (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). Through Pan-Africanism, Du Bois envisioned a form of socialism that was grounded in African culture and customs, functioned to unify people of African descent, and ended the exploitative system of colonialism.

Pan-Africanism and Black Community Cooperatives

Du Bois’s solution to capitalism was not collective class consciousness across all laborers (as it was for Marx), but Pan-Africanism, which includes the mobilization and cooperation of Black communities for their collective uplift and ultimately humanization for all oppressed groups globally. Du Bois attended the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, which was organized by Trinidadian Lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams (Contee 1972). During the closing address to the conference Du Bois stated,

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far differences of race-which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair-will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization (Du Bois 1900).

In 1905 Du Bois invited a selected group of twenty-nine Black intellectuals to meet secretly in Fort Eerie, Ontario nearby Niagara Falls, to discuss a national strategy for advancing the wellbeing of Black Americans (Rudwick 1957). The Niagara Movement was the first time Black leaders came together to publicly and without concession demand equal civil rights for Black Americans (Rudwick 1957). They demanded freedom of speech, freedom of press, the right to vote, the end of race discrimination, recognition of shared humanity, freedom of education, respect for laborers, and unity to advance their ideals.

The Niagara Movement was short-lived, spanning 1905–1910, due to lack of organizational and leadership experience, intellectual and emotional disconnect from the needs of the masses, and direct attacks to undermine the effort by Booker T. Washington who saw Du Bois as a threat to Washington’s power and influence (Rudwick 1957). Washington discredited the group and their efforts, leading to steadily declining membership and funds. Still, the Niagara Movement laid the foundation for the principles adopted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was established in 1909 (Meier and Bracy 1993).

Williams died in 1911 around the same time as many other prominent Black leaders including Booker T. Washington in 1915. These events left a vacuum in leadership and the opportunity for Du Bois to revitalize the Pan-African movement. He organized the first meeting of the Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919 and successfully convened a meeting of fifty-seven delegates, sixteen from the U.S. including six from the NAACP, and twelve from nine African countries. He was able to arrange the meeting through the support of French Senegalese delegate Blaise Diagne. Du Bois was elected Secretary of the Congress and Diagne its President. Du Bois saw the Congress as a great success, having overcome significant suppressive efforts by the U.S. and French governments. He actively worked to spread the message of the Congress and to establish it as a permanent organization. Du Bois’s efforts to advance Pan-Africanism, which endured through the end of his life, led him to be credited as the ‘father’ of the movement (Contee 1972).

Pan-Africanism viewed all people descended from Africa as one-people with a united common cause and destiny (Anderson 2017). The movement called for self-government and self-determination of African peoples everywhere (Contee 1972). Du Bois exclaimed, ‘Pan-Africa means intellectual understanding and cooperation among all groups of Negro descent in order to bring about at the earliest possible time the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro peoples’ (Du Bois 1933b, 247). Padmore (1956) says,

In our struggle for national freedom, human dignity and social redemption, Pan-Africanism offers an ideological alternative to Communism on the one side and Tribalism on the other. It rejects both white racialism and black chauvinism. It stands for racial co-existence on the basis of absolute equality and respect for human personality (379).

Du Bois was editor for the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine from 1910–1934 (Rudwick 1958). Through The Crisis, Du Bois advanced his vision of Pan-Africanism and advocated issues he thought were important to improve the condition of Black Americans. He supported Black intellectuals and artists and criticized institutions, white and Black, that contributed to racial inequities. His editorials directly called for protest and resistance to racism. He was a public intellectual communicating the important issues of the time to the broader public as he had in his role as Professor at Atlanta University. Rudwick (1958) maintained that Du Bois ‘believed that his journal was the mentor of the race—that it would teach Negroes not only how to protest, but how to live’ (221). His editorials encouraged Black Americans to pursue college education and to work to improve their lives. His lack of accountability to the primarily white leadership of the NAACP led to frequent conflict particularly as he criticized progressive allies for their lack of concrete action in undoing racism. He also faced censorship from the U.S. government who saw The Crisis as seditious and promoting race rioting.

