‘Using’ race in the politics of siting environmentally hazardous facilities

The question on how to best conceptualize race and racism continues to remain relevant to current environmental justice research; concepts of race as demographic-compositional and racism as structural remain dominant but neither sufficiently captures how race and racism may be implicated in the process of siting environmentally hazardous facilities. This article adopts a third approach that demonstrates how discursive dimensions of race are deployed strategically by stakeholders in the local politics of facility siting. Based on an analysis of legal and published research documents, the article examines the process leading to the disproportionate siting of several hazardous facilities within Chester, Pennsylvania in the late 1980s.