Environmental Racism

Martyn Bone

Related terms: Anthropocene, ecocriticism, environmental justice, Plantationocene, scales, slow violence

Definitions of ‘environmental racism’ began to develop some four decades ago, emerging out of grassroots activism by Black people in the U.S. South. In 1982, residents of Warren County in North Carolina organized against the state-sanctioned disposal of toxic waste at a vast dump in their largely poor, majority-Black community. Five years later, the United Church of Christ (UCC) report Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States highlighted the Warren County case, which also featured in Robert D. Bullard’s pioneering academic study Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (1990). By this point, a U.S. government analysis of hazardous waste sites in the southeastern states had “found that African Americans comprised a majority of the population in three of the four areas studied” (Dowie 1995, 142). In 1992, Reverend Benjamin Chavis, a civil rights movement veteran arrested during the Warren County protests and coauthor of the UCC report, elaborated an expanded definition of ‘environmental racism’ that encompassed not only “the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxic waste facilities” but also “racial discrimination in environmental policy-making” and “the history of excluding people of color from leadership in the environmental movement” (quoted in Zimring 2015, 1-2). The Gulf Coast Tenant Leadership Development Project in New Orleans identified just such forms of discrimination and exclusion in a 1990 letter sent to various national environmental organizations, including Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, accusing them of “racist hiring practices” (Dowie 1995, 146). Yet, twenty-first-century environmental activism and academic ecological thinking have continued to exhibit a “stubborn whiteness” (Purifoy 2018). Some scholars argue that this is due to the settler-colonialist origins of environmentalism and a continuing emphasis on the “interests of mostly white and wealthier people” (Purifoy 2018). The (re)definition and dissemination of ‘environmental racism’ as a key term thus remains ‘emergent’ at a time when the environmental humanities are both in transition and under interrogation. Recently, Kathryn Yusoff (2024) has suggested that “the humanities (and environmental humanities)” remain mired in a racialized model of “the human” (34) that privileges “whiteness” (587) and “the white imagination” (466). Activists, academics, and authors who resist, research, and represent environmental racism still struggle to articulate what Raymond Williams, in his classic definition of “emergent,” called “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships” vis-à-vis “dominant” (and white-dominated) organizations and institutions (Williams 1973, 123).

Even as humanities scholars attend more fully to the implications of environmental racism in the present and for the future, it is important to register its deep historical dimensions and how they continue to resonate today. While the Warren County case is rightly regarded as foundational for the U.S. environmental justice movement, biopolitical associations between Black southerners and waste were not new. In Necropolitics (2019), Achille Mbembe notes how the deeply entwined histories of racial “slavery, colonialism, and capitalism” have involved treating “the black as a thing” or “burning fossil” while “separating what is useful from waste, from the detrituses” (158-59). Like the plantation lands on which they labored, enslaved Black people were treated as sites of exploitation and extraction until their bodies were (like the land itself) exhausted and wasted. In Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism (2015), Carl A. Zimring traces how this “conflation of non-white skin with dirt,” detritus, and waste continued to determine “spatial relationships in American society during the twentieth century” (137). “Free” Black labor became over-identified with, and over-represented in, “‘dirty’ jobs such as laundry, waste hauling, scrap recycling, and other sanitary services” (5). This was especially evident in the U.S. South, where (to take only one obvious example) “domestic cleaning work was almost monolithically the responsibility of African American women” (119). Turning to the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King can be seen as “something of an environmentalist” and as a proto-activist against “environmental racism” (Dowie 1995, 141). At the time of his death in April 1968, King was supporting a strike by Memphis’ mostly Black male sanitary workers, who were protesting both meager salaries and “exposure to hazardous wastes” (Dowie 1995, 141). The sanitation workers’ strike was “an important precedent” to both the Warren County struggle and “Chavis’s definition of environmental racism” (Zimring 2015, 5).

