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

Evaluating Race in Air Pollution and Health Research: Race, PM2.5 Air Pollution Exposure, and Mortality as a Case Study

In this recent publication, Margaret T. Hicken, Devon Payne-Sturges, and Ember McCoy build on recent discussions in the epidemiology and environmental epidemiology literature more specifically, to provide a detailed discussion of the meaning of race, the race variables, and the cultural and structural racism that some argue are proxied by race variables.

Collaborator Spotlight

Karis Hawkins

What’s one common misconception about your area of research that you’d like to dispel? This research is about going deeper and combining a wealth of knowledge to understand and identify the root of the population health disparities we already know about.