“A
Terrible Thing to Waste – Environmental Racism and the Assault on the American Mind,”
by Harriet A. Washington, 2019
This is an
analysis of environmental racism focusing on what it does to mental and emotional
abilities. Toxic substances like lead, arsenic,
heavy metals, untested industrial chemicals, air particulates and carcinogens or
the absence of nutritional food and substances like iodide affect mental
abilities. The list of other culprits is
long, including vermin, tobacco, alcohol and drugs, hair straigteners and dyes,
poverty, red-lining and segregation. It
also includes many pathogens and diseases, including Covid-19, which can all cause
cognitive damage. She does not mention the
profit-system of course, which would sure “tie the room together.”
INTELLIGENCE
To assess
‘intelligence’ Washington
uses the IQ test. She has a conflicted
relationship with it, but she refers to it constantly. It shows a 15 point gap
between dark and light-skinned people. She
takes this number seriously, almost giving credence to the idea that poor or
minority people are less intelligent. This
book seeks to explain that gap on the environmental side, as she understands
IQ’s limitations. She seems unaware that
there are at least 8-9 types of intelligence, and IQ tests only sample a few. She
shows how IQ tests are flawed, as its creator Binet didn’t even think it
defined actual intelligence. In the
process she attacks various ‘hereditarians’ who use IQ tests to ‘blame the
victim’ – the method of choice by racists.
She goes back to colonial and slavery phrenology, U.S. eugenics
of the late 1800s / early 1900s and the racist science of Shockley, Jensen and
Watson in the 1970s-1980s, on up to 2014 and a NYT science writer. She accepts the conventional U.S. government
definition of ‘multiple races’ as describing ‘blacks’ and ‘whites,’ then refers
to ethnicity or ‘communities of color’ for these same people. For a middle-class science analyst, she
doesn’t seem to have a fixed or accurate approach to either IQ or race. While ‘socially constructed,’ there is only
one human race - embracing the ‘multiple’ verbiage helps the racists.
Socialists
will also notice the complete absence of the term ‘working class,’ as
Washington thinks people are either ‘poor’ or ‘middle-class,’ both color-caste
coded terms. This is typical of
liberals. She does identify ‘poor
whites’ and ‘underclass whites’ as lower on IQ scores, a result of a very
similar poverty to minorities – something also applying to Asians from certain low-income
countries like Cambodia, Laos or Indonesia.
The ISSUES
Environmental
damage is many-times the effect of a combination of poverty, class and skin
color racism. It is also obvious that climate change will have disparate
effects too, though she doesn’t address that.
Washington investigates in detail the
physical and mental damage wrought by every single negative factor inflicted on
the proletariat in the U.S.,
especially the African-American and Latino proletariat, starting with lead. Some of these factors both Dickens and Marx
documented years ago, but among workers in Manchester
and London. She starts with Baltimore’s
lead-filled neighborhoods and the poor majority-minority town of Flint. She covers smog leading to asthma, affecting
nearly every kid in Harlem. She investigates the effect of various
infections, pathogens and diseases on mental health, from AIDS to Zika. She locates toxic sites located in minority
neighborhoods scattered mostly across the South and on Native American
reservations, including the infamous town of Anniston, Alabama, polluted by
Monsanto©. For the cost of doing
business and poisoning the residents, Monsanto© paid thousands of individuals legal
settlements of $9K an adult and $2K a child for a lifetime of severe health
problems, up to and including death.
 |
| Afton, North Carolina protest against PCB dump |
Washington’s
solutions range from getting water filters, avoiding toxic food (much processed
baby food has arsenic and lead in it) and containers, eliminating house
hazards, enrolling in Head-Start or pre-Kindergarten, breast-feeding, getting
out in nature, writing your Congressperson, etc. – all common enough individual
steps. Washington also understands that the issue
is really political, beyond the personal.
She seeks a revival of the methods of the civil rights movement to deal
with racist toxic issues, citing a local environmental justice struggle against
a PCB dump in an African-American neighborhood in Afton, North Carolina. But what you are left with after reading this
book is that we are living in a toxic soup coming at us from all sides – water,
air, commodities, soil – with few social controls. Ignorance is not bliss.
LABOR
Is ENVIRONMENTAL
One thing Washington deals with
only once are work accidents or conditions, which especially affect blue-collar
and service workers. Her focus is on neighborhoods, so misses this. “Environmental
racism” is not limited to neighborhoods, but includes work-places. Vietnamese girls breathing nail fumes; Latino
roofers falling; dark-skinned laborers sliced in chicken-processing plants; Mexican
farm-workers dying of heat-stroke; Appalachian miners contracting black-lung; Haitian
textile workers breathing dust – the list is endless. The military exposes soldiers to various dangerous substances - we have only to remember Vietnam's Agent Orange and Iraq's burn pits. Due to the racist job-caste system, many of
these jobs are reserved for minorities and immigrants, are low-paid and
relatively unprotected. But is also affects light-skinned proletarians. The ‘mental’
effects of these jobs and accidents is unstudied for the most part.
This book
is a detailed study of toxins and their effect on mental and physical
health. The multiplicity of threats
requires a more ‘holistic’ approach to preventing harm than Washington suggests. The feature behind nearly every problem is a
political system dedicated to capitalism. As a middle-class professor, she cannot go there.
Prior blog
reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our
14-year archive of reviews on words like "toxic," "environmental."
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
July 10, 2021
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