Book of the Week: Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States by Carl A. Zimring
By Carl A. Zimring
Call number: GE230 .Z56 2015
Review by Publisher's Weekly
Publisher's Description: When Joe Biden attempted to compliment Barack Obama by calling him “clean and articulate,” he unwittingly tapped into one of the most destructive racial stereotypes in American history. This book tells the history of the corrosive idea that whites are clean and those who are not white are dirty. From the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis Public Workers strike of 1968 through the present day, ideas about race and waste have shaped where people have lived, where people have worked, and how American society’s wastes have been managed.
Clean and White
offers a history of environmental racism in the United States focusing
on constructions of race and hygiene. In the wake of the civil war, as
the nation encountered emancipation, mass immigration, and the growth of
an urbanized society, Americans began to conflate the ideas of race and
waste. Certain immigrant groups took on waste management labor, such as
Jews and scrap metal recycling, fostering connections between the
socially marginalized and refuse. Ethnic “purity” was tied to pure
cleanliness, and hygiene became a central aspect of white identity.
Carl
A. Zimring here draws on historical evidence from statesmen, scholars,
sanitarians, novelists, activists, advertisements, and the United States
Census of Population to reveal changing constructions of environmental
racism. The material consequences of these attitudes endured and
expanded through the twentieth century, shaping waste management systems
and environmental inequalities that endure into the twenty-first
century. Today, the bigoted idea that non-whites are “dirty” remains
deeply ingrained in the national psyche, continuing to shape social and
environmental inequalities in the age of Obama.
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