Addressing “environmental racism in the 21st century,” Bullard (2003) followed Chavis’s lead in looking beyond toxic waste dumping while retaining a telling emphasis on “the Southern United States” (51). Bullard also emphasized the national and planetary scales of environmental racism in the new millennium, including its structural role in U.S. history and its transmission via economic globalization: “Environmental racism also operates in the international arena between nations and between transnational corporations” (50). Still, the U.S. South remains a distinctive regional scale at which we can usefully discern how modern modes of economic and industrial ‘development’ intersect with familiar forms of environmental racism rooted in slavery and its afterlives. In the last few years, scholars across disciplines have identified disturbing historical, spatial, and ideological continuities between antebellum slave plantations and the contemporary Gulf South land- and seascape of petrochemical plants and oil platforms, many of which are owned and operated by “transnational corporations” such as Dow Chemical, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, and British Petroleum (BP). Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s Petrochemical America (2011) – part documentary photography, part “ecological atlas” – adumbrates “the regional, national, and global dynamics” through which petrochemical factories have been built “atop former plantations” (157) and adjacent to Black towns founded by formerly enslaved people. Furthermore, by “providing raw materials to people far away,” Dow, Shell, and their ilk “mirror the export of cotton and cane in a rather obvious historical parallel” (157). The extreme pollution generated by petrochemical corporations crowded along Louisiana’s Great River Road, now known colloquially as ‘Chemical Corridor’ and ‘Cancer Alley,’ has had a devastating effect on Black residents. “[F]or decades,” Bullard and Beverly Wright (2009) remark, “Black communities there have been fighting against environmental racism and demanding relocation from polluting facilities” (23). In This Changes Everything (2014), Naomi Klein identifies the intensive chemical pollution of Mossville, Louisiana – a Black town established by freed people after slavery – as “a textbook case of environmental racism” (429). Steve Lerner’s Diamond (2005) details how grassroots resistance in another Chemical Corridor community expanded from the local to the global scale of petrocapitalism. Black residents cum activists in Diamond, located on a former slave plantation, connected their struggle against toxic pollution caused by a Royal Dutch Shell plant to the same corporation’s atrocities against the Ogoni people in Nigeria. Here we see how opposition to environmental racism extends across what Rob Nixon (2011) has called “Hydrocarbon’s Black Atlantic” (273).

Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast in August 2005, offers another case study of environmental racism in the U.S. South. Katrina exposed, with calamitous consequences, the historical segregation of Black southern communities such as New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward on land susceptible to flooding. Comparing Katrina to other “global crimes of environmental racism” compounded by “neoliberal neglect,” Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) stresses how “[d]iscrimination predates disaster” and leaves “the poor and racial minorities disproportionately vulnerable to catastrophe” (58-59). In Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (2006), Henry A. Giroux pursues these links between the regional history of environmental racism experienced by “the black poor on the Gulf Coast” (39) and the globalized “logic of…neoliberalism,” according to which “the category ‘waste’” also includes “human beings, particularly those rendered redundant in the new global economy” (27).

For Roy Scranton (2015), televised images of Katrina’s impact on New Orleans signaled his – and humankind’s – entry into a “new world, the Anthropocene” and an emergent way of being in the world that Scranton calls “learning to die in the Anthropocene” (17). Yet as numerous critics have noted, including Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2017), definitions of ‘the Anthropocene’ tend to assume an “abstract” and “undifferentiated humanity” (66-67) that fails to “take into account social asymmetries and inequalities…on different scales” (69). Emphasizing environmental racism challenges these universalizing models of the Anthropocene. In the wake of Katrina, the “social asymmetries and inequalities” underlying “natural disaster” were all too apparent: as Bullard and Wright (2009) bluntly observe, “Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that negative effects of climate change fall heaviest on the poor and people of color” (19). In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), Yusoff stresses that these “racialized impacts of climate change” (3) are merely the latest manifestation of “ongoing environmental racism” (18). Having experienced “the costs of extraction” in “the sugarcane fields” and “on the slave block,” “black communities” now “buffer the petrochemical industries and hurricanes” (xiii) alike. The burden of learning to live and die in the Anthropocene continues to be borne by poor Black people in the U.S. South and beyond.

Some scholars troubled by the Anthropocene’s “undifferentiated humanity” have turned to an alternative concept: the Plantationocene. Proposed by Donna Haraway during a 2014 conversation at the University of Aarhus in Denmark (Haraway et al. 2016), “Plantationocene” refers to “the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor” (Haraway 2015, 162n5). Yet early definitions of ‘the plantation’ and ‘Plantationocene’ by Haraway, Anna L. Tsing, and other participants in that Aarhus meeting have drawn criticism for formulating multispecies, biocentric perspectives that fail to foreground the enslavement of Black people and related forms of racialized violence. Haraway’s emphasis on how “[t]he plantation system depends on the relocation of the generative units” entails an easy equivalence of “plants, animals, microbes, people” (Haraway et al, 2015, 557). Noboru Ishikawa interjects that “[f]or me, plantations are just the slavery of plants,” a statement with which Tsing and Haraway concur (Haraway et al, 2015, 556). Davis et al (2019) argue that in “this tendency toward multispecies flattening,” the Aarhus discussants marginalize “matters of Black embodiment and the disciplinary regimes of the slave plantation” (5) in a manner emblematic of “a broader failure among initial Plantationocene scholarship to seriously attend to Black spatial and ecological thought and practice” (5). In a similar vein, Natalie Aikens et al (2019) aver that “Tsing and Haraway skim over the Indigenous removals, captive and exploited labor, forced human relocations, and human rights violations” that characterize plantation slavery’s defining role in “Western modernity.” Here we see how even an emergent, cutting-edge environmental concept – itself a corrective to the Anthropocene’s privileging of an abstracted Anthropos – may yet elide environmental racism and the populations who experience it (Verbaarschot 2025, 13-14).

