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A review by gabsalott13
Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town by Melissa Checker
5.0
***Note: as a reminder, this is a book review/reflection paper for my course, CPLN 624: Readings on Race, Poverty, and Place.
Melissa Checker’s Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town details the combined contamination of ecological and social resources in Hyde Park, a tiny black neighborhood in Augusta, Georgia.
I first became interested in this book when it was introduced in class as a story about “normal places.” This conversation about the appeal of normal places/smaller cities reminded me of this recent op-ed in the NYT about why we need to return to places like these (which is where most of us come from), particularly if we’re interested in meaningful justice efforts. The author, Michele Anderson, speaks about the concept of homecoming, and how by engaging with normal places, you can not only stop participating in destructive economies of transplants in coastal cities, but also help to create “a vital, wakeful society of local communities elegantly adapted to local ecosystems.”
Black Southern women (like Latria Graham, a great South Carolinian and alum of my high school!), have been saying this, and Checker shows that many Hyde Park activists have been doing this. She shows that many of these people have continued the fight for a neighborhood they have long left, due to their religious and cultural ties to it. Even for people without these kinds of roots, this book starts with Melissa Checker asking what she could do for environmental justice. Her answer is somewhat simple —moving to a place and beginning activism where “everyone else wants to leave.”
In addition to my personal interests, this book is largely about the hidden history of environmental racism, a topic I’ve been casually learning about in Attica Locke’s (wonderful!) Jay Porter series. In Polluted Promises, because Hyde Park residents could not “point a finger at one deliberate polluter” in their neighborhood, they were often gaslit by the scientific and political establishment alike. This inability to address less-publicized wrongs, and to deem (black) people who don’t have empirical evidence of this treatment as near-conspiracy theorists, is common in so many fights. I remember a time when we thought hoteps were crazy for saying there were more black people than the government said, and now we’re talking about the risk of undercounts for Census 2020!
Obviously, part of the issue is getting the information in the right hands, so that more people who intrinsically know that their communities are suffering environmentally can learn the language and gain the resources to prove this to people. However, even when people have a better sense of environmental racism, many of traditional education programs are seen as the territory of “white women with predatory fetishes for every urban issue except their own harm in cities” (quote from one of the shadier group chats for my major.) These white women are often doing valuable work, and snide remarks won’t change that. But, it’s important to think about how everyone can become equipped with the technical resources to make these cases and wage these fights from a scientific standpoint.
Melissa Checker’s Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town details the combined contamination of ecological and social resources in Hyde Park, a tiny black neighborhood in Augusta, Georgia.
I first became interested in this book when it was introduced in class as a story about “normal places.” This conversation about the appeal of normal places/smaller cities reminded me of this recent op-ed in the NYT about why we need to return to places like these (which is where most of us come from), particularly if we’re interested in meaningful justice efforts. The author, Michele Anderson, speaks about the concept of homecoming, and how by engaging with normal places, you can not only stop participating in destructive economies of transplants in coastal cities, but also help to create “a vital, wakeful society of local communities elegantly adapted to local ecosystems.”
Black Southern women (like Latria Graham, a great South Carolinian and alum of my high school!), have been saying this, and Checker shows that many Hyde Park activists have been doing this. She shows that many of these people have continued the fight for a neighborhood they have long left, due to their religious and cultural ties to it. Even for people without these kinds of roots, this book starts with Melissa Checker asking what she could do for environmental justice. Her answer is somewhat simple —moving to a place and beginning activism where “everyone else wants to leave.”
In addition to my personal interests, this book is largely about the hidden history of environmental racism, a topic I’ve been casually learning about in Attica Locke’s (wonderful!) Jay Porter series. In Polluted Promises, because Hyde Park residents could not “point a finger at one deliberate polluter” in their neighborhood, they were often gaslit by the scientific and political establishment alike. This inability to address less-publicized wrongs, and to deem (black) people who don’t have empirical evidence of this treatment as near-conspiracy theorists, is common in so many fights. I remember a time when we thought hoteps were crazy for saying there were more black people than the government said, and now we’re talking about the risk of undercounts for Census 2020!
Obviously, part of the issue is getting the information in the right hands, so that more people who intrinsically know that their communities are suffering environmentally can learn the language and gain the resources to prove this to people. However, even when people have a better sense of environmental racism, many of traditional education programs are seen as the territory of “white women with predatory fetishes for every urban issue except their own harm in cities” (quote from one of the shadier group chats for my major.) These white women are often doing valuable work, and snide remarks won’t change that. But, it’s important to think about how everyone can become equipped with the technical resources to make these cases and wage these fights from a scientific standpoint.