Segregation and Sanitation in the United States

In October 1991, the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit convened to deal with the pressing realities and the historical development of environmental inequality in the United States. Attendees articulated seventeen principles of environmental justice, unified by the commitment to “secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples.”¹ The summit served as a unifying call to action for many environmental activists, led to the explicit articulation of environmental justice as a political framework, and gave definition to terms (environmental racism, environmental inequality) that motivated several subsequent trajectories of scholarly inquiry. Although not intended to be a reaction to mainstream environmentalism’s deafness to racial and economic inequality, the summit’s mere happening functioned as a critique of the inaction of large environmental organizations, which had, at best, a dismal record in advocating for the needs of poor and nonwhite communities.

In the twenty-five years since the summit, environmental racism, environmental inequality, and the complicity of mainstream environmental organizations in maintaining inequality have been subjected to interdisciplinary academic scrutiny. Scholars have written case studies of early environmental justice activism at Warren County and Love Canal; explored the “pre-history” of environmental justice; and produced case studies on contemporary situations of environmental racism. They have detailed how national environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society were loath to acknowledge the principles of environmental justice, viewing issues of environmental racism as “other people’s problems,” and resisting diversification of their own staffs. They have delineated how redlining and other zoning decisions radically restricted nonwhite communities’ access to recreational and natural areas, as well as tracing the influence of environmental concerns on civil rights and black liberation activism. They also have begun to explore how the “open space” debates of the 1960s and 1970s functioned as proxies to exclude poor and nonwhite communities from wealthier suburbs. Taken together, this scholarship demonstrates what summit attendees and myriad grassroots activists before them already knew: that environmental racism is a constitutive and necessary feature of the continued functioning of the economic and political structure of the United States. Moreover, the United States’ “successes” occurred through the deliberate marginalization, dispossession, and segregation of nonwhite communities.

In Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States, environmental historian Carl A. Zimring sets out to tell the history of environmental racism from a structural perspective: specifically, to uncover the connections between the histories of white supremacy, urbanization, sanitation, and environmental racism in the United States. Zimring opens his book with the assertion that existing histories of environmental justice and environmental racism have so far treated race and ethnicity as “static constructs” (p. 3). By taking as static the binary between African Americans and “white” Americans, historians have, he suggests, ignored two important issues: first, how the construction of whiteness was a dynamic historical process, and second, how bodies and environments were intertwined in the centuries-long construction of environmental racism. Zimring’s intervention, a history of environmental racism in the United States “using the lens of dirt,” seeks to illuminate the conceptual linkage of whiteness and cleanliness, and by contrast, the characterization of nonwhite peoples as unclean, unsanitary, and diseased. Zimring sets out to trace how becoming white meant adopting particular standards of hygiene; yet these standards of hygiene were only open to those considered by society to be white.

Organized in eight roughly chronological case studies, Clean and White traces the parallel and intertwined evolution of ideas about race and ideas about sanitation. In each case study, Zimring attempts to demonstrate the connection between practices of segregation and practices of sanitation. He begins with Thomas Jefferson’s idealization of the pastoral, including dirt. In chapter two, he analyzes the growth of U.S. cities in the antebellum period. He asserts that...