How may literature – and literary criticism – apprehend environmental racism? Two decades ago, Lawrence Buell (2005) remarked that ecocriticism’s early emphasis on (literary representations of) sublime natural landscapes largely devoid of human life was being superseded by second-wave environmental criticism’s attention to “sociocentric” (8) concerns including “environmental racism,” which had only rarely been “on the radar screen of first-wave ecocritics” (26). Yet the depiction of environmental racism continues to pose dilemmas for creative writers and critics. After all, as Nixon (2011) argues so compellingly, spectacular environmental disasters such as Katrina and the April 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster are merely the most visible manifestations of a much larger story of environmental despoliation more often characterized by “slow violence.” Like other forms of slow violence that happen “gradually and out of sight” (2), environmental racism is often incremental and invisible. It accrues in land, water, bodies, and minds over decades, even generations. As such, environmental racism remains much harder to represent in narrative forms than spectacular events like hurricanes and oil spills – or, for that matter, lynchings and bombings (staple plot points in films and fiction about white supremacist violence, especially when set in the U.S. South).

In Climate Change, Literature and Environmental Justice (2021), Janet Fiskio notes that “the deaths along Cancer Alley, the devastation of Katrina, [and] the BP oil spill of 2010… all emerge from the same context of environmental racism” (117-18). They also all emerge from the land and seascape of the Gulf South. In Living Oil (2014), Stephanie LeMenager identifies the Gulf South as a scale at which, during the five years between Katrina and Deepwater Horizon, it became possible to perceive the often-ineffable impact and “unique representational challenge” of “global climate change” (104). Like Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon disaster made visible, material, and local the often (pardon the pun) slickly elusive form of oil as an abstract, transnational commodity. Living Oil rightly stresses that Katrina and the BP blowout demonstrate how “southern blacks in particular continue to struggle with the imposition of social death” (107). LeMenager expresses, too, though, a more optimistic sense of “the relevance of the Gulf Coast, and the black South, to U.S. ecological futures” (119).

Because environmental racism remains so associated with the U.S. South, contemporary Black southern writers strive to render its effects: fast and slow, spectacular and opaque. LeMenager discusses Black “U.S. Gulf Coast writers” (136), including Attica Locke and Jerry W. Ward Jr., but not Jesmyn Ward, who represents forms of environmental racism and resistance throughout her fiction. Ward dramatizes environmental disasters in two National Book Award-winning novels: Hurricane Katrina features prominently in Salvage the Bones (2011), while the Deepwater Horizon explosion appears in Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). Yet the subtlety and efficacy of Ward’s environmental aesthetics derive from an acute sense that such singular, calamitous events are only the most obvious examples in a much larger history of environmental racism that also includes forms of slow violence impacting Ward’s characters across generations. All four of Ward’s novels can help readers to apprehend the complex interrelations between contemporary ecological catastrophes and the longue durée of environmental racism in the U.S. South. Ward’s debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008) concludes with Hurricane Katrina looming on the horizon, while Let Us Descend (2023) explores the existential and environmental degradation inflicted by plantation slavery (Bone 2025).

Contemporary ecocritics often ponder the dilemma of “environmental form” (Morton 2017, 3); form and genre are key components of Ward’s environmental aesthetics. Sing, Unburied, Sing depicts not only the Deepwater Horizon disaster – which, on the novel’s surface, seems to be a backstory or subplot – but also racialized modes of extraction from earlier in Deep South history. Sing’s generic revision of the (literally oil-driven) road novel connects the offshore rig to the Mississippi state penitentiary, Parchman Farm, which was built on the plantation model and where the overwhelmingly Black population was treated as neo-slave labor. Salvage the Bones’s twelve-part structure – ten parts of which focus on the Batiste family’s everyday lives and history before Katrina makes landfall – enables readers to register how, for Black southerners like the Batistes, hurricanes and floods intersect with the quotidian experience of ongoing, even daily exposure to environmental racism. Here we see at the human scale what Ward critic Henry Ivry (2023) terms “the asymmetries of the Anthropocene.”

