Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States By Carl A. Zimring

Abstract

Over the past thirty years, historians have made significant contributions to the body of academic literature on environmental racism. Most of this work employs a case-study method either to dissect the array of historical forces responsible for racially skewed geographies of waste or to document eco-justice activism. Carl Zimring’s most recent monograph addresses both of these subjects but also charts new territory by ascribing the development of environmental inequalities to a cultural association between whiteness and cleanliness that intensified over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries throughout the United States.