Where the Waters Divide: Neoliberalism, White Privilege and Environmental Racism

• In Event: 391 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Paper Session. Rethinking Race and Nation: Transnational and Comparative Approaches

Abstract

Recent neoliberal reforms in Canada and the United States represent a new hegemonic form of racism and white privilege; one that transfers the burdens of resource extraction and economic production away from the interests of private property to the traditional territories of First Nations and Native Americans. The effect of this lacuna is twofold: first, it perpetuates the ideology that free markets and private property—the hallmarks of neoliberal orthodoxy—yield prosperity and progress for all, and second it continues to consign institutional racism towards First Nations in Canada and Native Americans in the United States as something that happened in their colonial past. Moreover, it is the ability to keep this internal contradiction—the expansion of private property and racial injustice—separate that makes this racial formation particularly hegemonic. This research examines the ways in which neoliberal reforms in Canada and the United States reproduce and reinforce an environmental racial formation? Using the sitings of two waste facilities and the passing of recent federal budgetary bills this paper illustrates how various forms of contemporary environmental racism—structural, hegemonic, and white privilege—work together to the benefit the interests of Whites at the expense of First Nations in Canada and Native Americans in the United States.

Author

• Michael J. Mascarenhas, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute