Colorblind Racial Ideology and Government Agencies’ Environmental Justice Programs

• In Event: 536 - Regular Session. Environmental Sociology 3

Abstract

In the past 20 years, government agencies in the United States and elsewhere have adopted and implemented ‘environmental justice’ (EJ) policies, programs, and practices in response to the EJ movement. Largely grassroots and loosely networked, EJ activists fight the unequal clustering of environmental problems in low-income communities and communities of color and continue a long struggle against environmental racism in the United States and beyond. However, agencies’ EJ efforts to date appear to coopt the concept of EJ, disappointing movement members and academic supporters. In this paper, I show that these outcomes stem in part from a factor other scholars of EJ policy implementation have not addressed — an ideological hostility to EJ principles among agency staff. Drawing on confidential, ethnographic interviews with staff from numerous state and federal environmental regulatory agencies in the United States, I show that agency EJ staff feel unable to integrate EJ policies, programs, and practices as fully as they would like because an ideology of colorblind racism dominates regulatory culture. Based on these findings, I argue that, to explain why agencies’ EJ efforts have failed to meet EJ movement expectations, we must attend not only to the formal policies, pressure from industry, and other factors that scholars have rightly noted, but also to dominant racial ideology and other elements of regulatory culture.

Author

• Jill Lindsey Harrison, University of Colorado-Boulder