Linking History to Contemporary State-Sanctioned Slow Violence through Cultural and Structural Racism

Abstract

Environmental scientists started documenting the racial inequities of environmental exposures (e.g., proximity to waste facilities or to industrial pollution) in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, research has documented inequities in exposures to nearly every studied environmental hazard, showing that American society delivers racial violence toward non-White families. Through cultural racism, a resilient social hierarchy is set where the lives of some groups of people are considered more valuable than others; then, through structural racism, institutions unequally mete and dole environmental benefits and burdens to these groups. We argue that the “slow violence” of environmental racism is linked to other forms of racial violence that have been enacted throughout history. We discuss the meaning of cultural racism as it pertains to the hierarchy of groups of people whose lives are valued unequally and its link to structural racism. To remedy this environmental racial violence, we propose shifts in the empirical research on environmental inequities that are built upon, either implicitly or explicitly, the interconnected concepts of cultural and structural racism that link historical to contemporary forms of racial violence.

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of Black America, is it not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. (Hartman 2007, 6)

For Blacks, the “environment” is the … White-created environment, where the waste products of White space are dumped and the costs of White industry externalized. “Environmentalism” for Blacks has to mean not merely challenging the patterns of waste disposal, but also, in effect, their own status as the racialized refuse, the Black trash, of the White body politic. (Mills 2001, 89)

Racial inequities in exposures to environmental hazards are well-documented. A seminal study in 1987 showed that the racial and ethnic composition of a place was by far the strongest and most consistent predictor of the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities (Committee for Racial Justice 1987). This study had a key role in the development of the environmental justice movement, setting into motion the creation of an empirical literature on the unequal racial distribution of environmental hazards, with even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) acknowledging that such inequities existed. However, 20 years later, a follow-up study showed that the racial composition of a place continued to be the strongest predictor of hazardous waste facility locations (Bullard et al. 2007). In fact, compared to White families, Black families are still more likely to live in “fenceline” zones—those areas most proximate and vulnerable to industrial polluters (Orum et al. 2014). In addition to hazardous waste, segregated Black and Latino neighborhoods also bear the brunt of both industrial and vehicular air pollution exposure compared to other neighborhoods (Zwickl, Ash, and Boyce 2014; Jones et al. 2014). Further, recent evidence suggests that, while they are burdened with greater exposure to air pollution, Black Americans contribute less to its production compared to White Americans, (Tessum et al. 2019). Even the deleterious impact of climate change is not borne equally across racial groups. Recent evidence suggests that compared to White Americans, Black and Latino Americans live in neighborhoods with greater urban heat islands and with neighborhood features that contribute to these heat islands, such as little tree canopy and ground cover (Jesdale, Morello-Frosch, and Cushing 2013; Gronlund 2014; Mitchell and Chakraborty 2015). Environmental inequities are not isolated to urban settings. In fact, compared to rural White residents, rural Black and Latino residents are more likely to live near confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which include untreated animal waste lagoons (Mirabelli et al. 2006; Wing, Cole, and Grant 2000).

We propose that these environmental inequities are one of the major contemporary types of racial violence, linked to other forms of racial violence such as slavery and lynching that have been enacted throughout history (Ward 2016). In other words, contemporary environmental inequities are intimately tied to the past, their roots not necessarily feeding from historical environmental inequities alone but from the larger toxic social soil of cultural racism that renders the bodies of Black Americansⁱ as disposable (Mills 2001) and subject to numerous forms of racial violence. In this article, we present a framework that describes contemporary environmental inequities as linked to historical (nonenvironmental) racial violence through the common threads of cultural racism, which comprises our underlying shared societal value systems that ultimately dictate who is fully deserving of a long and healthy life and who is not, who is viewed as fully human and whose lives and bodies are essentially disposable, burdened with environmental waste so that the rest of society can benefit (Mbembé and Meintjes 2003; Mills 2001).

