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 Population Health

Recent Publication

Poster: Investigating Segregated Education & Trajectories of Muscle Strength among Black Middle and Older Adults by Gender

At the 2024 IAPHS annual meeting, Dominique Sylvers won the poster award for her poster “Investigating Segregated Education & Trajectories of Muscle Strength among Black Middle and Older Adults by Gender”

Read more about Dominique Sylvers’ work

Collaborator Spotlight

David Rigby

What’s one common misconception about your area of research that you’d like to dispel?Even in academia, there is a discomfort with using quantitative methods to study questions related to race. I hope to contribute, here at Landscapes, to a body of research that uses quantitative analysis of interesting data to carefully estimate pathways and relationships between place-specific histories and contemporary outcomes.