Toxic Environment to Think In

 “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