In a series of editorials in 1934 Du Bois promoted the voluntary self-segregation of Black communities to build self-sustaining neighborhoods and farms to work cooperatively to advance the wellbeing and promote the living conditions of Black Americans (Du Bois 1934b, 1934a). Du Bois’s support for all-Black cooperatives conflicted with the NAACP leadership and led to his resignation as editor of The Crisis in 1934 (Meier and Bracy 1993).

While NAACP leadership saw his support for voluntary segregation to be a dangerous pathway that demonstrated Black willingness to accept Jim Crow policies and second-class status, Du Bois’s support for voluntary segregation was not approval for separate and subordinate treatment but an effort to create sites of Black power and self-determination (Du Bois 1934b; Rudwick 1958). Monica White (2018) argues that Du Bois advanced an empowerment model that pointed to Black community institutions (e.g., churches and agricultural cooperatives) to develop independent economic and political power. Du Bois emphasized an asset-based approach to Black communities that focused on pooled resources and a structure of mutual support. For Du Bois, this model of mutual support was essential to resisting racial oppression and advancing democracy.

Anti-Blackness and Colonialism

Within its foundation in Marxism, environmental sociology tends to move away from racial analysis that directly examines the socio-political construction of racial forms. This move obscures how historically racialized processes shape modern social and environmental organization. Through Du Bois, the significant role of anti-Blackness is centered. Some environmental racism scholars view a shift to anti-Blackness rather than centering colonialism to be problematic for important reasons. These criticisms accentuate the need to critically advance both perspectives as structuring concepts under racial capitalism.

Pulido and De Lara (2018) say, ‘We are aware that the genesis of abolitionist theories, when traced directly to Du Bois, can be read as a settler-colonial move that guarantees civil rights by integrating Black people into the possession of indigenous land’ (80). Tuck and Yang (2012) elaborate on the contradiction between the reparative sentiment of ‘40 acres and a mule’ which relies on the provision of colonized land to Black Americans as reparations for the debt of slavery. Reparations for Black Americans is not equivalent to decolonization. Tuck and Yang say ‘Decolonizing the Americas means all land is repatriated and all settlers become landless. It is incommensurable with the redistribution of Native land/life as common-wealth’ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 27).

Navigating the space interrelating anti-Blackness and anticolonialism, Murphy (2021) argues that understanding the environmental implications of racial capitalism in the U.S. must go beyond considering race to understanding colonialism as the reason for the formation of race. Murphy advances an anticolonial environmental sociology that interrogates anti-Blackness as an enduring feature of colonialism. He contends that race should not be understood outside of the ‘entanglement of racialization and colonial domination’ (123).

Murphy is specifically critical of how racial formation theory, particularly the work of Omi and Winant (1994), only engages with colonization and slavery as an historical project. Instead, he calls for an environmental sociology capable of engaging the ways in which the logic of colonialism continues through the construction of Black and Brown bodies as less than fully human, available for consumption, incarceration, and disposal. He warns that viewing settler colonialism within a traditional racial formation lens contributes to a process of forgetting the integration of anti-Blackness within colonial logics. He argues that an anticolonial environmental sociology should work to reveal these processes of collective erasure and colonial unknowing.

Murphy’s call for an anticolonial environmental sociology points towards a critical area of important theoretical nuance. The violence of colonialism, while ultimately working towards elite white wealth and power, frequently positions marginalized populations in conflict with one another as they seek restoration within the bounds of structural breadcrumbs. Tuck and Yang (2012) illustrate this through showing that the implications of blood quantum for Black Americans are different than for Indigenous people. The one drop rule, which historically designated someone as Black, expanded the notion of Blackness which was used to demarcate a person as a slave/property. The effect was to expand white wealth through the ownership of Black persons. In contrast, blood quantum for Native Americans has historically contributed to a process of erasure by ever dividing the percentage of Native American ancestry. Percent Native blood has been used as criteria for tribal enrollment and participation in decision making. While the one drop rule expanded Blackness as a means of promoting white wealth, blood quantum for Native Americans facilitates their erasure and the myth of extinction. Explicit analysis of anti-Blackness needs to be considered as interrelated with but distinct from anti-Indigenous actions/ideology, as without that theoretical distinction assumed impacts and goals may not only contradict but also cause harm. While it is important that environmental sociology make space for intersecting and contradicting analyses of colonialism, I contend that lack of explicit attention to race as a structuring concept will perpetuate the obfuscation of anti-Blackness that Murphy describes.

