By Maya Rosenberg
Dr. Sacoby Wilson, an associate professor in UMD’s School of Public Health, delivered his lecture on environmental racism and slavery in modern America at the university on Thursday.
Wilson’s lecture compared the old Jim Crow laws of discrimination and separation between black and white people to the “new Jim Crow,” which includes gentrification, unequal zoning and police brutality, according to Wilson.
“You’ve got the new Jim Crow, which is xenophobic. This Jim Crow has children of color in cages at the border, [this] Jim Crow has immigrant children dying, [this] Jim Crow that has immigrant parents dying at the borders,” Wilson said. “That’s where we are in this country right now. This is the new Jim Crow.”
Wilson gave examples of different neighborhoods of color that had been zoned near landfills, chemical plants and highways. He explained that certain pieces of infrastructure such as highways had a negative public health and cultural impact on communities of color.
“You can look at almost any major city where you had black folks. Where were the highways?” Wilson asked. “Highways fragmented those communities and broke the cultural fabric of those communities.”
The Baha’i Chair for World Peace, an “endowed academic program that advances interdisciplinary examination and discourse on global peace,” and the Critical Race Initiative, which studies critical race theory (CRT) as an important framework by which to understand inequality in society, co-hosted the lecture.
According to the chair of the Baha’i program Dr. Hoda Mahmoudi, the lecture was part of a series on structural racism and the causes of prejudice established in 2012.
“Basically we’re interested in learning not only about the blight of racism, but more importantly about locating solutions, finding solutions to… structural racism,” Mahmoudi said.
For students in attendance, background knowledge and education on environmental racism differed.
“I personally haven’t experienced any racism in my life, so I [wanted] to gain a better perspective of people’s experiences [through the lecture],” senior environmental science and policy major Catherin Dowling said.
According to sophomore public policy major Emily Badin, she attended the lecture because of her interest in environmental ethics.
“There’s a lot of different communities in our country where people are being disproportionately affected by issues like climate change,” Badin said. “I want to figure out how we can get rid of environmental racism, so we can have clean air and clean water for everyone.”
While environmental racism and structural inequality were at the heart of Wilson’s speech, students did connect his message with the goal of the Baha’i program.
“There’s a lot of aspects and nuances of things like world peace,” sophomore psychology major Daniel Osuji said. “People think ‘Oh, we can come together as one.’ But the fact of the matter is that the world has been in turmoil since its beginning. Learning just the little steps towards world peace can help bring it about.”
For Dowling, the lecture drove home a new lesson.
“Everyone is always like ‘save the turtles, don’t use plastic straws,’ which obviously isn’t bad,” Dowling said. “But I feel like we’re forgetting about the people who are impacted by climate change, and I think this lecture really taught me that.”