Abstract
Clean and White builds on Zimring’s earlier work Cash For Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America (2009, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, First Paperback Edition). The latest book moves beyond the first to explore the history of environmental racism in the United States through the lens of dirt, from the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis Public Works Strike of 1968. Setting aside a conventional conception of waste as material we discard (and rely on public and private systems to remove), Zimring aims to show how “waste is a social process” (1), and to tell the yet untold cultural and racial story of this process. Studies of whiteness in the United States have previously focused on the roles of law, economics, literature, and science in the social construction of race over time. Little attention has been paid to how environmental factors have shaped this construction. This book is a timely contribution to prompt, maybe even reshape, debates about race, environmental protection, law and justice in America.
Zimring structures his story around the evolution of American constructions of race, waste, and their interactions. The book is composed of a concise introduction, a brief yet thought-provoking conclusion and four substantial parts. Part I of the book begins with the introduction of American anxieties about race and dirt in the early years of the republic. Zimring shows how moral and scientific thinking contributed to the development of racial inequalities in antebellum America. Yet, his effort to trace the roots of environmental racism before the Civil War by linking race and environment together is unsatisfactory. For example, he does not specify how the institution of slavery was influenced by environmental factors. He also fails to elaborate in detail on the rise of the discourse of “black and polluted” in the late eighteenth century. Thus, how African Americans were stigmatized as “not clean” at this time remains ambiguous.
The outbreak of the Civil War ended slavery, but racism nevertheless continued to manifest itself in nearly every aspect of social life. As Zimring observes, “the legal basis for white supremacy, had, it seemed, been dismantled; social and cultural hierarchies would prove more durable” (47). Zimring argues that after 1865, African Americans and waste were both treated as something “out of place,” and white American concerns about race became enmeshed with growing concerns about what was discarded or cast away. The Ku Klux Klan, for instance, emerged after the war out of the fears of emancipated African Americans, fears of waves of new migrants, and fears of contagion incubated by waste and dirt.
Part II addresses how new constructions of racial and sanitary order developed from the 1870s to the 1920s. Zimring claims that, “whiteness suffered two blows in the wake of the Civil War” (79). First, abolition of slavery appeared to dismantle the rationale for white identity that had developed in the South. Many Americans who enjoyed white privilege were terrified by the prospect that freed slaves might own property, vote, or hold office. Second, mass immigration from abroad challenged nativist white identity throughout the United States. White Americans feared that the influx of new immigrants might reshape the nation as a multi-hued, multi-cultural society. In response to these two sets of concerns, “Americans redefined whiteness by linking skin color to cleanliness in the years after Lee’s surrender ” (80). Ideas of environmental racism were reinforced in popular culture, and specifically by market mechanisms (soap marketing, in particular) that developed and pushed the view white skin was pure while other color skins were not.
Part III explores the material consequences of this new racial and sanitary order, an order in which “dirt and disease permeated the language of racial purity, and racial constructions permeated discussion of public health” (106). The author focuses on two significant material outcomes. First, non-white people were given the dirty work of handling waste. (Although Zimring distinguishes between different types of immigrants – Jews, Italians, Asians, etc. – working in the sanitary industry, he does not explain how only some immigrants were able to leave it and seize opportunities of upward mobility. Readers may be curious about the variation in experiences of environmental racism endured by non-white groups of people.) Second, “in the years between 1915 and 1960, urban spaces across the United States [were] reorganized with race as a primary organizing factor” (160). When middle-class whites decamped to suburbs, non-whites were forced to stay in the abandoned cities. In his discussion of the formation of residential segregation, Zimring convincingly demonstrates how ideas about blacks – that they somehow polluted white neighborhoods, that they poisoned the community, and that they devalued property – were later turned into federal policy (e.g., zoning).
The last part of the book focuses on the divergence of non-white people’s fate in fighting environmental inequalities. Assimilation involved putting increasing distance between a group and waste (165). Participation in World War II enabled Jewish and Italian immigrants to live closer to white Americans and further away from waste, leading to the social formation of “white ethnics.” African Americans who fought in the war were denied the opportunity to move, and this denial produced a new rhetoric of resistance. According to Zimring, environmental racism and political protest reached a high point in the Memphis Public Works Strike of 1968 when waste management emerged as a civil rights issue.
Clean and White can benefit any audience who is interested in the interactions of law, race, culture, and environment in American history. The book is rich in details, rigorous in analysis and thought-provoking in conclusions. Zimring’s work is also a welcome call for continuous exploration of the relationship between the environment and racism in the United States.