The journey that I have endured from the initial point of signing up for Capstone I, to now having completed Capstone II is one that took many turns. Just like everyone, I was skeptical on how the process would pan out and almost anxious to see if the end product would be worthwhile. The emotions of anxiety and looking too far in the future were also accompanied by a heavy thought that weighed on me for weeks. This thought was what will I even be writing about and is this even worth it? When I hear the term “capstone” it comes with a heavy connotation, an ideal that this must be your absolute best work and have some sort of contribution to ongoing academia. That applied some pressure to me in that I didn’t want to go throughout my college career and have nothing to show for it. Continuing through my senior year with the intentions of not furthering any more forms of  postgraduate education, I wanted to create something that would hold meaning after this academic year. Because of this almost fear of failure and anxiousness to create something that holds meaning, I choose to write about something that is applicable in our current time and essentially for the unforeseeable future. I developed a topic where I could discuss the socio economic problems that African Amercicans face within our country based on harmful environmental factors.  

To discuss this subject matter and form an entire Capstone around it, may seem to be risky or difficult since it’s extremely politicalized and sensitive. But to that idea, I realized the chance I was taking and it encouraged me to stick through with it even more. Furthermore, social issues in America isn’t something that I’m new to, rather it’s a topic that I have become very familiar with and educated on. A worthwhile past experience at VMI to begin with that sort of shaped me to write about this subject matter was my American Literature class. In this course, through COL Brown, we were able to analyze different forms of writing from various groups of people throughout American history. One book that stood out to me was Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, an established writer in the discourse community of social activism. The reason this book of poetry stood out to me was the way she was able to describe everyday turmoils African Americans face and how we have become numb to it. Furthermore, Rankine introduced me to the idea of microaggressions which is the concept of subtle adversities minorities face regularly that seem small initially but over time builds up. From this I wrote a paper titled “A False Citizenship in America” which for the first time I was proud of something that I wrote for school. In this paper, I furthered the discussions about the daily microaggressions Rankine highlighted in her different poems. Being that it was one of the few papers I’ve enjoyed writing for school, it only made sense for me to continue on this type of topic when it came to my capstone.

Fast forward from American Literature to Capstone I, my problem was figuring out what I wanted to focus on. I knew that it was going to regard the themes of social injustices and highlight systemic forms of racism, but I wasn’t confident with what I wanted to key on. To help guide my thought processes, I began to read about the different subcategories that participated in the overarching subject. One day while doing some academic research I came across the words “environmental racism” and it struck me because I’ve had the aspiration to work in the construction industry. As I’ve switched my focal points in order to learn more about how injustices are affected in one’s environment, I quickly knew this was something worth talking about. Environmental injustices span from the lacking of infrastructure in minority communities to the unethical forms of pollution affecting those similar community groups. At this point I realized if I focused my capstone on environments and how people are in a sense products of their environment, this can carry over to my professional career after college. This is where my motivation and drive to complete the capstone developed because now it wasn’t merely an assignment to be graded. It now became the start of an ongoing self educational process and goal of making a positive contribution to combat environmental injustices. 

With the end of the spring semester, I thought I would have a mental break from anything capstone related and just enjoy summer while completing an internship. This break was quickly ended when news came out of the unlawful killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. As people around the country became informed of the situation, there was a sudden shift of attitude in that enough was enough. People from all different backgrounds started protesting that night in Minneapolis and sent a shockwave across the entire country as others followed in their footsteps. I was one of those people that participated in peaceful protests and marched to gain attention on a matter that has often been suppressed. Being a part of the change in our society and improving from our history, further motivated me to continue with the concept of environmental racism as my capstone topic. 

Finally coming into Capstone II, I was set with the ideas in which I would write about, but I wasn’t extremely confident on how I would approach it. I had done an ample amount of research up to this point, but I still hadn’t figured out how I would relate all of my ideas together. This problem was solved when I reread over a poem within Rankine’s book that talked about the turmoils on Hurricane Katrina. In this poem she explained in vivid imagery the effects Hurricane Katrina had on African Americans, and how there was a lack of emergency planning for their communities. African Americans through their experience with Hurricane Katrina had developed a feeling of being forgotten and I thought this was a powerful theme. From this, I did some research on African American communities heavily affected by the hurricane and came across Cancer Alley. Cancer Alley is a span of towns in Louisiana that for decades has been facing fatal amounts of pollution from hundreds of neighboring factories. I realized that Cancer Alley being geographically consistent with communities hit by Hurricane Katrina, I could link the two with Rankine’s literature. From this point on, the process of drafting my capstone became much easier as I knew exactly what to talk about.