Our framework pairs cultural racism (i.e., a society’s ideologies and value systems, or culture, based on implicit and explicit ideas of a racial hierarchy) with structural racism (i.e., the interrelated network of a society’s institutions, with their policies and practices, that favor racial groups over others and operate without the need on the part of their actors to intend harm or hold dislike of certain racial groups). In other words, structural racism serves as the realization or the real-world application of the value systems of cultural racism. American society doles out its privileges upon those who are deemed fully human and dumps its environmental waste upon those who are deemed disposable (Mills 2001) through its interconnected network of institutions that compose our social structure. In our framework, we propose that this network is resilient, adapting to fit contemporaneous sociopolitical norms over place and time, maintaining an overall structural equilibrium toward White privilege (see Alexander 2010; Wacquant 2001 for examples of adaptation). Further, we proposed that cultural racism facilitates structural racism by rendering institutional policies and practices neutral and rational within place and time. Finally, we offer that environmental inequities, as a form of contemporary racial violence, are tied to forms of historical racial violence through the common thread of cultural racism is not an academic or trivial point. Understanding this link has important policy and intervention implications. Attempts to address contemporary environmental inequities will not be successful without understanding their historical roots and their linkages to other social processes and institutions that are not explicitly intended to address environmental exposures. Thus, we end with proposed research directions to empirically test this framework of cultural and structural racism to develop the evidence needed for effective environmental justice policies.

The Slow Violence of Environmental Inequities: Its Link to Other Forms of Racial Violence throughout History

Violence is typically conceived as an overt, discrete, and fast action, something brutal and intentional; however, this conceptualization obscures the ways in which violence can involve the gradual accumulation of covert insults to the body (Nixon 2011; Davies 2019). Slow violence is that which is “often difficult to source, oppose, and once set in motion, reverse” (Nixon 2011, 7). Further, the slow violence of environmental racism (i.e., policies or practices that result in racially unequal environmental exposures, whether intended or not) is rendered invisible as many hazardous environmental exposures act on the body incrementally or in a delayed manner. Additionally, while racial residential, occupational, and educational segregation facilitates environmental racism with spatial precision, segregation also ensures that most Americans remain (willfully) oblivious to the hazardous exposures administered by the state to Black families (Pulido 2017; Jones et al. 2014; Hicken et al. 2019; Morello-Frosch and Lopez 2006; Bullard 1993; Kravchenko et al. 2018; Seamster and Purifoy 2020).

The environmental inequities we see today are facets of state-sponsored, slow racial violence inextricably bound to the history of our nation by the seemingly unbreakable threads of cultural racism. In fact, these environmental inequities are an overlooked presence of the past, linked to more recognizable forms of state-sponsored racial violence, such as slavery and lynching, through the interrelated nature of cultural and structural racism (Nixon 2011). The societally accepted ideologies, values, and behavioral norms that compose cultural racism were historically woven into the fabric of our society by White men (Kendi 2016; Mills 2014). They have been infused through our shared social subconscious and ultimately dictate who is fully human and who is disposable (Mills 2001, 2014; Mbembé and Meintjes 2003).

Environmental inequities are not incidental to contemporary American life. They result from the American brand of necropolitical racial capitalism (i.e., a form of capitalism where the social and economic value of people is drawn along racial lines, with racial inequities in “biopower”, the power that ultimately determines life and death) operating as intended throughout history, maintaining reified, racially defined divisions between who will prosper and live in clean environments and who will be sacrificed in the quest for prosperity (Pulido 2017; Mills 2001; Mbembé and Meintjes 2003; Bell 1992; Giroux 2006; Bullard and Wright 2012; Seamster and Purifoy 2020). Structural racism, then, serves as the actualization or application of cultural racism and provides the mechanisms through which the state and private entities collude to dole out material prosperity at the expense of those deemed disposable (Pulido 2017; Mills 2014; Mbembé and Meintjes 2003). Through direct state action as well as inaction in the face of risk, we sacrifice segregated Black neighborhoods and use Black bodies as environmental sinks (Mills 2001; Pulido 2017).

