(By Jackie Manning and Steven Black)

The concept of environmental justice focuses on not only systemic and institutional racism but also the implications of climate change and displacement. In addition, it reveals how detached many environmental initiatives are from cultural and historical perspectives. Environmental inequities can be clearly seen in neighborhoods that have been consistently neglected, from residents whose livelihoods were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina to those in towns like Ardmore, Oklahoma who have been subject to racist city and environmental planners since the time of segregation. Often, these obvious injustices are lost in the rhetoric of “colorblindness” and “reverse racism.”

Ryan Blanton’s research as explained in his article, “Chronotopic Landscapes of Environmental Racism”, lays out a specific example of efforts to redress environmental injustices in Oklahoma. His work exemplifies how an entire activist organization’s research and efforts were denied on the basis of “colorblind” rhetoric that was common in politics at this time in the US. In this case, even the EPA seems lack the cultural and historical understandings of how racism has shaped industrial and environmental planning; and their authoritative, scientific rhetoric further burdens BIPOC communities that have been subject to harmful pollution, improper waste management and an overall avoidance of healthy infrastructure. This rhetoric becomes even more dangerous as cities all over the country undergo massive transformations due to gentrification.

The topic of language, environment, and social justice is relatively new, but efforts are currently underway to expand anthropological analyses of the role of language and communicative practices in perpetuating and redressing environmental inequities. Click on the “environment” category on the right side of this page to view blog posts about examples relevant to the topic of language, environment, and social justice.

References

Blanton, Ryan (2011). “Chronotopic Landscapes of Environmental Racism.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21 (S1): E75-E93.