Polluted Promises, by Melissa Checker

  The first chapter of the book Polluted Promises, by Melissa Checker, introduces us to the concept of environmental racism through an ethnographic case study of the Hyde Park neighborhood in Augusta, Georgia. Besides the environmental pollution that residents of Hyde Park had to suffer, what two social problems other that racism did the people of Hyde Park share with the residents of Spanish Harlem, in Manhattan, as discussed in the chapter by Phillip Bourgeois? According to Melissa Checker in the second chapter of Polluted Promises, how do environmental justice define “the environment” and how is their definition different from the mainstream middle-class understanding of this term?