Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States – Carl Zimring
As I read through Carl Zimring’s Clean and White, it took me several chapters to figure out what exactly his book is about. The story eventually reveals that Zimring is interested in how racial roles became associated and disassociated with environmental conditions in cities, specifically waste management. This made the chapter on Thomas Jefferson at the beginning quite confusing – was this Zimring’s attempt to trace the origins of dirtiness being conflated with race? If so the first half or even first 3/4 of the book offered nothing particularly enlightening that hasn’t been argued or explained by other authors before. Further, the information did not generate an in-depth discussion of the links between dirtiness and race. It felt as if Zimring was only scratching the surface. Only during the last chapters and the sanitation strike does the book seem to take a more refreshing turn, and Zimring’s work begs for another book written about race and what he labels the Environmental Justice movement of the 1970s-1980s. Too much of the argument here is implicit and too much of the history is summation of what has come before. While an interesting topic, Clean and White fails to deliver on its promise.
