Critical Environmental Justice Studies Through the Veil

The veil and environment

First articulated in the powerful opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk, ¹⁴ “the veil” stands for how black people must simultaneously live in two Americas: the ostensibly unbounded white America and their own, black America. This second America is an often-unacknowledged alternate, yet very real, social world that is not just bounded by but also built through race and racism. For Du Bois, living such a life “within the veil” impacts all relationships, even those with oneself, conjoining the racialized subject to the structural foundations of racism. ¹⁵ Thus, as Winant renders clear, the concept “operates both at the level of the personal or intrapsychic and at the institutional or structural level of social interaction.” ¹⁶ Its sheer everydayness is dialectically reinforced at multiple levels. The veil divides communities, states, families, institutions, and psyches, yet never in the same manner. And as Du Bois notes, this is a problem not only for black communities but also for all minorities, those from “Asia and Africa, America and the islands of the sea.” ¹⁷

Nevertheless, the veil is also a potential source of power, for in dividing social worlds it also becomes a foundation for political and cultural legitimacy. Situating one's social self on one side of the “color-line,” in other words, inspires alliances with those on the same side as well as antagonisms with those on the other side, substantially, as Du Bois put it, hone one's “power” and one's “mission.” ¹⁸ Du Bois's goal was, therefore, not to erase the veil, but to transform it in a manner that preserved the culture it helped to build yet do away with the subjugation it historically generated.

Despite its theoretical potential, Du Bois's concept of the veil has been thus far underutilized in terms of how it can add to conversations that examine relationships among the environment, race, and inequality. Meanwhile, other aspects of Du Bois's oeuvre have recently been examined more explicitly as they can relate to the environment. Both Schulz et al. ¹⁹ and Taylor, ²⁰ for instance, note that Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro ²¹ can be understood in the EJ tradition. Heynen ²² combines urban political ecology with Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America ²³ to build what he calls an “abolition ecology,” an approach designed to better connect white supremacist and other racialized processes to uneven development in urban environments. Clark, Auerbach, and Zhang, ²⁴ in turn, develop what they call “the Du Bois nexus.” Focusing on people's relationship to the land, they examine how distinct historical and material conditions, both social and environment, can shape national, class, gender, race, and other relationships associated with environmental injustice. In total, this nascent, important scholarship on Du Bois and the environment has successfully begun a conversation regarding the way Du Bois addressed historical and spatial questions regarding labor, race, and the environment.

Here, we add to this conversation on Du Bois and the environment by briefly considering how his use of the veil as a real, influential mediator of racialized social experiences can be extended through what Pellow identifies as the four “pillars” of critical EJ studies.

Critical EJ studies and fish consumption advisories: four pillars through the veil

Contemporary EJ scholars are intentionally reconsidering the ways in which the “justice” half of EJ is conceived, noting that it has often been thought about as primarily distributive in nature in that the goal has been to push for reforms that allocate resources more fairly as opposed to a more structural, intersectional, or generally critical conception of justice. ²⁵ With this in mind, a growing number of scholars are now rethinking the foundation of EJ studies. ²⁶ Pellow points to four specific ways, or “pillars,” scholars are reconsidering EJ studies, each of which can be enhanced through an incorporation of the veil.

The first pillar of Critical EJ studies is that systems of oppression along the lines of race, gender, nationality, economic status, indigeneity, etc., are interconnected and mutually constitutive, and that these also connect to the more-than-human world. This pillar draws on theories of intersectionality ²⁷ to explain how categories of difference interact in ways that produce both advantages and disadvantages during struggles for EJ. Categories of difference are not separate but relational producers of socio-environmental relationships.

Although this first pillar emphasizes the additive and variable nature of structural inequality,“the veil” offers an additional analytical layer regarding subjective experience. In regards to environmental injustice, the fusion of these two theoretical lenses allows for a more personal understanding of how communities—none of which can be accurately categorized through a singular label—must negotiate potentially toxic environmental relationships through lived tensions. This can occur through examinations of racialized relationships with environments, in particular how personal interactions with one's material surroundings are mediated through racialized, gendered, colonial, and other, ever-interactive, social structures, forcing people to live within both the dominant world and their own. For example, most states only issue fish consumption advisories with fishing licenses (and online), and a majority of state advisories are only available in English. ²⁸ This means that, even when they do reach anglers, advisories often fail to properly communicate risk, especially to those with limited English proficiency, the elderly, women, youth, and migrants, ²⁹ and these are the populations who consume locally caught fish in high quantities compared with white, male, elites. ³⁰ This manner of addressing public contamination, in other words, assumes that all citizens relate to environments in the same way as dominant white communities. ³¹ This means that those that are not from dominant white communities must often negotiate their own, often times variable, environmental relationships as well as the state's, as if through a veil in which they simultaneously exist within the dominant white world and their own.

At the center of both critical EJ studies and Du Bois's concept of the veil is attention to the multi-scalar aspects of injustice, the second pillar of critical EJ studies. For instance, Du Bois assiduously juxtaposed the large-scale, structural, aspects of race and racism with small-scale, personal, rhetoric throughout his oeuvre, from his dissertation on the Atlantic slave system to Black Reconstruction. As Winant ³² argues, the veil must be understood through this multi-scalar dialectic, in particular how it embodies the racial antagonisms and overlapping contradictions that develop across scales to construct and reconstruct relationships between racialized institutions and private identities.

