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Book Review
| Packing Them In: An Archeology of Environmental Racism In Chicago, 1865–1954. By Sylvia Hood Washington. Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Lexington Books, 2005. x + 213 pages. Illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth $60.00, paper $19.95.
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| Sylvia Hood Washington's Packing Them In serves as a valuable link in the history of the environmental justice movement. Washington applies the social-power theories of Michel Foucault and various theories on the historic fluidity of race definitions to build her narrative. Rather than join the debate between environmental justice authors on whether race or class plays the dominant role in determining environmental burdens, Washington depicts "others" as victims. Through restrictive covenants, nativism, racism, and outright violence, elite whites deliberately constructed certain areas of Chicago as places for "social and political lepers" in society. These outcasts included both immigrant groups and African Americans. |
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Washington begins her study with a discussion of the background of environmental justice. She lays the blame on both the growth and acceptance of social Darwinism and scientific racism. She also faults early African American political leadership, especially the division between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington over segregation and political activism, as pivotal in supporting "power relations that contributed to the development and continuation of segregated geographical places and spaces that eventually became the physical zones inequitably targeted for environmental waste" (p. 46). She follows with three case studies—one immigrant and one African American response, as well as a white attempt to fill in a polluted waterway for political and economic reasons. Throughout these stories, Washington demonstrates that elite whites controlled the definition of "other": Whites also controlled where and how those others resided through legal wrangling and the control of scientific knowledge. |
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Washington's construction of race as a fluid concept bears additional research and investigation. However, scholars should be careful that in lumping ethnicity and class together they do not gloss over important differences between these identifiers. As Washington notes, the environmental injustice directed against white immigrants was transitory. As their presence became more accepted in society, they moved out of densely packed, unhealthy areas. African Americans, on the other hand, could not as quickly erase their differences with the elites who placed them in degraded communities. |
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Washington criticizes the field of environmental history for failing to write "from the perspective of the working class, minority, or ethnic community" (p. 10). Although her work shows brief glimpses from this view, Washington's narrative focused on more privileged voices within these case studies. This emphasis may simply be a reflection of the available source material, but additional research could add to this picture significantly. |
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Overall, this book provides an important, useful, theoretical construct to aid the discussion of the history behind "environmental ethnocentrism" (p. 5). Adding to earlier efforts by authors like Andrew Hurley, Washington shows that environmental injustice existed as both an issue and source of activism long before the Warren County incident drew national attention. Washington also meets her goal of demonstrating that these neighborhoods were not "helpless and ignorant victims who have suffered from environmental policies because they did not understand or did not attempt to influence them until the Environmental Justice Movement began" in 1982 (p. 7), but worked diligently against oppression in an attempt to live cleaner, healthier lives. |
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Elizabeth Blum is associate professor of history at Troy University in Troy, Alabama. She is completing a manuscript for the University Press of Kansas on gender, class, and race in environmental activism at Love Canal. |
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