General Internal Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA; Center for Cultural Humility, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
J Environ Manage. 2022 Oct 15;320:115886. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.115886. Epub 2022 Aug 12.
A Critical Race Theory of Environmental Disaster can aid researchers in better contextualizing racially disproportionate environmental disasters and their intricate social meanings to survivors. Such a theory, as proposed and operationalized here, incorporates interpretations of the causes and consequences of environmental disaster. In so doing, this theory weighs the racial and economic stratification often preceding environmental disaster and that which reflexively becomes more embedded in the aftermath. Focusing on the water crisis in the racially diverse, socioeconomically diminished city of Flint, Michigan, this article examines survey data from research conducted with city residents. The analysis considers residents' attitudes and beliefs around the crisis' scope and its intentionality and residents' health outcomes. Results suggest that various institutional and community-level mechanisms contribute to processes of meaning-making during crisis, or "crisis-making," finding consistent variation in residents' understanding of the nature and scope of the water crisis that is associated with specific cultural and health-related experiences. This construction substantiates that a Critical Race Theory of Environmental Disaster must consider not only race, but class in the context of race, as instrumental in developing social understandings of, and experiences with, environmental disaster.
环境灾难的批判种族理论可以帮助研究人员更好地将环境灾难及其对幸存者的复杂社会意义置于种族不成比例的背景下。在这里提出并实施的这种理论包含了对环境灾难原因和后果的解释。这样，该理论就权衡了环境灾难之前经常存在的种族和经济分层，以及灾难后更深入的分层。本文以密歇根州弗林特市这个种族多样化、社会经济水平下降的城市的水危机为例，考察了对城市居民进行的研究的调查数据。该分析考虑了居民对危机范围及其意图的态度和看法，以及居民的健康结果。研究结果表明，各种机构和社区层面的机制有助于在危机期间进行意义构建，即“危机构建”，发现居民对水危机性质和范围的理解存在一致的差异，这与特定的文化和健康相关经验有关。这一构建证实，环境灾难的批判种族理论不仅必须考虑种族，还必须考虑种族背景下的阶级，这对于理解和应对环境灾难的社会意义至关重要。
