Post-Racial Environmental Justice?: Articulating Disadvantage and Disparity in Southern California Air Monitoring Programs

• In Event: “Antiracist Science”: Interrogating Knowledge Production, Interrupting Racism

Abstract

For over two decades, United States federal and state environmental legislation has required government agencies to address the impact of environmental problems on low-income and minority populations. In spite of these measures, glaring racial disparities in environmental health persist. For many actors working in the arena of environmental public health, at stake in addressing these persistent racial environmental health disparities is the problem of making “environmental justice” both scientifically measurable and publicly legible.


This paper compares how different stakeholders-- scientists, regulators, activists, and residents of so-called “environmental justice communities”-- come to define or disavow toxic air as a racial problem, and what that means for environmental science and policy. In particular, this paper considers the implications of a recent wave of EJ legislation in California, mandating priority investment in “disadvantaged communities” and “community-driven” approaches to environmental science. These laws create a renewed imperative to operationalize vaguely defined legal designations of “disparity” and “disadvantage” in pollution research and mitigation. Through ethnographic research of two Southern California air monitoring programs, this paper analyzes how slippery concepts of “disadvantage,” “community,” and “environmental justice” are negotiated through the practice of environmental health research. It argues that innovative scientific techniques are mobilized as remedies to racial environmental health disparities, even as they work to discursively mute the role of racism in producing environmental injustice.

Author

• Katie Cox, University of California, Irvine