Between massive environmental protests and looming worries of climate change, it is easy to forget how a multitude of communities have found their own ways to sustain themselves, preserving their residents and affirming their rights to proper living conditions.
In Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, Julie Sze, a professor of American Studies at UC Davis, documents how systemic racial segregation in New York City drove waste dumping, high pollution, and elevated asthma rates among Black and Brown communities.
Sze demonstrates how urban planning and environmental health activism in minority and low income communities differs from other neighborhoods. A separation from these communities and their White counterparts are created as attributes like political and social histories, racial demographics, and the economic circumstances of these residents are considered when creating zoned (or redlined) neighborhoods.
She emphasizes “…the ability of those with the least access to resources to shape the struggle for environmental justice” while expressing how New York is “ideal” for observations on disadvantaged communities as a place where social power and the balance between local and global processes infiltrate all institutions of the City.
Readers follow along the concept of “environmental pollution as-commodity” as Sze describes the growing number of factories moving into marginalized neighborhoods. Rights to clean air, freedom from congestion, and less negative health impacts, like asthma, become commodities– or luxuries– to residents. In turn, the loss of these rights from increasing pollution from businesses becomes a reality for those living in these neighborhoods. Sze, however, challenges how pollution pervades the lives of marginalized communities in New York city as the factories of conglomerates are given priority over residential areas.
The first wide-scale sanitation movements began in the early 1900s because of trash overflowing into streets and unavoidable smells motivated residents of NYC streets to tackle issues regarding public health. An emphasis on fresh air, pure water, and general cleanliness was considered to be essential in getting rid of diseases spread from unsanitary living conditions. Though this theory was disproved as more cities built sewers, and water filtration helped drop typhoid, cholera, and other water-borne diseases mortality rates.
Sze addresses the spread of tuberculosis and how assumptions about those who contracted diseases intertwined with racial politics in urban spaces, specifically public housing. She describes how the stigmatization surrounding Black American neighborhoods led to poor environmental conditions. Death rates from tuberculosis were seven times higher in predominantly Black compared to white neighborhoods. This drove moral apathy towards “lower classes” heightened through these wrongful descriptions of Black neighborhoods.
Later on in Noxious New York, she describes zoning and segregation of land based on pollution. Sze reveals that zoning has been linked to the term “congestion” – a reference to congestion of population but also buildings– and its effects on property values. Zoning was also linked to de facto discrimination practices through land use policies. She brings in studies from other geographers, such as Juliana Maantay, who outlined the relationship between neighborhoods and industrial zoning areas between 1960-1990. Sze utilizes Maantay’s findings to reveal that zoning concentrates manufacturing in neighborhoods with less financial and social resources. These communities, which had less political and social influence made them easier targets for companies to intrude upon.
Another aspect of Noxious New York is how this history leads to the disproportionate rates of asthma amongst Black and Brown communities, specifically children. With five times greater hospitalization rates for Black and Latino Americans and children in these communities having 3.5 times greater chances of contracting asthma, Sze stressed the importance of reflecting upon New York’s troubled environmental health history.
The hope in Sze’s book comes from New York movements such as WE ACT and El Puente that have tackled both health and discrimination issues. With asthma rates as their catalysts, these movements have worked with a variety of institutions to resist the encroachment of new industries and tackle research directly involving their communities.
El Puente’s research in Williamsburg, Brooklyn works to “join local insights with professional scientific techniques”, says Jason Corburn (featured in Noxious New York). Additionally, WE ACT has worked with the Columbia School of Public Health Research Project on Asthma in order to provide collections of data impacting children of marginalized communities. In partnering with Columbia, WE ACT receives support that helps advance their goal of reducing pollution exposure and documenting and reducing the issue of pollution causing asthma in their neighborhoods.
Sze highlights the important work of these current movements through community-based research. Noxious New York portrays how community-based research rejects the notion of being too “emotional” or “irrational” and instead provides readers with an explanation as to how environmental health assessments can be done without forgetting how risk can increase in marginalized communities.