Anti-Blackness remains a fundamental mechanism through which the U.S.’s oppressive social and political economic structures have developed and are maintained. Du Bois explained, ‘the most difficult social problem in the matter of Negro health is the peculiar attitude of the nation toward the well-being of the race. There have, for instance, been few other cases in the history of civilized peoples where human suffering has been viewed with such peculiar indifference’ (Du Bois 1899b, 163). As Du Bois connected anti-Blackness specifically with dehumanization, it is critical that we recognize anti-Blackness and colonialism as overlapping realities that are mutually reinforcing and integrative but non-synonymous.

Willie Jamaal Wright (2021), positions anti-Black racism as an essential aspect of environmental racism. He argues that anti-Black violence worked to expel Black bodies from natural spaces, and it coincided with the degradation of Black environments. Like Murphy, he highlights how Blackness is erased from places with which they are intimately associated, such as white affection for plantations and colonial architecture while collectively forgetting the connection between plantations and slavery. Wright is particularly interested in the means through which spaces are politically transformed to make them available for white accumulation explicitly through anti-Black discourse. For example, such a frame illuminates the conditions that allowed the Flint water crisis to emerge via positioning vulnerable communities as competitors—co-degrading Black political influence and Black environments (Carrera 2022; Hammer 2019; Pulido 2016; Sadler and Highsmith 2016).

Environmental injustice has been called ‘slow violence’ by Rob Nixon (2011) through passive infrastructural violence (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012) and exposure to carcinogens. Wright (2021) argues that Black individuals are targeted for elimination through state sanctioned violence from ‘above’ in addition to environmental assault through toxic dumping from ‘below’ (792). To understand the distribution of toxics and harms (from below) in Black and Brown communities, and as we consider the state as a violent adversary (from above) that has systematically worked to the benefit of white wealth accumulation at the expense of Black and Brown communities (Kojola and Pellow 2021; Pulido 2017), we must understand how specifically equating Blackness as less than fully human has been a driver of these coupled harms.

Du Bois argued that the degree of exploitation of Black labor, resources, and land was only made possible through systematic dehumanization:

Such degrading of men by men is as old as mankind and the invention of no one race or people. Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left, however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal world-wide mark of meanness,—color! (Du Bois 1920, 46).

As Sexton (2007) echoes in his analysis of state control over Black bodies through racial profiling in policing, Du Bois understood that to the American racial capitalist state, the notion of Black and human are ‘mutually exclusive’ (208). Du Bois maintained that dehumanization was as old as efforts to gain power and resources but that the system of associating human with whiteness is a modern project linked to European colonialism and American racialized capitalism.

Emancipatory Environmental Sociology

Du Bois’s work calls for a critical reconsideration of what counts as environmental sociology. As Du Bois developed his vision for Pan-African mobilization, he retained his earlier understanding of health and environment, showing how inequities for Black Americans manifest particularly in health conditions such as tuberculosis and pneumonia, which he attributed to ‘the result among people who are poor and live in poor surroundings, with bad air and bad habits, dirt, lack of proper food, who sleep in crowded, unventilated rooms and wear improper and insufficient clothing’ (Du Bois 1933c, 31). Moreover he stated, ‘On the other hand, an improvement in our present habits with regard to air, sleep, food, clothes and medical attention, and even increased income will not entirely settle our problem of sickness and death, so long as race discrimination continues on the lines in which we see it today’ (Du Bois 1933c, emphasis in original text, 44).

