Recognizing Public Health as a Barrier to Environmental Justice, and Working Toward a “Red, Green, and Internationalist Abolition Movement”
Topics: Environmental Justice
, Latinx Geographies
, Geography and Urban Health
Keywords: environmental racism, public health, racial capitalism, abolition, justice
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 59
Authors:
Cristina Faiver-Serna, University of New Hampshire
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Abstract
The logics of carcerality that produce discriminatory punishment, racialized enclosures, and geographies of hardship, fear, pain, death, and injustice operate in service to the logics of racial capitalism, where profit is dependent upon upholding deadly, violent institutions, respectively: police and prisons, and the fossil fuel industry. In each case, racialized poor peoples, often the same communities, are enclosed by the violent boundaries these state-backed institutions impose. In a 2020 interview Ruth Wilson Gilmore observes: “Abolition has to be green. It has to take seriously the problems of environmental harm, of environmental racism, environmental degradation. To be green it has to be red. It has to figure out ways to generalize the resources needed for well-being for the most vulnerable people in our community which then will extend to all people. And to do that, to be green and red, it has to be international.” In this paper, I hone in on the entanglement of abolitionism with the struggle against environmental racism, both as movements working against state violence, and situate the U.S. public health “system” as an arm of the state that should be included as a site of struggle for a state-side red, green, and internationalist abolition movement. Environmental justice activists and scholars alike have historically overlooked the ways in which the state arm of public health works to uphold polluting industry, re-entrench geographies of environmental racism, and reproduce racialized geographies of state violence for communities where environmental racism and over-policing are historically and spatially entangled.
Recognizing Public Health as a Barrier to Environmental Justice, and Working Toward a “Red, Green, and Internationalist Abolition Movement”
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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