Overall, I think my learning experience has been focused on discovering my ultimate goal of responding to environmental injustices through doing a lot of reading. All the research I’ve done has provided me with a large volume of information, and it was up for me to dissect which I wanted to use. This experience will carry on into the future in that I have developed a liking to reading books and articles for my own knowledge. Even after completing my capstone, I am still finishing sources that I’ve used such as The Color of Law because I want to gain as much insight as possible. This capstone experience has instilled in me the drive to continually improve my intellect on subjects that I see as valuable.

“As the twentieth century progressed, property and residency restrictions mostly faded away for all except African Americans. Only African Americans have had been systematically and unconstitutionally segregated for such a long period, and with such thorough repression, that their condition requires an aggressive constitutional remedy”

-Richard Rothstein 

The socioeconomic circumstances African Americans endure daily are a direct result of segregative ambitions developed after slavery. These racist agendas resulted in a systematic inequality of appropriate resources distributed among African American communities. Strategies such as redlining and the initial formation of the Federal Housing Administration have left African Americans in environmentally unjust areas. Situations such as air pollution caused by petrochemical facilities of Cancer Alley in Louisiana are prime examples of this environmental injustice. Due to this, poets like Claudia Rankine have turned to ecopoetics for its ethical focus on ecological questions as a way of revealing the environmental injustices that African Americans suffer in the United States. In my project, I will examine the idea of a systematic hegemonic form of environmental injustice, and use of rhetoric in acknowledging and responding to racism in America. I argue through rhetorical analysis, we discover a lack of resources and environmental disadvantages that create obstacles for African Americans which America needs to address. By closely examining specific examples of degradation in African American communities and the power of rhetorical responses in ecopoetics, this project highlights the neglected issue of socioeconomic injustice induced by systemic racism. 

When we begin to analyze the environmental injustices within America, it is vital to understand that the placement of African Americans in certain areas isn’t by chance. While it may be evident that people subconsciously choose to live near those who share similar characteristics as them, we also must uncover the strategically planned agendas of government officials. The time period we should focus on is 1934, during the Great Depression. The country had just faced the biggest economic fall in its history which left millions of its citizens displaced. As the country began to get back on its feet, President Roosevelt passed the National Housing Act within the New Deal, with intentions of reviving the housing market. Of this legislature, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created in 1936 to influence mortgages and interest rates for citizens. This seemed to be an effective course of action only if it adhered to all of America’s citizens. The Federal Housing Administration created the Underwriting Manual which provided specific racial provisions that would support whites and hinder all African Americans. Moreover, this manual was given to banking institutions to ensure that loans wouldn’t be given to African Americans with intentions of buying property. Also it served as a guide for real estate professionals to not sell homes in white neighborhoods to African Americans. The language used within this Underwriting Manual included:

Naturally or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences. Usually the protection against adverse influences afforded by these means included prevention of the infiltration of business and industrial uses, lower-class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups… The Valuator should investigate areas surrounding the location to determine whether or not incompatible racial and social groups are present… A change in social or racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in value… If the children of people living in such an area are compelled to attend school where the majority or a goodly number of the pupils represent a far lower level of society or an incompatible racial element, the neighborhood under consideration will prove far less stable and desirable… Prohibition of the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they were intended.(228-289)

The rhetoric within this segregative policy proves that ethnic groups living in common locations isn’t merely by chance. The specific words used by government officials within this manual creates an image of African Americans as being hazardous. White citizens being told that these racial groups are “incompatible” or resulting in “instability” wrongly manipulated their image on the dangers of living in concord. This language can even be seen as a type of propaganda, as the social theme of the time was focused on oppressing African Americans. White Americans were encouraged to not live in similar areas as African Americans because they were seen as harmful to property value. Homes that were offered to African Americans in a predominantly white neighborhood came with significantly higher interest rates and property cost. In result, African Americans had fewer amounts of affordable communities to choose from and couldn’t conduct social mobility. As African American communities began to form, government officials created redlining tactics where boundaries were mapped out to establish which locations of a city were valuable or not. According to Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law, ”the FHA judged that properties would probably be too risky for insurance if they were in racially mixed neighborhoods or even in white neighborhoods near black ones that might possibly integrate in the future”(65). Ethnicity was the foundation in determining if a location was worth investing in. The areas that African Americans eventually migrated to were majority urbanized or centered around cities while White Americans transitioned to suburban or rural areas. These strategies implemented by government officials left a shockwave effect within the African American community as a whole which is still felt today. 

