Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives - Chapter 11 Notes

Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives

Environmental Justice and Childhood Asthma

• Focus on Julie Sze's essay on Gender, Asthma Politics, and Urban Environmental Justice Activism (2004).
• Addresses the growing concern over childhood asthma in minority communities in New York City during the 1980s and 1990s.
• Highlights protests against polluting facilities in the South Bronx and West Harlem, where children often wore masks to symbolize the air quality issues.
• Asthma is not specific to any race or gender but is racialized and gendered in its social meanings; debates over causation, the role of gender, and management shape activism.

Gendered Aspects of Asthma

• Mothers are often seen as primary caregivers and are a dominant voice in child asthma issues.
• Historically, mothers were sometimes wrongly blamed for contributing to their children's asthma.
• Management of childhood asthma remains gendered due to the heavy involvement of parents and caretakers.
• Notes that children in low-income neighborhoods and children of color have been disproportionately affected by the asthma epidemic.

Asthma Politics

• Explores the disproportionate impact of asthma on urban children, especially those from low-income and minority communities.
• Focuses on outdoor air pollution as a primary factor in high asthma rates in certain communities; environmental justice activists aim to make childhood asthma a political and structural issue.
• Environmental justice activists push for precaution in public health in response to pressures to individualize and personalize the problem.

The Epidemic of Childhood Asthma

• Discusses the significant increase in asthma cases among children in the United States over the past fifteen years, as defined by the CDC, medical and public health communities, and health activists.
• The CDC reports that over 4.8 million children under eighteen in the United States, or approximately 6.9 percent, have asthma.
• Prevalence increased by 52 percent for those ages five to thirty-four between 1982 and 1996.
• Lists numerous costs associated with asthma, affecting children and caretakers in various aspects of life.
• Asthma is the leading cause of childhood hospitalizations and absenteeism.
• In 1998, the annual costs of asthma in the United States were estimated at 11.3 billion by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI).

Asthma and Environmental Justice in NYC

• Notes that over 700,000 adults and 300,000 children in New York City have been diagnosed with asthma.
• Hospitalization rates are three times higher than the national average; low-income children have rates 3.5 times greater than higher-income children.
• Discusses how childhood asthma has become an important issue in environmental justice campaigns in New York City, citing the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition (SBCAC) and West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT).

Environmental Campaigns

• Describes the WEACT campaign against the North River Sewage Treatment Plant, which began operations in 1986 and led to complaints about odors and air quality.
• WEACT was founded in the 1980s to monitor the plant's operations near a densely populated housing development.
• Details the SBCAC campaign against the Bronx-Lebanon Medical Waste Incinerator, which opened in 1991 and was sited near public housing and schools.
• The incinerator, costing almost 20 million to build, burned forty-eight tons of medical waste per day, was closed in 1998 due to organizing efforts.

Activist Beliefs

• Both SBCAC and WEACT believed there was a direct relationship between high asthma rates and the polluting infrastructure in their communities.
• Campaigns highlighted disproportionate levels of outdoor air pollution and potential racial discrimination in the siting of facilities.
• The campaigns asserted that their neighborhoods were already exposed to disproportionate levels of outdoor air pollution and that the addition of another polluting facility was unjust and potentially racially discriminatory.

Children's Role in Activism

• Notes that children with asthma are not generally activists themselves but are the focal point of activist concern.
• Parents and school administrators often advocate for children's health, especially when controversial facilities exacerbate environmental health conditions.
• The environmental justice movement provides a politicized framework for understanding childhood asthma. Consciousness of the role of outdoor air pollution in the disease tends to increase as a result of environmental justice asthma activism.

Environmental Inequality

• Asthma prevalence is higher in poorer populations and among urban as opposed to rural dwellers.
• Highlights the racial disparity in asthma rates, with African Americans having significantly higher prevalence and mortality rates.
• Suffering from poor health conditions is part of urban inequity, comparable to poor education, housing, income, and mobility which is concentrated among people of color and the young and the old.
• Discusses the concept of