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9 Black, Brown, White, and Green Race, Land Use, and Environmental Politics in a Changing Richmond ALEX SCHAFRAN AND LISA M. FELDSTEIN I n November 2006, Gayle McLaughlin, a white Green Party member, defeated incumbent Irma Anderson, an African American and registered Democrat, in the mayoral election of Richmond, California. Although technically nonpartisan , her election was notable in part because it made Richmond the largest city in the country with a Green Party mayor, and because it marked the first mayoral election of a Green Party member in a city without a white majority (Hall 2006). Two years later, in the same election where Barack Obama became the first African American president in U.S. history, the Richmond City Council saw African American representation on the Council drop to one in seven, its lowest level since the mid-1960s. The recent decline in African American representation in American cities has received significant attention from researchers (e.g., Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 2003; Douzet 2008; Sonenshein 1997). Scholars have focused on how demographic shifts and the ascendancy of new political actors have forced African Americans into new coalitions with either whites or other minority groups (or both), at times seeming to undermine the electoral gains documented by Rufus P. Browning, Dale R. Marshall, and David H. Tabb (1984) in their landmark study of racial politics in American cities. Yet the story of Richmond, a city that maintains a significant African American population (26.6 percent) despite the recent ascent of Latinos to a plurality (39.5 percent) and the steady growth of the Asian community (13.3 percent), cannot be told in terms of changing demographics, immigrant political incorporation , and purely racial coalitions alone.1 Building in particular on the work of Richard DeLeon (2003), this chapter argues that the Richmond case highlights two increasingly important and interrelated factors in the racial politics of the American metropolis: the (re)ascendency of land-use politics in the formation of coalitions, and the movement of the politics of environmentalism—and environmental justice—to the forefront of urban and suburban political discourse. 156 Alex Schafran and Lisa M. Feldstein Land-use politics and environmental justice have become central organizing foci for communities of color for a number of reasons, including shared class interests; growing awareness of spatial determinants of health;2 and a widening divide between the political goals of the more-established, pro-business black leadership and black progressives, who—following a period of relative dormancy in the post–Black Panther era—have reemerged to form alliances across racial boundaries. As an activist political strategy, environmental justice combines the need for a healthy environment with the ongoing struggle to build and maintain power in communities of color. The importance of this strategy complicates any simple explication of racial politics in the contemporary metropolis. In Richmond, the Laotian community has recently emerged as a political force, but not simply because it has strength in numbers, effective organizers and organizations, and enough naturalized citizens and second-generation members to constitute an electoral base. These resources were necessary but not sufficient: It took the issue of air pollution and the expansion and taxation of a local Chevron refinery to mobilize the community . Similarly, when African Americans split their vote between two mayoral candidates, it did not represent a superficial political divide between two politicians with their own networks and allies, but a deeper fissure between black progressives and the entrenched pro-business black leadership over such issues as Chevron and a proposed casino. Although often ignored by social scientists, this linkage between race and space runs the length of both racial and urban history in the United States. As Robert Self (2003, 17) notes, “Space is not the whole story, but it would be a strange and incoherent one without it.” The Richmond case study also points to the need to rethink the way in which we discuss race, politics, and the line between cities and suburbs. Much of the scholarship that has extended Browning, Marshall, and Tabb’s work on racial politics (and specifically political coalitions) focuses on major cities, despite the fact that six of the ten cities included in the original study can also be considered suburbs (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 2003; Sonenshein 1997; Sonenshein and Drayse 2006).3 On the suburban side, scholars have tended to focus on fights for inclusion, political incorporation, and representation in previously white and homogeneous communities (Haynes 2001; Johnson 2002; Lai and Geron 2006; Marrow 2005; Saito...

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