Critical Environmental Justice Studies Through the Veil

Abstract

Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship is today more keenly focused on examining how intersectional forms of difference fuse with the production of EJ at multiple scales, via multiple epistemologies, and via deeply embedded, previously taken-for-granted, forms of development and state power. Meanwhile, sociology more broadly is in the throes of a resurgence centered on the hitherto underappreciated work and life of W.E.B. Du Bois. This study fuses these two developments, employing Du Bois's concept of “the veil” to begin a conversation about how contemporary Du Boisian scholarship can use critical EJ studies to better examine cases of racial and other forms of injustice in a manner that at once emphasizes verstehen as well as the socio-natural constellation of structural influences that construct the context for verstehen. What Du Bois's concept of the veil offers is an appreciation of how those who do not come from this version of America often have to mitigate unhealthy environmental relationships through a veil in which they simultaneously exist within the dominant world and their own. To illustrate our point, we provide brief examples of how this perspective illuminates the myriad ways fish consumption advisories, or voluntary state recommendations for foraging and consuming potentially toxic fish from public waters, constitute a state-based form of EJ.