While as a sociologist Du Bois is highly regarded for his systematic methodology, the purpose of his project was to correct stereotypes about and ultimately liberate Black individuals and communities (Jakubek and Wood 2018; Quisumbing King et al. 2018). Jakubek and Wood (2018) call his approach emancipatory empiricism wherein Du Bois collected data to promote equity and improve the quality of life for Black communities. Du Bois was critical of mainstream (white) sociology that sought to establish objective laws of social behavior, effectively rationalizing inequities and racism, instead of advocating for a sociology that uncovered the mechanisms of oppression so that they might be transformed (Jakubek and Wood 2018). He worked to document communities in change to reveal the influences of structure and agency that constrain opportunities for Black communities (Carrillo et al. 2021).

To Du Bois, sociology offered the promise of a scientific study that would serve to liberate oppressed peoples; this was sociology’s imperative (Morris 2015; Zuberi 2004). Du Bois stated that for Black people to be liberated they needed freedom from slavery, the right and access to vote, and education (Du Bois 1903). These were neither sequential nor independent but interrelated needs that ‘must be melted and welded into one’ (Du Bois 1903, 14). Later he additionally emphasized the importance of economic parity (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). To realize the liberatory power of scientific knowledge, scholars must act deliberately towards using science to promote equity and justice that advance the condition of marginalized groups towards full humanity, economic opportunities, and political self-determination (Berry 2000).

Du Bois advocated for change to be initiated by the oppressed. Seventy years before the Memphis sanitation workers strike, more than eighty years before Warren County, and ninety years before the publication of Toxic Waste in the United States, Du Bois declared, ‘the main movement for reform must come from the Negroes themselves, and should start with a crusade for fresh air, cleanliness, healthfully located homes and proper food’ (Du Bois 1899b, 163, emphasis added). In his understanding of liberation, Du Bois recognized the need for Black communities to mobilize around environmental health concerns. His analysis of the mechanisms through which power degrades environments suggested to him that the pathway for liberation for Black communities was through what would later become the environmental justice movement.

Using Du Bois, we understand environmental spaces as social constructs that in marginalized communities can be a) synergistically racialized as disposable coincident with the degradation of residents or b) antagonistically racialized as valuable, worthy of protection to the benefit of outside populations deemed to count while residents are cast as invisible, incapable, or unworthy (Carrera 2022; Safransky 2017). In particular, this approach leads to important insights in the shaping and management of Black cities in the U.S., which frequently are characterized as environmentally compromised and not worthy of investment because their populations are ‘declining’, and spaces have been ‘blighted’ and ‘abandoned.’ This ‘abandonment’ discourse is frequently made in communities that still have large numbers of Black, Brown, and low-income white residents and these places notably include communities historically recognized as significant sites of Black power. From a Du Boisian environmental lens, the construction of these places as absent of politically significant populations is no accident.

Key to his worldview, Du Bois’s methodology was designed ultimately with the intent of transforming the world around him. In calling for a sociology that improved the lives of the public, specifically Black Americans, he predated Burawoy’s (2004) appeal for public sociology by one hundred years. Burawoy’s (2005) often referenced 2004 presidential address to ASA, called for sociologists to support the centering of public sociology within the profession as one dimension of the framework of sociological practice. Agger (2000) argued that public sociology is original to the discipline and grounded within the Marxist tradition of understanding the historical materialism of social processes and how they are subject to change.

Going further, Feagin and Vera (2001; 2014) stated while Marx saw the purpose of philosophy to be to change the world, they argued that the purpose of sociology is ‘to improve the human condition’ (39). They advanced that liberation sociology should go further than just engaging with the public as an important audience and must promote a sociological praxis of change. As rationale, they drew heavily from the works of Jane Addams, Saul Alinsky, and Du Bois, who each believed that the purpose of sociology is to change the world towards a more equitable and just space for all. Liberation sociology aims to increase human rights, participatory democracy, and social justice through reducing or eliminating oppression. Feagin et. al (2014) said:

An emancipatory sociology not only seeks sound scientific knowledge but also often takes sides with, and takes the outlook of, the oppressed and envisions an end to that oppression…A counter system perspective often envisions a society where people have empathetic compassion for human suffering and a real commitment to reducing that suffering (1).

