THIS IS REVOLUTION>podcast Ep. 139: Race, Infrastructure, and Capitalism w/ Josiah Rector and Keith Pluymers

From the Flint water crisis to Newark, Jersey water privatization schemes, capitalism is fostering multiple environmental, economic, and health crises affecting the working class and poor around their drinking water. Are these realities rooted in a problem of "systemic racism," or are these factors further examples of how capitalism is cannibalizing the poor and working class while larger segments of Black America are part of that class? We will discuss race, capitalism and infrastructure in this episode.   About Professor Rector: Josiah Rector is an urban historian specializing in 20th century U.S. urban environmental history, the history of the environmental justice movement, and the history of capitalism. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Wayne State University, and his dissertation received the Urban History Association’s Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History, 2016. He was subsequently a visiting professor of U.S. and Environmental History at Northland College in 2017-2019. His current book project, Toxic Debt: Race, Capitalism, and the Struggle for Environmental Justice in Detroit (forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press, series in Justice, Power, and Politics), is a history of environmental inequality and environmental activism in Detroit from the late 19th century to the present. He has published articles in The Journal of American History and Modern American History, and he is currently planning a second book on the political ecology of urban environmental disasters in the United States since World War II. He also has extensive experience in public history. He coordinated public history internships through the Next Gen Humanities Ph.D. Program at Wayne State University in 2017-2018, and he co-organized the Michigan Humanities Council’s Third Coast Conversations: Dialogues about Water Program for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in 2018-2019.   About Keith Pluymers: After doing my BA at the University of Delaware, I completed my PhD at the University of Southern California, graduating in 2015. I then was the Howard and Susanne Jessen Postdoctoral Instructor in the Humanities at Caltech. Since 2018, I have been an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Illinois State University. My research focuses on the environmental history of early modern Europe and the Atlantic World. I have taught classes on early modern Europe, historical methods, global environmental history, the histories of conservation and sustainability, rivers and history, and doing history in the Anthropocene.   Thank you guys again for taking the time to check this out. We appreciate each and everyone of you. If you have the means, and you feel so inclined, BECOME A PATRON! We're creating patron only programing, you'll get bonus content from many of the episodes, and you get MERCH!   Become a patron now https://www.patreon.com/join/BitterLakePresents?   Please also like, subscribe, and follow us on these platforms as well, (specially YouTube!) THANKS Y'ALL   Get THIS IS REVOLUTION>podcast Merch here:  https://www.thisisrevolutionpodcast.com/   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG9WtLyoP9QU8sxuIfxk3eg Twitch: www.twitch.tv/thisisrevolutionpodcast www.twitch.tv/leftflankvets​   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Thisisrevolutionpodcast/   Twitter: @TIRShowOakland Instagram: @thisisrevolutionoakland   Medium: https://jasonmyles.medium.com/kill-the-poor-f9d8c10bc33d   Pascal Robert in Black Agenda Report: https://www.blackagendareport.com/author/Pascal%20Robert   The Dispatch on Zero Books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SZSs-PpSKE&t=48s