Photo by Special to The Chronicle | The Chronicle Danielle Purifoy, Graduate School ‘18, is a Carolina postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies the racial politics of modern segregation in black communities across the South. The Chronicle spoke with Purifoy about racial diversity in environmental academia, her experience working in racial environmental justice and her lived experience as a woman of color in environmental academic spaces. The Chronicle: How has your lived experience influenced your current environmental justice trajectory? Danielle Purifoy: I was a senior in high school when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. That storm was the first time I had heard about environmental racism and really experienced how a lot of folks that called themselves environmentalists were willing to dispose of New Orleans. I was struck by how callous people were about the loss of people’s lives and how they wanted to erase hundreds of years of black culture in this city. I ended up working down there for about three years on the infrastructure and environmental planning division of the recovery effort and saw firsthand how the federal programs administered by [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] were disadvantaging communities […]

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