Is there a global environmental justice movement?

One of the causes of the increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. There are conflicts on resource extraction, transport and waste disposal. Therefore, there are many local complaints, as shown in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and other inventories. And not only complaints; there are also many successful examples of stopping projects and developing alternatives, testifying to the existence of a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Moreover, since the 1980s and 1990s, this movement has developed a set of concepts and campaign slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include environmental racism, popular epidemiology, the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous, biopiracy, tree plantations are not forests, the ecological debt, climate justice, food sovereignty, land grabbing and water justice, among other concepts. These terms were born from socio-environmental activism, but sometimes they have also been taken up by academic political ecologists and ecological economists who, for their part, have contributed other concepts to the global environmental justice movement, such as ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ or the ‘ecological footprint’.     

Public administration reform for Aboriginal affairs: An institutionalist analysis

Persistent underperformance of public policy and program implementation in Aboriginal affairs is widely recognised. We analysed the results of two case studies of attempted reforms in public administration of Aboriginal primary health care in the Northern Territory, using a framework based on the institutionalist and systemic racism literatures, with the aim of better understanding the sources of implementation failure. Implementation of the agreed reforms was unsuccessful. Contributing factors were as follows: strong recognition of the need for change was not sustained; the seeds of change, present in the form of alternative practices, were not built on; there was a notable absence of sustained political/bureaucratic authorisation; and, interacting with all of these, systemic racism had important consequences and implications. Our framework was useful for making sense of the results. It is clear that reforms in Aboriginal affairs will require government authorities to engage with organisations and communities. We conclude that there are four requirements for improved implementation success: clear recognition of the need for change in ‘business as usual’; sustainable commitment and authorisation; the building of alternative structures and methods to enable effective power sharing (consistent with the requirements of parliamentary democracy); and addressing the impact of systemic racism on decision-making, relationships, and risk management.     

Labor radicalism and the local politics of Chinese exclusion: Mayor Jacob Weisbach and the Tacoma Chinese expulsion of 1885

ABSTRACT

The 1885 Chinese expulsion from Tacoma, Washington Territory highlights the importance of local political economy in shaping how a wider anti-Chinese movement played out in a particular community. Tacoma was a newly emerging city where white residents felt the threat of corporate domination in the form of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In this context, the city’s German immigrant mayor, Jacob Weisbach, could draw upon his longstanding labor radicalism to mobilize a broad anti-Chinese coalition that blurred the divide between white workers and the local business class. The result was the forceful removal of Chinese residents following a year-long campaign that culminated in mob action and became known as the ‘Tacoma Method’. This local violence in turn fed into ongoing national efforts to secure Chinese exclusion. Tacoma’s Chinese expulsion illustrates how radical labor traditions could be turned, under particular conditions, to the politics of racial repression even as the proponents of expulsion framed their efforts in terms of an egalitarian and democratic agenda. The participation of the Knights of Labor and other labor radicals in a politics exemplified by the Tacoma Method was accordingly tied to the larger racialized American state-building project as it unfolded in the late 19th Century.     

Integration or Black Power?

Integration politics experienced a postcolonial crisis in the late 1960s. This was a crisis driven by the simultaneous and inter‐related eruption of Powellism and Black Power. This article uses the crisis of integration politics to show the Powellite conjuncture from its other side, as it played out in the reconstitution of black British politics. It shows how black activists responded to the rise of Powellism by demanding that the politics of integration be either abandoned or reframed, to more fully shake out the colonial inheritances that lurked within it. The integration proposed by the postwar project of race relations was problematic from its inception; Black Power used Powell's intervention to expose these problems and demand change.     

‘Rivers of Blood’ and Britain's Far Right

This article examines the impact of Enoch Powell's speech on Britain's numerous right‐wing fringe groups and their response—in particular, that of the National Front, who benefitted the most from Powell's intervention on race and for a brief moment became Britain's fourth political party. It begins by looking at the growth of post‐World War II British fascism and how its emphasis switched from anti‐Semitism to anti‐colonial immigration. Throughout the piece, the relationship between Britain's far right and the Conservative party is examined to show how Powell inadvertently blurred the lines between the two. The article concludes with the 1979 general election victory of Margaret Thatcher who, by adopting Powellite themes but in more measured tones, destroyed the National Front's dream of an electoral breakthrough.     

