Conceptual and historical particularities of environmental racism in the United States of America

Abstract

This article presents the initial results of a postdoctoral research project that studies “environmental racism” and that, in its first stage, focuses on the study of its characteristics and particularities in the USA. The research is exploratory and comparative in nature. The data collected are qualitative and come from bibliographic sources selected through the World Wide Web using a script previously elaborated according to the objectives of the study, which allowed the selection of some of the most cited classical references in the treatment of the subject. The data obtained indicate that the particularities of environmental racism in the United States derive from aspects specific to that social formation and that some of them are difficult to generalize to other countries. Thus, we conclude that the debate on environmental racism in peripheral capitalist countries requires the investigation of mediations related to each social formation and its concrete determinations.