Through his effort to use sociological science to dismantle the oppression of Black communities and his recognition of the importance of Black empowerment through community cooperatives, Du Bois’s approach pointed to an emancipatory environmental sociology that in particular investigates the environmental health concerns of marginalized communities and that centers community leadership and community-driven alternatives to address residents’ understanding of their circumstances and their self-identified priorities. Such an approach works through the leadership of marginalized communities to document disparities, combat stereotypes, provide evidence of harm, and provide a channel for cultivating empathy; analyze structural and social forms that lead to the persistence of oppression, including the ways in which social and environmental constructs are coproduced and degraded; AND work towards liberation to take action, mobilize structural change, and dismantle oppression. To only work to document disparities does not further the liberation of marginalized communities and serves only to advance the careers of scholars who likely desire to help but ultimately only exploit environmental injustices. Du Bois provides the theoretical legitimacy, methodological rationale, and moral imperative that compels us to bear witness to environmental harms and use the resources of our profession to work towards true environmental justice. The community science model illustrated in the next section aligns with this perspective (Carrera et al. 2019, 2023).

Community Science as Emancipatory Environmental Sociology

The unfolding of the Flint water crisis, which by some measure began with the city’s April 2014 switch in drinking water source from the Detroit water system to water taken from the Flint River, brought international attention to an overt, government-created context of environmental injustice in the majority Black city of Flint, Michigan. For residents, these measures were evidence of the government’s willingness to support Black death through abandonment of their basic needs. Across the world, Flint became a symbol of community resistance to racialized austerity measures. The crisis highlighted problems with water quality—particularly the significant potential for lead exposure via drinking water in the U.S., when many considered these issues resolved in high income countries.

For Flint community scientists who organized to promote a Flint-based perspective on the water crisis, the issue of water quality is not isolatable to the chemical problem of lead in drinking water but is a holistic problem that interweaves the physical and social environments. This perspective accounts for the availability of safe drinking water, housing condition, historic political and economic practices by government and industry to exploit labor and resources, environmental contamination by industry, and local historical and cultural processes of marginalization. Processes of marginalization in Flint include Tiebout governance models that put Michigan cities in competition with each other (Sadler and Highsmith 2016; Tiebout 1956); redlining, urban renewal, and white flight; and suppression of labor organizing, deindustrialization, and neoliberal austerity measures. From this holistic perspective, in order to understand water quality and accessibility in Flint, it is essential to understand how socio-natural forms are embedded within and emerge from the contextual processes operating within racial capitalism.

Most scholarship on the Flint water crisis did not draw from an emancipatory frame and did not actively work to advance the empowerment and liberation of Flint residents. It is difficult to estimate how many leveraged Flint’s struggles for personal gain, but a Google Scholar search for ‘Flint water crisis’ yields more than 4,000 results. A pattern emerged in a review of the most influential environmental justice articles on the topic, which showed that most authors had little connection to the community and instead recycled dominant perspectives that overshadowed the voices of Flint’s residents (Carrera and Key 2021). These detached analyses drew upon published scholarship that emphasized the actions and perspectives of individuals, particularly in formal scientific roles, over the experiences of residents. In addition to offering an incomplete vision for the complex issues faced by the community, some officials advanced perspectives that asserted Flint residents were at least partially to blame for their observed health experiences when such assertions were not supported by systematic analysis (Carrera 2020). It is worth noting not only the historical and political processes that contributed to framing Flint as a largely blighted space absent of local leadership that could be capable of appropriately managing the city’s essential features (hence the need for the imposition of emergency managers), but also how sympathetic academic literature reinforced this erasure by perpetuating tropes that suggested that Flint residents were merely victims of state violence in need of saving, rather than providing a balanced analysis highlighting the decades of protest and organization by residents to advocate for fair and healthy living conditions.