The rise of the far right in Greece and opposition to ‘othering’, hate speech,and crime by civil and civic organizations

This article focuses on forms of opposition to ‘othering’ and far-right politics in present-day Greece. This opposition takes a variety of forms, comes from a range of actors, and is motivated by a number of concerns with differing assessments of what should be done. More specifically, the article focuses on the far right in Greece and discrimination, hate speech, and hate crime against the ‘other’ from the perspectives of those who are active in mobilizing against racism and counteracting the country’s populist and neo-nationalist turn. Concentrating on the forces opposing discrimination, the analysis describes present-day social movements and actions from grassroots to governmental level, their strategies and politics, their diversity of thought and action, and their contribution in providing the resources for social change, and the production of new meaning in the context of anti-racism in Greece. Trying to provide answers as to how social movements and activists produce meaning, we argue that activists develop less intentional, inadvertent meanings which emerge in the course of the not-always conscious schemas of their struggle. This calls for a more dynamic explanation of the relationship between practice and meaning-making in social movement contexts.     

Racism and sexism at work

Both racism and sexism have had the effect of handicapping selected groups in terms of salary and access to jobs, promotions, and power. However, the categories of race and gender, and the experience of racism and sexism, differ in many ways. This article reviews the differences resulting from definitions of race and gender, as well as those differences stemming from historical, legal, and demographic factors. In particular, we focused on the interactive effects of racism and sexism in the experience of women of color. We examine the assumption that affirmative action operates equivalently for all racial and gender groups, and suggest some directions for further research.     

Patricia Williams: Inflecting Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory (C.R.T.) has developed out of a deep dissatisfaction that many black legal scholars in the U.S. felt with liberal civil rights discourse, a discourse premised upon the ideals of assimilation, ‘colour-blindness’ and integration. In addition, the emergence of the Critical Legal Studies movement provided Critical Race theorists with an innovative lexicon and practice which allowed them to develop a critique of traditional race analysis and U.S. law. Patricia Williams has played a key role in the formation of the C.R.T. movement and is concerned with many of the C.R.T. themes: the understanding that traditional civil rights law has benefited whites more than blacks, the ‘call to context’, and the critique of liberalism by the assertion that racism is routine and not aberrational. Following the C.R.T. belief that form and substance are connected, Williams has also extended the boundaries of another C.R.T. theme by (largely) eschewing the conventional genre of legal writing in much of her work, including her two books, The Alchemy of Race and Rights and The Rooster's Egg. This was one of the issues Williams discussed in an interview that commenced when she visited Britain in 1997 to deliver the Reith Lectures. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

From Reflection to Refraction: Rethinking Paradigms of Cultural Interaction and Identity in Peru and Mexico

This article explores the construction and reworking of paradigms of culture contact and identity by social scientists and cultural critics in response to contradictory sociocultural experiences of modernity in Peru and Mexico. It seeks to do so in the context of calls made by the Peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar for greater historicism and critical thinking about these, and the concern that this appeal has since generated in the field of Latin American Cultural Studies. Focusing first on the postcolonial, ideologically driven model of 'mestizaje', the article then traces continuities and discontinuities between it and latter–day thinking about cultural pluralism.     

Discourse of decency: white nationalists,white antiracists,and the criminality of color

Contemporary research on white racial attitudes on race and crime reflect a grouping of opinions on a traditional liberal-conservative scale. These two groupings reflect what sociologists and political scientists call ‘issue constraint’ or a ‘clustering’ of ideas into a specific ideological worldview. Many now argue this gulf is growing; a white ‘culture war’ that many interpret as evidence of the increasing fracturing and political bifurcation of white racial identities over ‘hot button’ topics like race and crime. While a substantial literature on race and crime finds white racial attitudes to vary by educational level and political orientation, we know less about shared understandings of crime and race in relation to the processes of white racial identity formation. Rather than view attitudinal statements on race and crime as accurate reflections of essential different and static white racial political positions or ideological orientations, additional scholarship can examine discourse on crime and race as constitutive of the white identities that wield them. Drawing from an ethnographic study with conservative white nationalists and liberal white antiracists, this paper addresses the following question: what is the relationship between discourse on crime and race and the ongoing process of white racial identity formation?