Cultural racism, woven into the foundational fabric of American society, allows for an enduring link between historical and contemporary racial violence. Indeed, empirical evidence suggests the endurance of this White supremacist ideology in the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2007). For example, people who currently live in counties that had a greater number of enslaved persons are more likely to hold anti-Black sentiment and support policies that disadvantage Black residents compared to people who currently live in other counties (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2016, 2017). However, this afterlife extends beyond the spatial boundaries of the South. Some of the New Deal policies that were intended to expand the wealth of (White) families, in part by extending generous new mortgage practices, included the economic risk assessment of neighborhoods across the United States (Rothstein 2017). Families who lived in neighborhoods that were deemed high risk, in large part due to the presence of Black residents, could not benefit from these new practices. New evidence suggests that these “redlined” neighborhoods still show their historical roots of public and private disinvestment over time, their residents burdened with greater exposure to air pollution and extreme heat compared to neighborhoods that had not been redlined (Hoffman, Shandas, and Pendleton 2020; Nardone et al. 2020).

Cultural racism dictates who is disposable

A society’s culture is broadly defined here as its values and belief systems and its normative social mores and behaviors. Cultural racism, then, can be viewed as a culture comprising racialized and racially hierarchical values and beliefs woven into its fabric. It dictates whose lives and whose bodies are valued as fully human (or fully American when discussing the U.S. context) and whose are ultimately disposable (Mills 2001, 2014). While extrasomatic, a society’s culture is internalized and generally unquestioned by its citizens as the “natural” way to approach social life, a particularly insidious form of racism as it operates on the level of our shared social subconscious. The features and processes that compose cultural racism are invisible to many because they are our default sociopolitical lens. Operating in the background, cultural racism shapes the answer to the question of who deserves to live a full and healthy life (Mbembé and Meintjes 2003). Ideas of this racial order were central to defining American democracy, perhaps not surprisingly in 1860 as Senator (and later Confederate President) Jefferson Davis insisted that the inequality of the White and Black races was “stamped from the beginning” (Kendi 2016). Just as Davis proclaimed their biological inferiority, Thomas Jefferson wrote extensively, decades before, on the intellectual and emotional inferiority of both freed and enslaved Black persons (Kendi 2016). Cultural racism is the enduring thread that binds historical and contemporary ideas of whose lives and bodies are valuable and whose are disposable.

Structural racism is the actualization of cultural racism

Cultural racism ultimately translates into “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” for Black Americans through structural racism (Hartman 2007, 6). The American social structure comprises a resilient, symbiotic network of the formal and informal institutions that operate to maintain an equilibrium toward White privilege. To better understand these institutional connections, consider those that undergird residential segregation, the criminal justice system, and our environmental stewardship. While seemingly separate state silos, they are tethered across place through the same fundamental threads of cultural racism that serve to control Black Americans in a number of ways. At the most basic level, there is a spatial correlation among neighborhood social and economic disinvestment, incarceration, and hazardous waste, whereby the constellation of these institutional disinvestments that result in these “punishing and toxic neighborhoods” is delivered almost exclusively to those of Black (and other non-White) residents (Manduca and Sampson 2019). Further, however, scholars describe a “deadly symbiosis” among segregated neighborhoods, the prison system (Wacquant 2001), and our environmental institutions to ensure little intergenerational upward socioeconomic mobility and movement away from toxic exposures (Manduca and Sampson 2019). While each institution (i.e., criminal justice, environmental stewardship) may exact its own toll, when considered together as a tethered system of control, evidence suggests a synergy among social and environmental exposures that results in unequal life chances (Hicken et al. 2012; Hicken et al. 2014; Manduca and Sampson 2019).

These institutions are tethered across time as well as the same “stamp” of disposability has operated throughout history. Historical state violence is linked to the contemporary slow violence of environmental racism at numerous sites in the American landscape. For example, at the site of the former Angola plantation is the Louisiana State Penitentiary, currently the largest maximum-security prison in the United States where prisoners are contracted to prepare electronic waste, from broken glass to toxic metals, for recycling, often without proper protection (Pellow 2017). Further linking history to the present through place, the formerly enslaved often established “Freedom Towns” or “Freedom Colonies” throughout the South. These towns and colonies (i.e., unincorporated places) are often the site of environmental dumping so that other areas, both near and far, can thrive economically.

