How Does Colorblind Racism Shape Environmental Inequalities? Examining Race and Pollution in Brazil

• In Event: 2341 - Environment, Oppressions, and Justice I

Abstract

Although race scholars have demonstrated the central role that meso-level mechanisms play in reproducing structural racism, few studies have examined how racial ideology and racialization operate within organizations. Research on racial socialization often views institutions as ‘race-making’, yet overlooks how individuals actively institutionalize ideology. Scholars have recently called for research that examines, on the one hand, how ideology shapes the formation of organizational practices and, on the other hand, how individuals interpret and enact racial ideology. This article therefore investigates the mutually constitutive processes through which organizations transmit racial logics to individuals and by which individuals racialize organizational practices. Based on an extended case study of Brazil’s sugar-ethanol industry, I examine how white elites in polluting organizations translate colorblind ideology into environmental policies that perpetuate racial inequalities. Drawing on in-depth interviews with white elites and ethnographic observations at mills, I argue that elites use non-racial discursive frames to rationalize toxic practices that subordinate non-white populations. Understanding how colorblind racism operates in the environmental context is important, since race remains the major predictor for exposure to toxic conditions. This article advances the literature by showing 1) how meso-level organizations reproduce the racialized social structure in their allocation of resources, opportunities, and, in this case, environmental harms and 2) how white elites create discourses, epistemologies, and strategic ignorance in efforts to institutionalize racial ideology in organizational practices.

Author

• Ian Robert Carrillo, University of California, Santa Barbara