"You begin to understand that you are less." -Carlos Padilla

When people of color have been historically characterized with a language of infection and contamination (e.g. the "one-drop" rule), the politicization of garbage and pollution then becomes a politicization of race and racism. In her book Noxious New York, Julie Sze writes, "during the summer of 1968, black youths burned garbage as an expression of their rage and anger" (50); the burning of garbage acts as a rejection of racist, hegemonic structures that not only site environmentally dangerous buildings in neighborhoods of color but also that equate the people living in those neighborhoods with garbage.

Laura Pulido discusses the role of intent in cases of environmental racism and, in particular, attempts to dispel the popular conception of racism as individual actions driven by the intent to disadvantage people of color. Pulido asserts that racism should be understood, instead, as actions that have been influenced or made possible by the history of oppression in the United States, and which further propagate oppression. This reading of racism is especially useful in studying the debates around environmental racism; indeed, Sze mentions multiple times the role of neglect, as opposed to intent. In other words, while acts of environmental racism may not have been born of conscious decisions to harm neighborhoods of color, the fact that these neighborhoods have been neglected by the government, which in turn has allowed them to be targeted, still constitutes a form of racism.

Furthermore, the absence of a community voice in decision-making relegates those who actually reside in the affected neighborhood to a subjugated role. Sze quotes Robert Caro: "Once the avenue had been a place for people; Robert Moses made it a place for cars." (86) Here we see the erasure of the personal voice, the denial of residents in the community, who are replaced by transitory cars passing through the neighborhood. The erasure of the personal is precisely what allows these acts of racism to occur, what allows people of color to become associated with, equated with, garbage, so that the burning of garbage is not just an act of resistance against the government for allowing these things to happen, but an act of resistance against the stripping of the voices of the disempowered. The politics of garbage is not just a politics of the environment and of welfare, but also a politics of power and identity.