The State of Race Relations in the United States and the Effects on Environmental Justice: A Conversation with Julian Agyeman

HJAAP Our first question concerns your perspective on race relations in the United States from an environmental framework, as compared with your work in either Great Britain or the Soviet Union or other countries. The United States has a unique way of talking about race. How does that change the strategy of the environmental justice initiative or movement, as compared to how you frame it abroad? AGYEMAN The U.S. has a particular way of talking about and dealing with race--at least different, certainly, to my experience in the U.K. I've tried to think about why the U.S. has a different way of looking at race and how that affects environmental justice. I think the one thing I'd have to say is that we have environmental injustices in Britain. They are not as racially polarized because, basically, British society isn't quite as racially polarized as the U.S. As an example, research about ten years ago found that, like in the U.S., the most polluting facilities were closest to the lowest-income communities. And this was pretty statistically significant across Britain. But it was socioeconomically linked because we don't have zoning in Britain. We don't have racialized zoning. Well, we don't have zoning, full stop. So, you don't tend to get dense populations--or as dense populations or ghettos--of one particular racial group. Whereas in the U.S., there is much more active segregation in certain cities, where certain groups of people are kept in certain places. But it doesn't happen so much in Britain, certainly not legally. Illegally, I know that realtors do show people from different social groups to different places. And there have been cases in Britain where Asian families or African-Caribbean families have not gotten into the neighborhood they wanted to because realtors have been actively trying to maintain the Whiteness or otherwise of those neighborhoods. So, there is much more polarization in the U.S. And certainly, the work I'm doing in Canada on environmental justice is more like the U.K., in the sense that there isn't the racialized zoning. There is more of a spirit and an official policy of multi-culturalism in Canada. But, the positive side to the U.S. is that you have this fabulous civil rights movement; really, the culmination is [U.S. President] Barack Obama today. The environmental justice movement [in the United States] has managed to align its frame of outrage with that of civil rights. And I always think of civil rights as almost like being a renewable energy supply: you plug your plug into the socket, and you've got a live issue. The environmental justice movement really, I think, capitalized on that. Only in the U.S. could a civil rights movement [happen], as such, because of those conditions that I've just described: real racialized segregation through planning, through public policy making, through realty active decisions, etc. HJAAP Do you think now, given the election of Obama, that people might be receptive to understanding what environmental racism is? Or, is this a time where we should just sort of say, Let's focus on the solutions? AGYEMAN This is a really interesting point, and this is actually where my research is. We're at a really interesting point in racial history in the U.S. Barack Obama, [Massachusetts Governor] Deval Patrick, [Founding President of Green For All] Van Jones, and [Newark, N.J., Mayor] Cory Booker--this is the new black leadership. These are people who don't mention racism and civil rights in the first sentence, unlike--say--Al Sharpton and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. We've handed the baton to a new leadership, not just in politics, but in environmental justice. So, my good friend Robert Bullard, [environmental justice advocate], is part of the old leadership who expressed righteous indignation and started tub-thumping straightaway. Now, that was appropriate in the early days in environmental justice campaigning. …

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