Flint residents have a long history of organizing and the legacy of the 1936–1937 sit-down strikes, which launched the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and the labor movement, holds a place of pride within the community and family histories. As well, in the 1990s Flint residents participated in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Based Public Health Initiative, which established the practice of Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and led to Flint residents forming Community Based Organization Partners’ (CBOP) in 1994. CBOP is a largely Black-led coalition of Flint residents and local organizations who work together to advance resident and community leadership in scientific inquiry, particularly in areas related to public health. In 2009 CBOP formed the Community Ethics Review Board (CBOP-CERB) to provide direct community oversight and accountability for any research projects conducted in Flint. These groups represent local cooperatives, not just with the aim of advancing science, but that specifically promote community control and self-determination in the process of scientific inquiry.

To respond to damaging narratives about Flint during the water crisis, CBOP members organized with trusted academics to bring forward the stories of the water crisis as told by Flint residents. I was invited to support this exploration in 2015 and formally joined the Flint Water Community Narrative Group (FWCNG) in 2016. The work of this team was approved by institutional review boards at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University (MSU), and the CBOP-CERB.

The group’s efforts began before its formation with individual members attending and listening to residents who shared at dozens of public meetings on the crisis as it progressed (Carrera et al. 2019). Led by Flint residents, the team reviewed transcripts and coded seventeen public meetings, developing themes from community concerns (The Flint Special Projects Steering Committee 2020). This preliminary work guided the administration of thirteen focus groups across racial, religious, and age groups to solicit perspectives on the causes and impacts of the water crisis, particularly with respect to trust.

The analyses of this team focused on the phenomenology of racism in the management of the water system, how residents experienced a long history of marginalization and exploitation, and how these processes contributed to present day economic, social, and health outcomes. In particular, the group explored how these dynamics affected trust in government and social institutions and the implications for the community moving forward. While there was little evidence for the potential for trust in government, the findings suggested that residents could and desired to trust community members to work towards advancing their wellbeing (Hamm et al. n.d.).

Preliminary findings were presented in a town hall meeting on September 23, 2019, to roughly two hundred stakeholders, predominately Flint residents. The findings of the focus groups, along with the responses to the town hall, led to recommendations from the community that worked to build trust in reconciliation, resiliency, and public health. These recommendations emphasized working towards community healing, sharing information broadly without barriers, transparency, involving the community in all levels of decision making, working to support collaboration across sectors from the bottom up, and aligning regulatory goals with public health needs. The holistic approach by the group—understanding how Flint’s historical and cultural context intertwined with the development of water problems and the management of Flint’s environmental challenges—not only brought to light perspectives otherwise discounted but also served as a mechanism of broad community organizing and coalition building. This foundation supported the advancement and leadership of Flint residents in subsequent efforts to understand the economic and environmental health conditions faced by the city.

With members of CBOP, I extended this collaboration through a partnership funded by a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) K01 award. The work of this team was reviewed and approved by the Human Research Protection Program at MSU and the CBOP-CERB. As with the work of the FWCNG, all participants received and signed written consent forms, which were read aloud in group contexts to ensure accessibility. Our goal was to elevate Flint residents’ expertise in responding to a public environmental health crisis. Between 2018–2022 the team (seven Flint residents [the Action Council] and myself [a non-community academic partner from Michigan State University]) worked through a Freirian listening, dialogue, action approach to explore environmental health literacy (EHL) with Flint residents (Freire and Ramos 2000; Wallerstein and Bernstein 1998).

During the preliminary listening phase, we conducted four focus groups (n=41) to learn about residents’ experiential and acquired knowledge about water quality and health as well as their concerns related to using and managing the water system. We developed generative themes from the focus groups where the group identified equity and trust as foundational for understanding environmental health literacy as a knowledge network, rather than a set of facts to be transferred. Next, we conducted four workshops (n=78) to co-learn with residents about the utility of home water test kits and their efficacy for addressing resident concerns. Participants particularly expressed appreciation for the research team’s efforts to engage without judgment, with shared curiosity, approachability, accessible language, and familiar explanations for technical concepts.

