There's Something in the Water by Ingrid R. G. Waldron

Author:Ingrid R. G. Waldron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2018-07-03T18:16:26+00:00

Chapter 5

Sacrificial Lives

How Environmental Racism Gets Under the Skin

Everything connected to the land is connected to our bodies. (Konsmo and Kahealani Pacheco 2015: 60)

Environmental racism is not only about a concern for profit and wealth, but also about how the bodies of “racial others” get taken up within the “white gaze.” Policy decisions that lead to the disproportionate placement of polluting industries and other environmental hazards near Indigenous and Black communities highlight how little value these bodies hold in the white imagination. Joe R. Feagin and Hernan Vera (1995: 16) aptly point out that “white racism involves a massive breakdown of empathy, the human capacity to experience the feelings of members of an out-group viewed as different.” This lack of regard for the humanity of Indigenous and Black peoples speaks to enduring perceptions of them as disposable and lacking in humanity and value and simultaneously invulnerable, strong, “superhuman” and, therefore, able to endure inconceivable harms inflicted on their spirits, souls, minds and bodies. Combined, these perceptions perpetuate enduring pathologizing myths about Indigenous and Black peoples’ capacity to withstand all hurt and pain.

Harriet A. Washington (2007) examines pathologizing myths about the Black body during the colonial era in her groundbreaking book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. She reveals that slaves were exploited and abused by physicians by way of ad hoc experimentation in medications, dosages, and spontaneous surgical experiments. The powerlessness and legal invisibility of slaves enabled their neglect and abuse by a court system that had little concern for their safety and health. Real (skin colour, hair texture, etc.) and imagined (elongated penises, distended labia, etc.) physical differences between Blacks and whites during the colonial era contributed to ideologies of Black biological primitivism and, consequently, the pathologization of Black bodies. According to Washington (2007), physicians advanced theories about the greater immunity of Black people to malaria and yellow fever during the colonial era, although there was no evidence that they had an innate, absolute resistance to malaria. Scientists also claimed that the primitive nervous systems of Black people made them immune to physical and emotional pain and to mental illness. These and other stereotypes highlighted contradictions about the Black body in two main ways during the colonial era: theories about real and perceived physical differences between Blacks and whites were developed and myths about the Black body as inherently stronger, more resilient, or impervious to most illnesses were generated (Washington 2007). These controlling images of Black people were used to justify slavery and various forms of torture endured by slaves, such as branding and whipping.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a popular topic up for debate was the apparent relative absence of “madness” among African, Asian, and Native American people. Henry Maudsley (1879), a prominent British psychiatrist, espoused the idea of the “noble savage,” attributing Black people’s relative immunity to mental illness to their lack of civilization. As cited by Suman Fernando (1991: 39) in his book

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