Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

Today, we have a three-part, three-interview special episode on Houston.

It's a city that everyone has watched closely in recent weeks, but that few outsiders know much about.

It's a sprawling and highly segregated metropolis where environmental injustice, guided by sharp

inequality, hits poor neighborhoods of color, the hardest.

My guest today are Robert Bullard, a longtime leader of the environmental justice movement,

historian Tawana Stepto, and housing advocate, John Hennemberger.

Before we dive in, I want to thank the more than 400 people who have supported the show so far on patreon.com.

To keep doing these two shows a week, though, we still need more support. In fact, we'd like to get to 700 supporters by the end of the year.

And I think we can do it.

So, if you haven't already, press pause and go to patreon.com.

That's p-a-t-r-e-o-n.com slash the dig.

If you can only do a buck a month, that's great.

If you can do five, even better.

Ten or more comes with socialist book swag. And we have a really exciting fall lineup, as I mentioned a few days ago. Not yet

finalized, but includes Khaled Bedouin, Aziz Rana, Francis Fox Piven, Stephen Wertheim,

Brandy Jensen, Leslie Lee, Eve Pacer, Paul Freimer, Matt Christman, Corey Robin, Matt Karp, Noelle Bridgin, Tim Shorock, Nikiel Saval, and Dorothy Roberts.

Thanks for listening and for your support. First up, we have historian Tijuana Stepto, a professor at the University of Arizona, and the author of Houston Bound, Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City.

Tijuana Sttoe, welcome to the dig.

Thank you for having me.

Before we get into the history, one thing that really struck me putting together the show is that Houston is the fourth largest city, but isn't studied that much by scholars. For listeners who hadn't given much thought to the city before Harvey

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