Race and environmental inequality

Early studies on race, particularly those that predate the 1990s, largely reduced racism to an idealist definition with the view that a set of ideas and beliefs leads people to prejudice and subsequent discriminatory acts against a racial group. These studies thus equated racism with an ideology that promotes individual acts against subordinate races, ignoring the structure of a racialized society and structural racism. Racism is maintained in a multiplicity of ways that include intentional and unintentional, overt and covert, acts as well as ideological beliefs and the organization of the economic, social and political structures. These features of race, entrenched in US society, also lie at the center of environmental racism, an additional domain of racial oppression that involves the distribution of environmental harms and benefits and the unequal protection from those harms along racial lines. In this chapter, I discuss the conceptualization of environmental racism from the perspective of environmental inequality and in relation to theories of race that were developed during the last few decades based on research conducted by sociologists in general and environmental sociologists and environmental justice scholars in particular. I discuss the early foundations of environmental racism, empirical approaches to the study of environmental racism, recent theoretical and methodological advances in environmental racism studies, and environmental racism in the global south. I end the chapter with a discussion of future directions for research in the area of race and environmental inequality.