In the final year, over six months our team co-developed an Android mobile application with twenty-six Flint residents to act towards collecting and sharing information that is meaningful to residents. The outcome of the co-development process was not only a technological product but a shift in perspective in participants from data collection is the responsibility of officials to participation in science is an act of democracy. Participants and team members expressed that the process made them feel less out of control. Participants gained confidence in reviewing water quality reports and using home test kits to evaluate their water. They explored their personal questions as directions for scientific inquiry and expressed comfort in sharing their water quality and testing knowledge with neighbors and family. The process was described by participants as healing.

Building upon our experiences participating in the FWCNG investigation and continuing with the EHL project, we adopted the identity of the Community-Driven Flint (CDF) team. Through this partnership our team developed multiple funding proposals (more than $65 million total applied for) to increase the national reach and advance a transferable model of community-driven science based upon the structure established in Flint, particularly through Flint’s CBOP-CERB. More than merely measuring the distribution of contaminants, these efforts work to advance an alternative model of science and sociological inquiry that challenges the established role of scientific partnerships in monitoring environmental injustices (Carrera et al. 2023).

Efforts by community members to mobilize and advance their vision of science resulted in a 2020 Genesee County resolution that declares racism as a public health crisis and NIEHS staff conducted workshops on logic models and metrics of evaluation for CBOP and the Action Council. Our team continues to organize resources to build the capacity for CBOP’s leadership in science and to advance health equity. Throughout, our efforts emphasize Black leadership, the impacts of structural racism on health disparities, and community collaborations to advance change towards health and economic equity.

Consistent with Du Bois’s approach, our work in Flint uses scientific methods to understand and describe the context of community concerns from a ‘total environment’ frame, where problems are considered as interrelated forms of physical and social contexts that mutually reinforce and construct one another. We investigate the processes and implications of various management strategies for the conceptualization and politicization of human and non-human constructs. In support of self-determination and ultimately liberation, we actively work to support community capacity to conduct scientific inquiry both independent from and in leadership of outside academics. Data collection, analysis, and interpretation methods emphasize Flint residents’ expertise and intellectual labor, which motivates the related priority of substantial efforts to secure research support that directly funds Flint residents, both in compensation as well as capacity building. Analyses explicitly examine and methodologies reflexively prioritize interrogation of the influences of structural racism in constructing socio-natural phenomena and shaping processes of scientific inquiry. Research trajectories are selected with attention to ‘undone science,’ which highlights pathways of science that have traditionally been discounted because they offer the potential for greater benefit to marginalized publics than established power structures (Frickel et al. 2010). Finally, the products of our work remain in the ownership of the community for the purposes of community control and public education. Intentional effort is made to make materials accessible to broad educational and linguistic backgrounds with low functional and technical literacy and when possible, research processes and findings are shared in town hall meetings for dissemination, collective interpretation, and critique.

Conclusion

Du Bois began with an effort to document and reveal the extent of racial disparities in living conditions and opportunities for Black Americans in hopes that ignorance was the reason for white apathy to Black suffering. He documented the conditions of former slaves throughout the rural South and the changes that they experienced as they moved to Northern cities, specifically Philadelphia. His analysis of their living conditions encapsulated what he referred to as a total environment, wherein the social and physical environments interact, shape each other as well as living conditions, meaning, and opportunities. Through objective prose and poetic form, Du Bois reached out to broad audiences and attempted to move the reader to connect empathetically with the experiences of Black Americans. His work showed how racial systems are constructed through the economic and oppressive systems of colonialism and capitalism and that adherence to whiteness was driven by more than ignorance. Through his actions as a scholar and as an individual, he worked to organize resistance to the oppression he articulated. He pointed to community cooperatives as potential means of working towards self-empowerment, resistance to state-based oppression, and an alternative space for creating equitable systems.

