Getting out of the Dirt: Racialized modernity and environmental inequality in the cotton sector of Burkina Faso. Luna, J. K. Environmental Sociology, 4(2):221–234, Routledge, April, 2018. _eprint: https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2017.1396657![Getting out of the Dirt: Racialized modernity and environmental inequality in the cotton sector of Burkina Faso [link]](https://bibbase.org/img/filetypes/link.svg "link")
Paper doi abstract bibtex Scholarship on environmental inequality has long focused on racial inequalities in exposure to environmental pollution. In explaining this, previous scholarship has identified mechanisms such as intentional discrimination, structural and institutional racism, and dynamics of political power. Here, I demonstrate an additional mechanism: that racist cultural ideologies can influence marginalized people themselves to act in ways that produce and justify environmental inequalities. Using ethnographic data from Burkina Faso, I examine the environmental inequality of rising pesticide use, where poor Burkinabe farmers are disparately exposed to the toxic burden of capitalist cotton production. Drawing on Bourdieusian cultural sociology, I describe Burkina’s racialized cultural field – a social arena with racially coded status positions – in which modernity, wealth, and scientific technology are coded as ‘white’ and high status, while poverty, backwardness, and physical labor are coded as ‘black’ and low status. I argue that many actors embrace technologies, including pesticides, in part to achieve status in this field, and that this paradoxically increases rural peoples’ exposure to chemicals, creates barriers to sustainable agriculture, and devalues black African bodies. My findings demonstrate a hitherto unidentified mechanism through which structures of racism translate into environmental inequalities: through aspirations for status within a racialized culture.
@article{lunaGettingOutDirt2018,
title = {Getting out of the {Dirt}: {Racialized} modernity and environmental inequality in the cotton sector of {Burkina} {Faso}},
volume = {4},
issn = {null},
shorttitle = {Getting out of the dirt},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2017.1396657},
doi = {10.1080/23251042.2017.1396657},
abstract = {Scholarship on environmental inequality has long focused on racial inequalities in exposure to environmental pollution. In explaining this, previous scholarship has identified mechanisms such as intentional discrimination, structural and institutional racism, and dynamics of political power. Here, I demonstrate an additional mechanism: that racist cultural ideologies can influence marginalized people themselves to act in ways that produce and justify environmental inequalities. Using ethnographic data from Burkina Faso, I examine the environmental inequality of rising pesticide use, where poor Burkinabe farmers are disparately exposed to the toxic burden of capitalist cotton production. Drawing on Bourdieusian cultural sociology, I describe Burkina’s racialized cultural field – a social arena with racially coded status positions – in which modernity, wealth, and scientific technology are coded as ‘white’ and high status, while poverty, backwardness, and physical labor are coded as ‘black’ and low status. I argue that many actors embrace technologies, including pesticides, in part to achieve status in this field, and that this paradoxically increases rural peoples’ exposure to chemicals, creates barriers to sustainable agriculture, and devalues black African bodies. My findings demonstrate a hitherto unidentified mechanism through which structures of racism translate into environmental inequalities: through aspirations for status within a racialized culture.},
language = {en},
number = {2},
urldate = {2023-01-25},
journal = {Environmental Sociology},
publisher = {Routledge},
author = {Luna, Jessie K.},
month = apr,
year = {2018},
note = {\_eprint: https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2017.1396657},
keywords = {Environmental inequality, modernity, pesticides, postcolonialism, race},
pages = {221--234},
}
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