Many African Americans today reside in the same cities and neighborhoods as their predecessors due to the lack of generational wealth. Generational wealth is a concept of assets being passed down through generations of descendants for financial advantages. Since a wide range of African Americans weren’t given the opportunity to own real estate, this resulted in the lack of equity. With African Americans having endured a late start on creating generational wealth, as a whole they are still striving to reach financial equity between the white counterparts. Regardless of the efforts continually being made, African Americans have been subsequently forced to live within areas that may be thought as forgotten about. These overlooked cities with predominantly poor and African American occupants are where we discover the environmental injustices within America. Juliana Mantaay, the Director of Geographic Information Science at Lehman College, defines environmental injustice as “ the disproportionate exposure of communities of color and the poor to pollution, and its concomitant effects on health and environment, as well as the unequal environmental protection and environmental quality provided through laws, regulations, governmental programs, enforcement, and policies”(161). Essentially this concept may be conceptualized as specific geographical demographics that lack the proper physical and legislative attention to environmental hazards such as pollution. One area within America that has severely faced environmental injustices is a strip of Louisiana between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as Cancer Alley.

St. Gabriel and St. John, recently known as Cancer Alley, are cities in Iberville Parish, Louisiana with an averaging population of 64% African Americans and only 35% white according to the world population review. Before Cancer Alley has become what it is from recent decades, this area in Louisiana had already been a victim to a lack of infrastructure and occupational opportunities. History can be noted as a reason why this area faces developmental issues instead of being a city where there is a focus on progression. Tristan Baurick in his article Welcome to Cancer Alley comments, “many families have been rooted here for centuries, brought as slaves and forced to cut and process sugar cane on the vast plantations that once dominated the river parishes. After the Civil War, many stayed on as sharecroppers, free but still beholden to white landlords”(24). These occupants, through generations of descendants, have endured labor type jobs since slavery that has resulted in an inaility to move to a better place. This poor African American community with a 29% poverty rate and $15k per capita income, became a target by industrial companies since the mid 20th century. Baurick explains the structure of St. Gabriel by saying it “ has no downtown, no commercial center. Within its city limits is a discordant patchwork of large steel petrochemical complexes, farm fields and small neighborhoods”(23). Manufacturing companies chose locations with higher poverty and minority levels because of their vulnerability and nature of being forgotten within government regulation.

Someone passing through Cancer Alley at first glance may initially picture this area as an ordinary rural town in America. This idea quickly comes to halt when they suddenly smell an egg-like odor in the air, or see forms of runoff in the Mississippi River. With confusion of where these environmentally unfriendly factors are coming from, that person driving will soon come across more than 140 chemical factories or oil refineries. These 140 factories consist of the largest petrochemical producers in America used to create plastics and styrofoam. Cancer Alley is a seemingly convenient location for these factories due to the low property costs, Mississippi River ship accessways, and “government officials that equate industrial investment with progress”(Baurick 15). The consequences from the factories aren’t only towards the environment, but specifically air pollution has been harmful to the residents of this area. 

Of all the chemicals emitted by the surrounding factories, Chloroprene has proved to be the most deadly as it is a carcinogen. This chemical used to make synthetic rubber has caused an extreme increase in fatalities. According to a hospital worker in St. Gabriel, “out of every 10 houses, there’s a prospect of one or two people that have died from cancer”(Baurick 17). Even a pharmacist within the area began to take note of pregnancies and has commented that one in three pregenacies have ended in a miscarriage in result of the unsafe air quality. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began investigation of this health epidemic and discovered fatal numbers. With chloroprene emissions over a lifespan having a maximum human interaction of 0.2 micrograms per 3 cubic meters, it was discovered that the emission levels were dozens of micrograms above the maximum for decades. On an even closer level, after studies in November of 2017, “ the fifth ward elementary school, which sits on the plant’s fenceline, chloroprene was recorded at a staggering 755 times above the EPA’s guidance”(Lartey 22). People of all ages have been impacted by the various chemicals that reside in air pollution for years. The poor neighborhoods inhabited by black residents haven’t received the proper response to these inequalities. Government officials have begun to put some regulations in place, but those regulations haven’t proved to be thorough or effective. The state of Louisiana is still one of the ten least improved states in America when it comes to pollution. With a sense of invisibleness and forgetfulness , African Americans have turned to rhetoric to identify and respond to their adversity. 