Du Boisian environmental sociology focuses on the co-production of race and environment within a framework of racial capitalism. Race is understood to be a key mechanism for organizing our modern political economic system, which must be addressed in order for any meaningful change towards economic equity to be achieved. Race and economic marginalization are intertwined and reciprocally reinforcing but non-reducible to one another. Race is a social construction that is produced to rationalize the accumulation of wealth under a racial capitalist system designed to benefit and maintain white supremacy. Understanding the role of race in constructing the modern world system allows for a broader analysis of dehumanization and exploitation across multiple and intersectional social locations and thereby affords a position of critique to engage with environmental sociology via other mechanisms of oppression (e.g., gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, etc.) (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020).

The uneven geographic distribution of environmental burdens and risks present local sites for investigation into specific, historical, and contingent processes of racialization and the legacies of colonialism. To understand race, one must look at the ways in which it is materially and symbolically produced through environmental living conditions, where the built environment takes on particular significance in the validation of racial forms. The purpose of this work is not merely to understand racism but to transform the total environment to work towards more just and equitable systems that undo oppression.

In confronting environmental injustices, Du Bois’s emancipatory empiricism and his focus on the importance of community collaboratives point to support for scientific cooperatives led by marginalized communities. Environmental management often poses a covert pathway through which oppressive political constructs are rationalized and perpetuated. When we consider the deeply political processes that produce regulatory science, it becomes clear that participation in science is an essential act of democracy (Carrera et al. 2023). As sociologists, we serve an important role in critically interrogating the taken-for-grantedness of scientific processes as being ‘value-neutral’ and creating a space that supports the capacity of marginalized communities to lead the investigative processes that affect their lives. Enforceable environmental regulations are not determined by public health standards but by economic feasibility, which is constrained by the expectations of regulators, elected officials, industry, scientists, and environmental officials. How standards for safety, frequency of testing, compliance, and procedures for monitoring are determined is not through the expectation of the elimination of health risks but by what can ‘reasonably’ be accomplished by a regulated (municipal or corporate) body. What is ‘reasonable’ is determined by the worth of the population in question, and contemporary capitalism directly exploits the cultural conditions that work to classify and devalue specific bodies as they are subject to their placement within white supremacy.

The social and environmental problems we face today feel increasingly urgent and intractable. We have a responsibility to make the connection between the problems we investigate and the actions necessary to bring about real change to improve people’s lives and correct very serious environmental issues. Sociologists need to be part of innovative solutions planning from the beginning, leading inquiry into how we can develop interventions while amplifying the structural constraints that drive those problems. We are uniquely positioned to serve marginalized communities and support their capacity to conduct research programs that will create the impacts they need while leveraging the resources academia has at its disposal. Environmental sociology is uniquely positioned within sociological scholarship to make direct connections between these threats and our theoretical contributions. By expanding SES’s foundations to reconstitute our existing theories, we offer a platform for increasingly practical relevance of the discipline, a broader and more inclusive base to appeal to diverse scholars, and move much closer to realizing our shared vision of an NEP.

Biographical Note

Jennifer S. Carrera is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science and Policy at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on environmental justice issues around water access and water quality, with an emphasis on low-income communities in the United States. Dr. Carrera’s research focuses on community capacity to lead environmental health and health equity research and pathways through which academic partners can support community research agendas. She uses a racial equity lens in considering the production and management of environmental health knowledge. Dr. Carrera is currently engaged in community based participatory research with partners in Flint, Michigan. This work considers the local knowledge of Flint residents in responding to a public health crisis and the implications that this knowledge has on the broader understanding of environmental health literacy. As an environmental sociologist, Dr. Carrera is particularly interested in advancing theoretical frames exploring racial capitalism, its impact on marginalized environments, and the ability of residents in those environments to mobilize citizenship claims to promote the wellbeing of their communities. Additionally, she is interested in increasing capacity for sympathetic academics to support the leadership directions of communities in the pursuit of community expressed needs and goals.