According to Fredrickson, America was able to largely ignore the "race question" until the American Revolution. Before the war for independence, Jews were mostly sequestered in ghettos and black people on plantations, so the need for a dominating racial ideology had not yet arisen. However, with the dawning of the Enlightenment and the democratic revolution, the idea that all men are created equal was at the front of the minds of the people. Therefore, some system had to be invented to demote blacks and Jews from the status of "men" if absolute white rule was to continue uninterrupted.
The American answer to this need was a "scientific" racism called the "American School of Ethnology," which went against the Christian idea that all humans are descended from Adam by positing that the three main races present in the United States at that time, whites, blacks, and Native Americans, were in fact different species with different personality traits and levels of ability. By this logic, all men were still created equal: those who were unequal were not men. This ideology gained popularity in response to the abolitionist movement that began in the 1830's : without the free labor provided by the slaves, the southern cotton market could no longer thrive, and so southern whites had a strong motivation to keep blacks in servitude.
[...] In the final chapter of Living Downstream, Steingraber laments the direction that cancer research and fundraising has taken to address this growing plague: the money and attention goes to treatment, not prevention, despite evidence that cancer treatment never seems to get any more successful no matter how much money we pour into it.[xix] There is a belief in the cancer science community that one's odds of dying from cancer are mostly determined by one's ancestors, a belief that diverts attention from where it needs to be. [...]
[...] Monique Harden, an attorney with the New Orleans-based Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, said that “Environmental justice means something different in every context.”[xi] Part of the reason the environmental justice movement is now struggling to define itself is that is has suffered under certain inaccurate assumptions, and committed others itself. Pellow discusses the assumption of ecological modernization, the idea that as society evolves “toward a state where free rational individuals are in control of their own affairs and those of the world,” “states and industries are improving their environmental performance with remarkable results that benefit the social and natural worlds,”[xii] as a possible cause of environmental injustice: experience has taught us that companies will rarely protect the environment as a part of their debt to society at the expense of making a buck. [...]
[...] Rhodes says that is in the interest of mainstream environmental organizations to increase their minority membership and leadership what cannot be permitted is that they continue to serve as virtually the sole source of recruitment for government agencies.”[xvii] While this statement is correct, our trip to Chicago taught us that people of color are taking it upon themselves to address these issues, with or without help from the government and mainstream environmentalists. Rhodes takes a more top-down approach, discussing in detail the evolution of social and economic policy, while Pellow's is more bottom-up, reflecting the grassroots origins of the movement, but both agree that the road to an environmentally just world is marked by the participation of those people whom injustice affects the most. [...]
[...] But the coffee we drink includes the water we pour through the beans—and this may be the same water used for showering and cooking food. If our tap water contains, say, traces of weed killer and dry- cleaning fluids, we are being exposed to environmental carcinogens through multiple pathways and through no individual choice of our own, even as we freely determine our own bathing, cooking, and coffee- drinking habits.[xxv]” Our choices barely matter when compared to the things we can't control. While 87% of people with lung cancer are cigarette smokers are not. [...]
[...] We are now made of chemicals: dry-cleaning chemicals, DDT, and other toxins can be found in every modern human body.[xxvii] If I end up being one of the lucky 60% of people who will not ever get cancer, my life will have been affected at the very least by the knowledge that human action has made it so that everything I eat and breathe poisons me and changes my very genetic identity, and there's next to nothing I can do about it. Fredrickson, George. Racism: A Short History. Princeton and Oxford: (Princeton University Press, 2002). p Fredrickson, p [iii] Fredrickson, p Fredrickson, p Fredrickson, p Fredrickson, p [vii] Fredrickson, p [viii]Fredrickson, p Pellow, p Rhodes, Edwardo Lao. Environmental Justice [...]
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