One such colony is Tamima, Texas, just outside of Houston, formed in the mid- to late-1800s to support the nearby lumber industry. The land that originally formed Tamima has continually been annexed to form nearby wealthy White towns. As these nearby towns and Houston suburbs thrive economically, rich with civic resources, Tamima is burdened with poor water and sewage infrastructure and few other civic services (Seamster and Purifoy 2020). Exemplifying the relational nature of cultural and structural racism with Black Americans sacrificed for the benefit of White Americans, Tamima is stripped of its natural resources for the benefit of neighboring towns while serving as their dump (Seamster and Purifoy 2020). Emelle, Alabama, as another example, was established in the 1830s in the place where nearly half its residents were enslaved to support the cotton industry. It is currently a “Black Town” and the site of Chem-Waste, the largest hazardous landfill waste site in the United States, which currently imports millions of tons of cancer-causing toxic waste for profit from countries around the world (Bullard 1990). The denial of a clean environment did not only come as hazardous waste exposures; even as farm land was provided to free and formerly enslaved Black people, that land was disproportionately land that had been used for staple Southern crops (i.e., cotton, corn, and tobacco) with the highest rates of soil erosion and exhaustion (Zirkle 1943; Trimble 1985; Taylor 2014). Cultural racism undergirds structural racism so that entire ecological systems, institutional practices, geographies, and relationships to land through time are informed by racial logics that value White lives more than others.

Cultural racism acts as a distortion lens

The cultural racism running through our shared social subconscious dictates who is disposable who is not; these ideas serve as our default sociopolitical lens, which then renders American institutions as neutral and rational (e.g., the “natural” way to do things). Cultural racism, as well as the racially unequal societal structure it drives, is facilitated by a willful ignorance of most Americans. Indeed, this “Racial Contract” (Mills 2014) or “Racial Sacrifice Covenant” (Bell 2004), which can be considered synonymous with cultural racism as we have described it here, has been implicitly signed by all White Americans. It “prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional)…” (Mills 2014, 18). This self-delusion is not accidental but prescribed by the Contract and, importantly, it allows for the uncontested perpetuation of racial violence, including the slow violence of environmental racism. Furthermore, when stories of environmental racism come to light through the media or community action, it can be difficult to reconcile the American narrative of equality with such blatant inequality. Thus cultural racism, with its internalized, subconscious understanding of a racial order, also produces “the ironic outcome that Whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (Mills 2014, 18).

Environmental racism provides numerous examples of distorted narratives. For example, it may be a common assumption that Black neighborhoods develop around polluters due to cheap real estate. However, evidence indicates that the residents are generally there first, with polluters moving in later (Mohai and Saha 2015). Another common narrative is that residents will reap the benefits of employment with these newly placed polluters. However, recent research indicates that this is, in fact, not the case. Most of the jobs, not only the higher-skill managerial jobs, but also the low-skill jobs go to people from other neighborhoods (Ash and Boyce 2018).

Perhaps even more powerful is the narrative of American democracy where the voices of citizens burdened unfairly will be heard and their needs addressed. Indeed, the mission of the U.S. EPA is “to protect human health and environment.” Further, the definition of environmental justice from their website reads: “The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”ⁱⁱ However, cultural racism dictates that the lives of White families matter more than others; this is an unspoken agreement operating in the background. Contrary to the EPA’s politically clean narrative is the muddied reality that the true power lies in the concept of intent to do harm (Coleman 1993; Pulido 2017; Harrison 2019), erroneously conflating the self-sustaining power of structural racism for individual and interpersonal notions of prejudice and discrimination (Desmond and Emirbayer 2010). In other words, intention means that specific people intended to do harm through interpersonal dislike of specific groups of people. The power of this concept of intent means that, of the hundreds of lawsuits brought against the state and polluters to correct environmental injustices, less than one-half of 1 percent have been successful (Pulido 2017).

