Racial capitalism creates “sacrifice zones” where extreme environmental violence creates conditions of slow death which is ignored in favor of progress narratives

Capitalism is predicated upon a racialized hierarchy of gendered bodies and accompanying racialization of space: a heavily polluting aluminum smelting plant, crucial to US 20thcentury industrialization, employed Black laborers in the most physically demanding and hazardous jobs and dumped lethal industrial waste adjacent to the Black residential area. Roberta has struggled to keep herself and her community alive. Whether fighting for safety measures and dignity in the workplace, or for government accountability and hazardous waste remediation outside of work, survival has involved constant strategizing of how to leverage limited power against the impossible odds of an uncaring government colluding with a multinational giant. For communities of color living in capitalism’s toxic “sacrifice zones” (Lerner, 2012), “life’s work,” the gendered labor of social reproduction (Mitchell et al., 2004), is characterized by daily negotiations with death-dealing structures that complicate, and exceed, the already challenging demands of obtaining food, maintaining a household, and sustaining community networks. Meanwhile, in Flint, Michigan, four years after news broke of widespread lead poisoning, children’s safety remains a concern for caregivers wrestling with conflicting information from government officials and scientists. In 2016, eight-year-old Mari Copeny, “Little Miss Flint,” wrote to then-President Obama, asking him to visit. Copeny and her mother, Lulu Brezzell, have raised over $350,000 through donations and fundraisers to provide residents bottled water (Suggs, 2019). Their activism makes visible the often-hidden labor of survival in zones of “organized abandonment” (Gilmore, 2008)— the uncelebrated, mundane, and tedious work of hauling, unwrapping, and distributing water, reading reports, attending hearings, navigating broken trust and frustration, considering flight, and enduring. Despite unique histories, rooted in the South and the Rust Belt respectively, Badin and Flint share characteristics that are tragically common among predominantly Black communities in the US: a greater likelihood of premature death (Gilmore, 2002), due in part to the racialized concentration of lethal industrial waste, reflecting state neglect and collusion with industry (Holifield, 2001; Taylor, 2014). Environmental racism is a constitutive element of “racial capitalism,” a Black radical theorization of how capitalism develops through the proliferation of social hierarchies based in the devaluation of racialized people (Gilmore, 2002; Pulido, 2016; Robinson, 2000). Racially disproportionate exposure to toxicity is a material manifestation of capitalism’s “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011), which erodes the environmental conditions sustaining life. However, Badin’s sacrifice and Flint’s abandonment are neither incidental nor accidental. Racial zones of toxicity and abandonment are the shadow geographies of empire. Celebrated for their productivity during industrialization, their subsequent economic decline and rising concerns about contamination reflect a process of ruination (Stoler, 2008) that we argue is symptomatic of a colonial relationship with the US imperial state. Rendered materially and symbolically surplus, these territories are erased from national imaginaries of progress; such sites of production that have been sacrificed for the so-called “national good” point to the ways that “imperialism as a way of life [animates] the architecture of sociopolitical relations at home as well as abroad” (Sundberg, 2015: 210). Yet life endures in the shadows of empire.