Clean and White offers a history of environmental racism in the United
States focusing on constructions of race and hygiene
When Joe Biden attempted to compliment Barack Obama by calling him
"clean and articulate," he unwittingly tapped into one of the most
destructive racial stereotypes in American history. This book tells the
history of the corrosive idea that whites are clean and those who are
not white are dirty. From the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis
Public Workers strike of 1968 through the present day, ideas about race
and waste have shaped where people have lived, where people have worked,
and how American society's wastes have been managed.
In the wake of the civil war, as the nation encountered emancipation,
mass immigration, and the growth of an urbanized society, Americans
began to conflate the ideas of race and waste. Certain immigrant groups
took on waste management labor, such as Jews and scrap metal recycling,
fostering connections between the socially marginalized and refuse.
Ethnic "purity" was tied to pure cleanliness, and hygiene became a
central aspect of white identity.
Carl A. Zimring here draws on historical evidence from statesmen,
scholars, sanitarians, novelists, activists, advertisements, and the
United States Census of Population to reveal changing constructions of
environmental racism. The material consequences of these attitudes
endured and expanded through the twentieth century, shaping waste
management systems and environmental inequalities that endure into the
twenty-first century. Today, the bigoted idea that non-whites are
"dirty" remains deeply ingrained in the national psyche, continuing to
shape social and environmental inequalities in the age of Obama.