Building Empirical Evidence for Effective Change

Environmental inequities show the presence of our past; they are linked to history through cultural racism and a resilient social structure that preserves an equilibrium favoring White privilege. The first step in attempting to make lasting change toward equity is to develop an empirical literature that tests this general framework, linking history to the present through the common themes of cultural racism and the contemporaneous features of structural racism. We recommend building an environmental justice research agenda using a framework (Hicken et al. 2018) with three explicit features: (a) the linkage of cultural and structural racism to environmental inequities; (b) the linkage of historical and contemporary forms of violence; and (c) the critical clarification of distorted narratives that may appear neutral and rational. Specific features of this framework are adaptable to specific research questions (e.g., the relation between lynching and lead poisoning, the relation between redlined neighborhoods and hazardous waste sites). We propose, however, that the interdisciplinary themes of cultural and structural racism over time and place are the critical foundations that must guide the development of research questions and their modeling approaches (Hicken et al. 2018).

The institutions that comprise our racial capitalist structure have and will continue to work together symbiotically to maintain an equilibrium toward White dominance set by cultural racism (Bell 1992). This suggests that when examining single institutions in a siloed manner, there may be periods when or places where there is an apparent move toward racial equity. However, without working within multiple institutions simultaneously, other institutions will change to maintain the original overall equilibrium. We must acknowledge the American hypocrisy that simultaneously maintains a narrative of democracy and racial equality engrained in our social subconscious along with the reality of a structure that was historically designed for Whiteness at the expense of Blackness (Mills 2014). Empirical tests of this resilient structural network can range from its simplest form in statistical interactions (Hicken et al. 2013; Hicken et al. 2012) to more complex forms of systems modeling (Kaplan et al. 2017), but in the end, they must bring in multiple institutions within our social structure.

To acknowledge our hypocrisy is to understand that the state, which leads, directs, guides, or facilitates the institutions that comprise our social structure (e.g., environmental stewardship, education, labor, media, etc), often in collaboration with private entities, is functioning as it was designed to and is fully complicit in the slow violence of environmental racism (Pulido 2017; Harrison 2019). This suggests that change toward environmental equity will be sourced from evidence generated from research that does not “reaffirm the boundaries and frameworks established by the EPA” (Pulido 2017, 530). As we build our empirical literature and include intervention research as well, we recommend that these interventions account for the ways in which the state acts to preserve White privilege, always questioning who ultimately benefits and who ultimately bears the cost. Further, as we weigh the social and health benefits of various interventions against their economic costs, rather than focus on conventional approaches, we support tests that put the value of place with the people who live on the land rather than the reified economic value of the land (Lipsitz 2007). Notably, however, care must be taken to ensure that the insidious notions of disposable people are not inserted into this new people-versus-land socioeconomic calculus. This approach can be strengthened through work with nonenvironmental justice–focused action groups, with the understanding that movement toward environmental equity will pull on the structural threads to activate forms of racial violence and control in other institutions.

We have discussed the ways in which environmental inequities are tied to historical racial violence through cultural racism. The structural racism that results in these unequal environmental burdens serves as a contemporary sociopolitically acceptable actualization of our underlying racial contract that renders Black lives and bodies as disposable. With a foundation of empirical evidence built on the proposed framework that can ultimately guide our interventions, we have our best hope of moving toward racial equity and delinking historical violence with the contemporary violence delivered by environmental racism.

Biography

Margaret T. Hicken is a research associate professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Her interdisciplinary research program centers on American cultural and structural racism as it pertains to environmental racism and includes the study of biological mechanisms that link social processes to health inequities.

Lewis Miles is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He is primarily interested in medical sociology, racial disparities in health, and how structural racism shapes health over the life course. He is a social demography trainee at the Population Studies Center and affiliated with the Program for Research on Black Americans and RacismLab.

Solome Haile is a research associate in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Michael Esposito is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He uses sophisticated modeling approaches to examine the link between structural racism and health inequities.