An Intimate Inventory of Race and Waste

Abstract This article focuses on Badin, North Carolina, a segregated aluminum company town established in the early 1900s and site of a current environmental justice struggle. Racialised industrial toxicity operates through quotidian relations of care, corporate and state claims to innocence, and perversion of pleasurable environments. This affective and materialist inventory illustrates how race and waste intertwined in Badin to make aluminum vital and valuable. Drawing on critical race and postcolonial studies, feminist geopolitics, and science studies, this paper argues that intimacy is a crucial analytic for understanding racial capitalism as a political and ecological project in multiple spheres including the workplace, the home, the community and the landscape.