Ward’s Black southern environmental aesthetics are not sui generis, however. As Willie Jamaal Wright (2021) emphasizes, Black “artists and writers have continuously tracked the racial codification of land, particularly in the Southern US” (792). Tracking literary representations of environmental racism requires looking back to earlier examples too, such as the role of plantation soil exhaustion in Frederick Douglass’ “antislavery environmental imaginary” (Ellis 2014, 285) or the “ritualized violence” (Wright 2021, 792) portrayed in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “The Haunted Oak” (1900), in which the eponymous tree must bear witness to lynching from its bough “because the human victims cannot” (Child 2019, 30). Richard Wright has rarely been considered an environmental writer but his story “Down by the Riverside” (1938) was inspired by the 1927 Mississippi flood, a “humanly caused calamity” (Parrish 2017, 13) exacerbated by another form of ‘catastrophe’: “the abiding, everyday reality of Jim Crow” (19). Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) similarly depicts the consequences of ‘natural’ catastrophe – a hurricane and flood that Hurston based on the 1928 Lake Okeechobee disaster (Bone 2018) – as inseparable from the experience of “living Jim Crow” (Wright 2008, 1). Taken together, this body of writing across two centuries dramatizes how Black southern life has remained subject to “anti-Black violence as environmental racism” (Wright 2021, 805). Yet Ward also emphasizes the endurance, solidarity, intimacy, and joy with which her Black southern characters interact with their environment. The closing scene of Salvage, in which fifteen-year-old narrator Esch Batiste anticipates the reunification of her family, looks beyond the death and destruction wrought by Katrina to envision Black southern “ecological futures.”

At times, the sheer scale and heavy history of environmental racism can make it difficult to articulate or imagine such futures. Indeed, one might wonder whether a biocentric or ecocentric outlook – a worldview less weighed down by ‘racism’ and more attuned to the ‘environmental’ – offers more optimism and a way beyond the ethico-political emphasis that still dominates (re)definitions of the term. We cannot wish away the socioecological realities of environmental racism, however. Nor can we afford to ignore how otherwise valuable emergent contributions to the environmental humanities elide plantation slavery and its anti-Black afterlives. Toxic waste dumping remains a major concern for many Black southerners (Milman; Gaffney and Park). Even as I drafted this essay, reports emerged that, almost sixty years after the sanitation workers’ strike, working-class Black Memphians are again enduring exposure to hazardous waste: unregulated toxic pollution generated by Colossus, Elon Musk’s xAI data center (Kerr 2025). The second Trump administration’s recent rollback of environmental regulations will surely have an unequal impact on poor non-white communities in and beyond the South. Yet the ongoing story of Black southern grassroots activism against environmental racism facilitates hope for the future, also in academia. Danielle M. Purifoy (2018) stresses that her development as an environmental scholar was shaped not “by a traditional environmental organization like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club” but by how “in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, I learned some important lessons from my bosses and community partners at the City of New Orleans, who were nearly all black and nearly all women.” Interdisciplinary, hybrid texts like Misrach and Orff’s “ecological atlas” point forward to the innovative environmental forms that emergent scholarship might take. Scholars working between literary studies and animal studies are elaborating “creaturely” models of “milieu” (Cohn 2025) and emphasizing “interspecies alliances” (Boisseron 2018, xx). Such work foregrounds Black and animal ontologies while remaining alert to how “the inextricable entanglement of the black and the animal” (Boisseron 2018, xix) continues to be shaped by slavery and its legacies. In Black Studies, Christina Sharpe (2016) provides an environmental metaphor that captures the enduring pervasiveness of racism – “the weather” as a “total climate” that is “antiblack” (104) – even as she leavens the (Afro)pessimism with a steadfast commitment to “imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery” (18). Davis et al (2019) demonstrate how “emergent scholarship in Black geographies” (6), especially about “embodied plantation ecologies in the United South and Caribbean” (7), can ensure “[s]ustained attention to race in Plantationocene scholarship” (10) and generate “strategies to cultivate more just futures” (11). This is the sort of work undertaken by Jarvis McInnis’ important new book Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South (2025). Finally, and in a similar spirit, fiction like Jesmyn Ward’s imagines Black southern lives not simply as disposable and dystopian – riven by environmental racism and related forms of suffering – but rather as sustainable and hopeful: “look[ing] into the future…alive, alive, alive” (Ward 2011, 258).

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