Environmental Racism

Catalog description

While Environmental Justice as a field encompasses most of the Environmental Racism discussion, the last notion is still in dispute. It is a concept born in the United States and abroad throughout the 1970s and 1980s and coined by Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. In the context of the United States, Environmental Racism often emphasizes the inequalities between urban and nonurban areas in terms of racialized communities. Internationally, Environmental Racism can refer to the effects of the global waste trade, like the negative health impact due to the export of electronic waste from the wealthiest states to the so-called developing countries, as well as the particular vulnerability of indigenous groups to environmental pollution. Environmental Racism is a term that entitles a fair understanding of environmental injustices within racialized groups. Why have we continued to use Justice instead of Racism? Why keep using climate change if it does not impact people equally? As its ultimate goal, this course endeavors to address this issue using Critical Race Theory in socio-environmental case studies.