• There's Something In the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities by Ingrid R.G. Waldron

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• "If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W.E.B. Du Bois's famous words, "the problem of the color line," then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification. (Murakawa)"
• "Black feminists have long argued that race, gender, class, and other social identities cannot be separated because they function interdependently and accompany an individual into every interaction or experience. In other words, challenging monolithic conceptions of communities requires an understanding of how these multiple social identities operate in and through one another to produce diverse experiences. Such an analysis appreciates the complex relationality of these multiple identities that frame individuals' social, economic, and political lives. In addition, an intersectional analysis requires attendance to the historical, material, and structural contexts and conditions within which social inequalities are produced; the meanings assigned to them; and the interrogation of white privilege and power and their accompanying ideological rationales for dominance."
• "While (conservation, wildlife protection, and sustainable development) are all important issues, work carried out in these areas by scholars, activists, and environmental organizations tends to be missing an expanded analysis of how the environment is experienced in specific ways by different bodies who hold varying levels of power."
• "By using the term 'state-sanctioned racial and gendered violence,' I am describing the systematic ways in which government and social institutions harm or otherwise disadvantage Indigenous and racialized communities and women, preventing them from meeting their basic needs and rights related to employment, income, justice, housing, food security, and other resources. State-sanctioned racial and gendered violence is subtle, invisible, and often has no specific person who can (or will) be held responsible, in contrast to interpersonal violence where a main perpetrator can be identified."
• "Rather than being pinpointed to a single encounter, settler colonialism is an ongoing event that can be described as a form of colonial formation and governance involving the invasion of foreigners for the purposes of assimilating, depopulating, or erasing Indigenous populations."
• "The temporal and spatial extension of settler colonialism involves the reproduction of power relations between and among settlers and Indigenous peoples. Its central features include profit seeking through land acquisition, resource extraction, and other features of the built environment; denial of any responsibility for dispossession; and the repudiation of Indigenous governance structures. In Canada, legal tools and policies such as the federal Indian Act and residential schools, respectively, were the mechanisms through which the assimilation, subordination, and genocide of Indigenous peoples were legitimated and settler political, cultural, and economic hegemony achieved."
• "-- progressive and transformative change on issues of environmental racism must move beyond addressing entrenched social inequality and power (including state power) through legislation, institutional reforms, and other policy concessions, toward building an unapologetically anti-authoritarian agenda. The most common vision of change articulated by environmental justice studies scholars and activists is to work with the institutions and agencies that are responsible for sanctioning environmental racism violations in the first place. However, this has been largely ineffective because it reinforces the legitimacy of these institutions and agencies and thus leaves intact the power structures within which environmental racism manifests."
• "-- white privilege accords economic, material, social, and psychological benefits and advantages to white people simply based on skin colour. Since whiteness is often construed as an 'unmarked' or 'normative' category to which 'racial others' are compared, many white people view themselves as 'race-less' or beyond race. For white people to fully appreciate their privilege, they must move beyond a focus on individual hostile acts to a consideration of how structural and institutional decision making supports and upholds policy actions that protect and benefit white people economically, materially, socially, and psychologically, often at the expense of Indigenous, Black, and other racialized peoples' well-being."
• " Bullard characterizes environmental racism as racial discrimination in environmental policymaking; in the greater exposure of non-white or racialized communities to toxic waste disposal and the siting of polluting industries; and in the implementation of policies that sanction the harmful and, in many cases, life-threatening presence of poisons in these communities. Environmental racism is also characterized by a number of other factors: the history of excluding Indigenous and racialized communities from mainstream environmental groups, decision-making boards, commissions, and regulatory bodies; the lack of political power these communities have for resisting the siting of industrial polluters in their communities; the disproportionate negative impacts of environmental policies that result in differential rates of cleanup of environmental contaminants in these communities; and the disproportionate access to environmental services, such as garbage removal and transportation."
• "The theoretical framework offered by settler-colonial studies sheds light on how environmental racism is connected to historical and present-day colonial systems, subjugation, forced displacements, land dispossession, exclusion from the polity, social marginalization, extraction of wealth, destruction of culture, dehumanization, and genocide, primarily in Indigenous and Black communities."
• "Not only is environmental racism illustrative of the spatial character of state-sanctioned racial and gendered violence (i.e., spatial violence), it also manifests alongside other forms or violence experienced by Indigenous, Black, and other racialized communities, such as high unemployment rates, income insecurity, poverty, food insecurity, poorly resourced neighbourhoods, poor-quality housing, gentrification, criminalization, police brutality, disproportionate rates of incarceration, the prison industrial complex, and proximity to polluting industries and other environmental hazards."
• "-- Deborah M. Robinson's assertion that environmental racism is 'old wine in a new bottle' — another manifestation of historical racial oppression that produces, reproduces, and sustains racial and other social inequalities by disproportionately affecting already-vulnerable communities in the present day."
• "-- the 1876 Indian Act sought to further assimilate Indigenous peoples by instituting elected rather than traditional Band Councils and making Indigenous peoples 'wards' of the federal Department of Indian Affairs. The Chief and Council system created by the Indian Act also stripped Indigenous women of their political powers, stipulating that only men could be elected as Chiefs and Councillors. These legislative decisions instigated and cemented inequalities between Indigenous women and men, thereby shaping the negative perception and treatment of Indigenous women. "
• "-- as a key feature of settler colonialism, white sovereign domination must be regarded as an ongoing encounter in which the main incentive is wealth and opportunities gained from the acquisition of land. Inherent to capitalism is the creation, consumption, and transformation of spaces and places; the assimilation, depopulation, removal, and erasure of Indigenous peoples; and the dispossession, expropriation, and territorial occupation of Indigenous resources, land, property, homes, and other physical structures — all toward the end goal of profit."
• "Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology and politics; it has always been political and strategic. If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents ... it is precisely because it has been occupied and used, and has already been the focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident on the landscape. Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has always been a political process ... It is a product literally filled with ideologies."
• "-- when we endeavour to shed light on our commonalities, we must be prepared to consider our own complicity in each other's oppression, and how that complicity often serves to maintain the status quo. "