Critical EJ studies likewise “embraces multi-scalar methodological and theoretical approaches to better comprehend the complex spatial and temporal causes, consequences, and possible resolutions of EJ struggles.” ³³ There is an insistence on analyzing the multiple spatiotemporal scales of social and environmental injustice, more similar to work done in geography, ³⁴ as opposed to the single-scale lens of earlier scholarship. This includes observing the multi-scalar connections that drive the problems at hand, as well as the necessity for multi-scalar responses to environmental injustice. The difference between critical EJ studies and Du Bois's approach is that critical EJ studies are more explicitly concerned with the environmental aspects of this embrace. For instance, Pellow notes how we must pay attention to anthropogenic climate change not only at the global scale, where the worst is yet to come, but also at the community scale, where its impacts are already uneven in that they already disproportionately affect communities of color. To understand the unjust treatment of a multitude of environmental issues, ranging from individually impacted communities such as the St. Regis Mohawk, where James Ransom, Director of the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force, says, “contamination of the St. Lawrence River (has) resulted in a destruction of a subsistence (fishing) lifestyle for the Mohawk people”, ³⁵ to the way New York state advisories construct the problem of public contamination in terms of personal responsibility as opposed to a foundation for action against the industries discharging harmful chemicals into the St. Lawrence, ³⁶ demands not only far broader spatiotemporal perspectives but also a dialectical relationship between these broader perspectives and personal experience similar to those advocated by both Du Bois and critical EJ studies.

The third pillar is a renewed focus on the ways state power itself is a source of social and environmental inequality, one that can use legal recognition of EJ efforts as a tool to coopt and deaden a movement's radicalism and keep the hierarchies at the root of the problem in place. Reformist solutions to environmental inequalities often inadvertently reinforce the status quo power dynamics that spawn inequalities, and, as a result, a critique of the state is a foundational element of critical EJ studies. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, Anarchist, and Women of Color Feminist perspectives, Pellow argues that “the very purpose of the state is to exert dominance over populations, resources, and territory, among other things.” ³⁷ When the state does appear to ameliorate environmental inequalities, it can only be to ultimately weaken the movements for justice that called attention to them in the first place.

Nevertheless, as Holifield ³⁸ notes, although Pellow's insistence that the state is itself a source of social and environmental inequality is undoubtedly accurate, the state is neither monolithic nor all powerful. It is important to recognize that the state, though a source of environmental inequality, is many things at once. State power is relational, and it is varied in form and function. ³⁹ For instance, Besek ⁴⁰ has demonstrated that advisory policy is largely funded and driven by angler tourism and alienating this constituency would be akin to alienating the advisories customer base. The state actors who create advisories, in other words, have to serve a particular constituency, rendering them not all powerful but rather as one mechanism in a constellation of structural influences. Indeed, Du Bois himself always maintained a deeply skeptical, yet complicated and ever-evolving, relationship with the state. For Du Bois, every institution is partitioned by race and racism, yet, in recognizing this, he saw state action as a potential (if rare) fount of empowerment, for example, his praise for the Freedmen's Bureau ^{41 , 42} (praise in which the veil plays a central role). Du Bois can, therefore, play a slight corrective role for this third pillar.

The of idea of indispensability, the fourth pillar for Critical EJ studies, is an idea that values both communities and socioecological systems in their own right but also one set on countering systems of thought, be they racist or ecologically destructive or both, which ignores how all communities and socioecological systems are interdependent and therefore are vital to our collective futures. Akin to Du Bois's perspective, this is not a call for assimilation in which non-dominant “others” are to be incorporated into a single developmental vision of society or socioecological relationships, but rather an insistence that single developmental visions are unjust in that they do not reflect difference. Singular socioecological visions, particularly those driven by the destructive environmental logics of industrial capitalism and the development project, can come close to erasing relationships that should be foregrounded as indispensable.

Advisories again offer a clear example. For if advisories are the principal means employed by the state to regulate life among toxic environments, the target, intentionally or not, of regulatory governance then becomes non-normative culinary cultures, especially if these are intertwined with non-normative ecological relationships. Delores Garza of the Alaska Native Science Commission explains: “[w]e eat much more [fish, wildlife, and plants] than is listed [by EPA and other agencies], but we also eat it in a very short time period. That's when strawberries are fresh, when corn is fresh, when salmon run – you eat nothing but salmon…. You eat salmon for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner for a month, and then you go to your next resources and you eat that same amount of that resource.” ⁴³ Op. cit. For Garza, advisory advice assumes a diet that is disconnected from ecological cycles and is thus stable throughout the year, while she lives in a second, ostensibly expendable, world, as if through a veil, in which her community's diet fluctuates with ecological cycles.

Indeed, as Du Bois grew older, his conception of the veil transformed. If it had been born from the dialectics of Hegelian thought he absorbed in Germany as a young man, by the second world war, ⁴⁴ as he more fully embraced Marxist and anti-colonial thought, the concept thickened. The veil eventually represented an impenetrable barrier for Du Bois, one that at once protected some black communities from select aspects of the racism so fundamental to U.S. institutions but also excluded them from taking full part in those institutions. Du Bois feared that lifting it, if even possible, would entail an absorption of black cultures, which had for centuries been treated as expendable, into dominant white culture. The final pillar of critical EJ studies extends this line of thought beyond human beings, to not only specific communities or “sacrifice zones” but also entire populations of marginalized people that are too often treated as expendable “others.” ⁴⁵