TY - JOUR
T1 - The multiple people of color origins of the US environmental justice movement
T2 - social movement spillover and regional racial projects in California
AU - Perkins, Tracy
N1 - Funding Information:
The author wishes to thank all of the activists who shared their time and reflections in interviews for this project. She also wishes to thank for their comments Leslie Fields, Caroline Farrell, Manuel Vallee, Heath Sledge, David Meyer, Vernon Morris and the attendees at the ‘Race and the Environment: Bridging the Gap’ mini-conference preceding the 2018 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, where an early version of this work was presented. The author also wishes to thank three anonymous reviewers and the Guest Associate Editors for this special edition, Raoul Liévanos, Lauren Richter, Elizabeth Wilder and especially Jennifer Carrera. The following funding sources supported interviews between 2007 and 2018: The University of Arizona Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice, the Spivack Program Community Action Research Initiative of the American Sociological Association, the Howard University Summer Faculty Research Fellowship, the Environmental Studies Department of the University of California Santa Cruz, the Center on Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California Santa Cruz, the Consortium for Women and Research Graduate Research Award at the University of California Davis, and the Humanities Institute at the University of California Davis.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - This paper contributes to scholarship on the origins of the US environmental justice movement (EJM) through exploration of the early EJM in California. The national EJM is often seen as having grown out of the intersection of environmentalism and the Black civil rights movement in the 1982 protests in Warren County, North Carolina. This paper adds weight to alternate narratives that depict the EJM as drawing on a variety of racialized social movement infrastructures that vary regionally. These infrastructures, as they were built in California, are analyzed as regional racial projects responding to histories of white supremacy that are connected through social movement spillover. This conceptual framework illuminates the place-based ways in which racial oppression and racial justice responses create social movement infrastructure that persists across multiple movement formations, both across contemporary groups and through time. The paper draws on data gathered from existing case studies and oral histories, in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival documents to offer a capacious view of the EJM’s origins.
AB - This paper contributes to scholarship on the origins of the US environmental justice movement (EJM) through exploration of the early EJM in California. The national EJM is often seen as having grown out of the intersection of environmentalism and the Black civil rights movement in the 1982 protests in Warren County, North Carolina. This paper adds weight to alternate narratives that depict the EJM as drawing on a variety of racialized social movement infrastructures that vary regionally. These infrastructures, as they were built in California, are analyzed as regional racial projects responding to histories of white supremacy that are connected through social movement spillover. This conceptual framework illuminates the place-based ways in which racial oppression and racial justice responses create social movement infrastructure that persists across multiple movement formations, both across contemporary groups and through time. The paper draws on data gathered from existing case studies and oral histories, in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival documents to offer a capacious view of the EJM’s origins.
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U2 - 10.1080/23251042.2020.1848502
DO - 10.1080/23251042.2020.1848502
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85100186979
SN - 2325-1042
VL - 7
SP - 147
EP - 159
JO - Environmental Sociology
JF - Environmental Sociology
IS - 2
ER -