From the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, the combination of racial segregation and environmentally unregulated industrial capitalism produced outsized environmental risk exposure for poor and working-class Detroiters. In recent decades, as the auto industry abandoned Detroit, the banking and real estate industries worsened those risks with predatory loans to African American homebuyers and to an increasingly indebted city government. Alongside a wave of subprime foreclosures and cuts in welfare assistance for poor families, the state of Michigan used municipal debt to justify suspending democracy in majority-Black cities, imposing brutal austerity policies that imperiled public health. In both Detroit and nearby Flint, Emergency Financial Management turned environmental risks into disasters-and the coming of COVID-19 made matters still worse. Toxic Debt is a history of this environmental racism and inequality. At the same time, it tells the history of Detroit's environmental justice movement, which emerged from over a century of battles over public health, industrial pollution, and water rights in the city. It involves powerful corporate elites, revolutionary auto workers, eco-feminists, and working-class women fighting for welfare rights and environmental justice. Linking the history of racial capitalism, environmental history, and social movement history, Toxic Debt lucidly narrates the story of debt, environmental disaster, and resistance in Detroit.
Josiah Rector is assistant professor of history at the University of Houston.
[Josiah Rector] has written a book that advances two major interventions. First, it pushes back the environmental justice movement's genesis to midcentury union organizing. Second, and just as significantly, it firmly connects the effects of debt and austerity--that is to say, capitalism--to environmental racism. . . . Toxic Debt is an outstanding book . . . relentlessly clear-eyed in its focus on contemporary injustice and resistance."--Scott W. Stern, New York Review of Books A groundbreaking study that opens up new questions and perspectives in urban and environmental history, while simultaneously showing a real understanding of the stakes for present and future residents of Detroit . . . . a major achievement . . . . a new model for understanding and explaining our current environmental challenges, as well as their causes and consequences."--Journal of American History A must-read for anyone doing work on the environment, sociology, public health, policy, or labor in Detroit and beyond . . . . accessible and important for wide-reaching audiences, including activists, policymakers, practitioners, and scholars."--Sociology of Race and Ethnicity An outstanding book examining multiple issues of environmental justice in Detroit. . . . Alongside the issues, Rector highlights the story of the many people involved in environmental justice activism, critically examining successes and failures in their efforts to bring about change. . . . Highly recommended."--CHOICE
