Gentrification is a less violent yet still significant form of trespassing whose effects and even existence are often denied. Some argue that if privileged (often white) people move to a neighborhood mostly populated by a minority racial group, like an enclave or ghetto, the area will become more diverse, and the original inhabitants may enjoy…[Read more]

This graphic shows the size of major spills form the Dakota Access Pipeline and adjoining Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline in 2017. When protesters attempted to block construction of the pipelines, citing concerns of air and water pollution, damage to Native land, and risk of spillage, they were shut down and arrested. Now, land and lives are…[Read more]

Love Canal is a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York whose residents mysteriously began falling ill in the mid-1970s. Abnormalities appeared in children, and women suffered a high rate of miscarriages. In 1978, reporter Michael Brown traced this phenomenon to the Hooker Chemical Company using the eponymous canal as a toxic waste dump for over…[Read more]

The environmental injustices against minority communities in New Orleans did not stop after Hurricane Katrina, or in the decade after Bush’s presidency ended. This picture is from a council meeting in which the city approved the construction of a natural gas power plant in New Orleans East, where mainly African-American and Vietnamese-American…[Read more]

On June 14, 2017 the Grenfell Tower apartment complex in West London caught on fire, causing over seventy deaths and injuries each. While the fire itself is thought to have been started by a malfunctioning freezer, its rapid spread was due in part to the building’s exterior cladding, which had been added the year prior to improve its physical…[Read more]

After the United States abolished slavery, the government famously promised each newly freed family “forty acres and a mule.” But with systems of racism and discrimination still in place, black Americans still struggled to make ends meet. Segregated neighborhoods forced them into less-than-favorable living situations. Many turned to sharecropping,…[Read more]

The Why‘s documentary Park Avenue introduced me to the concept of structural wealth and racial inequality. The iconic New York street runs through the richest neighborhood in the city as well as the South Bronx, an urban ghetto and “the poorest congressional district in the country,” as nearly forty percent of residents live below the poverty…[Read more]

This map depicts the segregated neighborhoods in the Greater New Orleans area. The discriminatory practice of “redlining,” designating specific spaces as “dangerous” or “undesirable,” is clear. Green areas are “best,” while red areas are marked “hazardous.” It is no coincidence that the latter consist of primarily Black residents. The…[Read more]