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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 104.1 | The History Cooperative
104.1  
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March, 2008
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Reviews

Packing Them In
An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–1954

By Sylvia Hood Washington
(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. Pp. 215. Illustrations, index. Clothbound, $66.00; paperbound, $21.95.)

Chicago is one of the most notorious sites of racial violence and segregation in the United States. Historically, most of this tension has centered on housing and on the maintenance of neighborhood racial boundaries by whites. Thus it is no surprise that the practice of relegating people of color to areas crowded with polluting factories and other locally unwanted land uses—environmental racism—is also widespread in that city. Sylvia Washington's Packing Them In provides strong, sometimes startling evidence of environmental racism in Chicago, and offers a historical explanation for how this social ill developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 1
      Drawing from Michel Foucault's concepts of power/knowledge, as well as from biopolitics and theories of racial formation, Washington argues that non-whites are constructed outside of the parameters of the body politic. Since racialization is a sociohistorical process, many groups previously defined as non-white (e.g., Irish, European Jews, and other immigrants) were later reclassified as white, in the process becoming less vulnerable to environmental racism. This argument represents a significant contribution to environmental justice studies and suggests a comparative and relational ethnic studies approach to future treatments of the subject. . . .
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