According to Robert Bullard, author of “Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality,” poor and minority communities are home to a disproportionate share of the nation’s environmental hazards. Bullard, who directs the Environmental Justice Center at Clark Atlanta University, will speak on “Environmental Justice” at Wake Forest University on Wednesday, March 3, at 3:30 p.m.
The free, public lecture will be held in Benson University Center’s Pugh Auditorium.
Bullard is nationally known for his research in the areas of urban land use, housing, community development, industrial facility siting processes and environmental quality. He is also Ware Professor of Sociology at Clark Atlanta.
Bullard became interested in environmental racism in 1978 when his wife was asked to represent a group of residents in a predominantly black area of Houston fighting a decision by city officials to put a landfill in their neighborhood. The same site had been rejected seven years earlier when the community had been mostly white.
“Black communities, because of their economic and political vulnerability, are routinely targeted for the siting of noxious facilities, locally unwanted land uses and environmental hazards,” said Bullard in his book “Dumping in Dixie.”
He is the author of several other books including, “Residential Apartheid: The American Legacy,” “Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots,” and “In Search of the New South: The Black Urban Experience in the 1970s and 1980s.” He also recently edited a collection of essays titled, “Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color.”
Bullard’s lecture is sponsored by Wake Forest’s American ethnic studies program, the history department, the Multicultural Affairs office, the sociology department and the environmental studies program. For information, call 336-758-1891.
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