Of those that have taken the responsibility amongst themselves to uncover the extremities of environmental injustices, Claudia Rankine has stood out in her forms of rhetoric. Rankine uses the concepts of microaggressions and African Americans as bodies in order to exhibit the daily forms of inequalities faced within America. She has participated in a type of ecopoetics where people and their experiences are connected with their environments and its products. Ecopoetics has provided African Americans around America a platform in which they are able to make sense of the unjust conditions they are living. Rankine in specific has contributed to ecopoetics by providing various scenarios of African Americans being negatively impacted by environmental racism. Anglea Hume, a literary scholar, comments that, “Rankine’s work figures not only the wasting of the body and self, but also the wasting of the environments in which they are placed”(80). Through her book Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine is able to unravel the effects of social, political, and environmental forms of inequalities in result of a long-lived theme of systemic racism. A poem within this book relating to Hurricane Katrina gives us a vivid example of how ecopoetics assists in identifying and responding to environmental racism. In this poem Rankine says:

The fiction of the facts assumes innocence, ignorance, lack of intention, misdirection; the necessary conditions of a certain time and place. Have you seen their faces? Faith, not fear, she said. She’d heard that once and was trying to stamp the phrase in her mind. At the time, she couldn’t speak it aloud. He wouldn’t tolerate it. He was angry. Where were they? Where was anyone? This is a goddamn emergency, he said. Then someone else said it was the classic binary between the rich and poor, between the haves and the have nots, between the whites and the backs, in the difficulty of all that. Then each house was a mumbling structure, all that water, buildings peeling apart, the yellow foam, the contaminated drawl of mildew, mold. The missing limbs, he said, the bodies lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters, lying face down, arms outstretched on parlor floors… We never reached out to anyone to tell our story, because there’s no ending to our story, he said. Being honest with you, in my opinion, they forgot about us… And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, she said, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working well for them.(83-85)

Through gruesome imagery and deepened allusions, Rankine delivers us a catastrophic event that unfortunately was a reality for American citizens. Before we begin to analyze the poem for rhetorical strategies, it is important we understand what is occurring. In August of 2005, one of the most destructive natural disasters of recent date hit hard in the southern states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. Of areas affected, Louisiana experienced much of the damage to both property and human lives. The residents of Cancer Alley are included in those who had faced fatal consequences from the storm. There wasn’t any proper attention to lower income and African American communities when it came to prior emergency planning. Moreover, African Americans in communities similar to Cancer Alley were overall towards the latter end of post-storm rescuing. The reason Hurricane Katrina within Citizen connects to Cancer Alley is because in both instances there is a theme of being forgotten. The unacceptable lack of urgency in response to the hurricane is a recurrent concept that had already been present within the pollution controversies. Additionally, being that these locations are geographically consistent, we are able to bridge the two events together. African American communities such as Cancer Alley are oftentimes neglected whether it be from environmental pollution or natural disaster planning. From this we discover a sense that African Americans are treated more like bodies rather than people. Through this poem within Citizen, we are able to put into words the system based struggles African Americans face that parallel the rhetorical theme of being forgotten. 

We should start by addressing the scene and the vivid imagery Rankine illustrates to us. The characters in the poem are experiencing a catastrophic time as the consequences of the hurricane are ravishing through both lives and property. The houses are referred to as “mumbling structures” and the water is causing “buildings to fall apart” with “yellow foam” and  “contaminated drawl of mildew mold”(84). The environment around them has become overwhelming and is destroying everything they have worked so hard for. It is not only ending their livelihoods but also their actual lives. Similar to the air pollutants, environmental factors are proving to be fatal with victims having a sense of helplessness. Rankine even relates the victims fallen to the hurricane to debris. She describes the victims as “bodies lodged in piles or rubble, dangling from the rafters, lying face down” as if these are no longer even people(84). This is powerful because the consequences of their environment has subjected them to something less than life, they have become rubble themselves. 

