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.

(Charles W. Mills, “Black trash.” In Faces of Environmental Racism, 2001)

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.

(Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose your mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, 2007)

Landscapes of Structural Racism and Health

Recent Publication

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

In this recent publication, Margaret T. Hicken, Lewis Miles, Solome Haile, and Michael Esposito argue that the “slow violence” of environmental racism is linked to other forms of racial violence that have been enacted throughout history. This paper lays out many of the important themes of the research agenda of the Landscapes of Structural Racism and Health Lab:
“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.”

Collaborator Spotlight

Ember McCoy

What is your area of research or expertise that you bring to the Landscapes collaboration?
I think a lot of people see critical geography and social studies of science as more theoretical or “ivory tower” facing research. But I’m really passionate about emphasizing the need for scholars and the public to understand the socio-political dimensions…