RACE, POLLUTION, AND THE MASTERY OF NATURE

Racial environmental inequities, documented in research over the past ten years, have deep cultural sources in the connections between the c oncept of social pollution as it has operated in U.S. race relations a nd the pollution of minority communities, both of which are, in part, the expression of our dominant cultural ethic and project of mastering nature. The project of mastering nature requires the disciplining of ''human nature'' in a context of social power in order to dominate ''o utward'' or ''external'' nature for the purposes of production and con sumption. In disciplining human nature, our ethics and practices of wo rk and gender have fostered the repression and projection of sensualit y, widely construed, onto African-Americans in particular. This racial ''other'' has been historically segregated in our society through soc ial pollution taboos. Social pollution practices, in turn, facilitate the disproportionate environmental pollution of minority communities b y rendering such pollution, like the communities themselves, less visi ble and therefore less of a threat to white centers of power. This fit between social and environmental pollution is expressed in the notion of ''appropriately polluted space.'' Attempts to understand and corre ct racial environmental inequities will founder unless these deeper cu ltural connections are recognized and challenged. Moreover, attempts t o redefine an environmentally benign ''self'' in the American context require that the historical ''other'' of race be confronted and transc ended.