The next aspect of the poem worth analyzing is the means in which the lack of response was happening and why it isn’t a mere coincidence. With build up rage and desperateness, one of the characters calls out for answers to a question that would never be heard. The character says,  “Where were they? Where was anyone? This is a goddamn emergency”(83). We can feel the echoes from these cries, cries from victims as tears are intertwining with rain falling down their face. African American citizens put their faith in a system that in return wasn’t concerned with their wellbeing. In the biggest time of need, there was no one there to answer their cries for help, no one there to assure they wouldn’t merely become a product of their environment. Rankine clearly relates to us what kind of people were being subjected to the inhumane form of neglect. She states, “it was a classic binary between the rich and poor, between the haves and have nots, between whites and blacks, in the difficulty of it all”(83). In a time of despair, African Americans were continued to be treated as second class citizens, as those that did not have America’s attention. Rescue teams didn’t accidentally forget to enter African American communities nor did they accidentally undermine emergency plans. Just as corporations planned to place their toxic factories along African American communities, the government planned to save who they thought were most important during this time. 

The last aspect of the poem that may be the most important, are the characters feelings towards the situation which ultimately creates the forgotten theme. The first line of the passage states, “the fiction of the facts assumes innocence, ignorance, lack of intention, misdirection; the necessary conditions of a certain time and place”(83). The terms innocence, ignorance, lack of intention, and misdirection all share one thing in common, they serve as excuses. The absence of responders, the absence of proper planning, and the absence of care aren’t simply the fiction of facts. There’s no possible way those given the responsibility of American citizens’ safety, consistently don’t know the truths of situations. Instead, it is the complete opposite, they are more aware than those being directly affected, they simply just don’t care. Those government officials that didn’t take the necessary actions to combat air pollution in Cancer Alley, who also didn’t take the necessary actions to combat Hurricane Katrina created the forgottenness, it was only for African Americans to one day discover. A character announces, “we never reached out to anyone to tell our story, because there’s no ending to our story… being honest with you, in my opinion, they forgot about us”(84). Africans Americans have reached the point where there is a feeling that their voice is without words, there are no open ears to catch the cries for help. Knowing that they are forgotten, there is no reason to even strive for the attention needed. Being unavailable to these second class citizens “is working well for them” because the goal of the oppressor is to keep the oppressed, oppressed.

Since the first African native arrival on American soil in 1619, there has been a systematic social structure to keep African Americans as lessers. The forms in which America has kept African Americans oppressed ultimately is the lack of ethical attention to those suffering. Even after the abolishment of slavery and the ending of segregation, there are new ways continually being created to keep African Americans as second class citizens. The sense of forgottenness when African American’s wellbeing isn’t accounted for is a theme too common. Centuries of America being unaccountable for the unfair treatment of their citizens has produced a pile on effect in which harm has strategically been layered. This layering of harm is reflected in a toxicity that has slowly stolen the lives from innocent African Americans. This toxicity is represented in both a physical and metaphorical form of environmental injustice. Today, African American citizens are still enduring the fatal effects of pollution that their white counterparts on a general scale aren’t. Additionally, White America doesn’t have to experience the microaggressions that African American does on a daily basis. In order for America to finally put an end to our current environmental violence, it needs to release the shackles of hypocrisy and address the voices of the unheard. 

Works Cited

Baurick, Tristan. “Welcome to ‘Cancer Alley,” Where Toxic Air Is About to Get Worse.” ProPublica, 2019, www.propublica.org/article/welcome-to-cancer-alley-where-toxic-air-is-about-to-get-worse

Gross, Terry. “A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America.” NPR, NPR, 3 May 2017, www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america. 

Hume, Angela. “Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics: Waste and Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 57 no. 1, 2016, p. 79-110. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/619448.

Lartey, Jamiles, et al. “’Almost Every Household Has Someone That Has Died from Cancer’.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2019, www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/may/06/cancertown-louisana-reserve-special-report. 

Mantaay, Juliana. “Mapping Environmental Injustices: Pitfalls and Potential of Geographic Information Systems in Assessing Environmental Health and Equity.” Lehman College, 2002, https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/pdf/10.1289/ehp.02110s2161 

“Racial” Provisions of FHA Underwriting Manual, 1936, wbhsi.net/~wendyplotkin/DeedsWeb/fha36.html. 

Rankine, Claudia. “Citizen: an American Lyric”. GreyWolf Press, 2014. 

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: a Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.