Badin, North Carolina was the site of one of the nation’s first aluminum smelting facilities, operated by the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) from 1917 through 2007. It was racially segregated, and Highway 740 remains a physical barrier between the residing communities, with East Badin being majority white and West Badin largely Black. The closed aluminum smelting facility as well as its dumping sites are located in West Badin. The Concerned Citizens of West Badin Community (CCBWC) formed in 2013 to advocate for remediation of contamination from the now closed Alcoa aluminum smelting facility in their community. In interviews, former workers from the facility have voiced concerns regarding imbalances in occupational exposures by race and gender, as well as a high incidence of cancer. Communities of color are disproportionately burdened by industrial pollution throughout the US; and, at this smelting facility, employees report that the least desirable jobs in the plant involved work in the pot rooms and were most frequently assigned to Black workers.
This project work supported by and in partnership with Pavithra Vasudevan, an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches in the Department of African & African Diaspora Studies and the Department of Women’s & Gender Studies. Per her linked bio, “[her] scholarship and teaching are concerned with how racialized peoples and landscapes are devalued in capitalism and the abolitional possibilities of collective struggle. [Her] work addresses how race and waste are interwoven in contemporary racial capitalism and capitalist entanglements with the state and science.”
The North Carolina Environmental Justice Network also plays an integral role in collaborating with the EJ Clinic and CCBWC on these efforts.