Laura Pulido. (2000). Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 90(1): 12-40.
What do you think when you hear the word racism?
That is "what bad people do because they are bad"?
If so, this article calls for a change of perspective and introduces a concept of structural racism.
The article, our final reading for this week, is an article that has had a transformative impact on how geographers approach the spatial dimensions of inequality and injustice. This article, published in the flagship academic journal in American geography, explores different ways of understanding environmental racism, and emphasizes "white privilege" as a particularly influential form of racism that has shaped urban and suburban development in the United States.
Pulido's groundbreaking contribution to geography (and environmental justice studies) in this article is that she combines the mapping of racial demographics and siting of toxic facilities with spatial renderings of suburbanization and white flight to produce a more complex understanding of environmental racism as an ongoing process.
Those of you who have not read a lot of geographic scholarship before may need to work through this reading with extra care. Please take the time to look up terms with which you are unfamiliar, and read to find Pulido's central arguments about how racism works.
The following terms are particularly important. Remember, your first job is to understand how Pulido is defining these concepts and using them in her analysis, and your second job is to think about how her arguments differ or agree with the other assigned materials, popular media, and your own perspective.
The key difference between the two pictures is the presence/absence of "the bad guy" as we would typically think.
It seems unfair to label the able-bodied person in the right picture as "the bad guy" in the right-hand side picture. But it is also clear that the right-hand side picture is not a desirable situation and a struggle is clearly present for the handicapped person that he wouldn't have to undergo if he were without the handicap.
It can be helpful that Pulido's concept of racism does NOT seek to label the able-bodied person (the white) bad and start a blame game, but it seeks to address and correct a situation or structure where a specific group(e.g. black people, the handicapped) of people are receiving disadvantage that other people don't. In short, the point of Pulido's argument is to address and eradicate "racism without racist".
As you read, consider the following questions:
Links
[1] http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Social_structure