Harriet A. Washington. A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind. New York: Little, Brown Spark. 2019.
(This review was first published in Flint’s East Village Magazine.)
From the early 2000s, I was director of a center that taught poverty to the non-poor. The point was to help resourced people understand the problems and become allies in the work for a better world. Our constituency was mostly young people, so "boiling it all down” was often our approach.
Along the way, I developed a trajectory to help folks connect “what is possible” to “what is epidemic.” I would draw for them a line directly from “creating a national corps of exterminators” to “reducing the prison population” that bracketed cockroaches, school absenteeism, reading capability, drop out rates, and you get the idea.
Of course, nothing is ever that easy, and my straight line became really just a metaphor for a host of ills that create and sustain poverty — up to and including policies that embed poverty in our national economic system, poor people as a requirement of capitalism. And we would eventually get to the reality that People of Color are overwhelmingly poor and poor people are disproportionately People of Color, hence it is challenging to get people in any position of power to do or want to do anything different.
My basic trajectory, my metaphor, found girth, breadth and depth in Harriet A. Washington’s book A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind.
With a specific thesis exploring the connections between environmental degradation and intellectual/neurological development, Washington offers a tome that is frankly more maddening than hopeful, yet another indictment of American capitalism.
The cockroaches of my metaphor are of course inadequate to describe the environmental issues faced by People of Color and people living in poverty (and again, there is huge overlap). Her list of poisons goes far beyond to describe how roaches, rats and other vermin become a problem to begin with — and if you guessed it has something to do with capitalism, well, you’re right.
Washington begins with an introduction and first chapter on the problematic history of measuring IQ and a refutation of the long-defended premise that People of Color are just naturally less intelligent. I hope no reader here needs to be convinced, but that’s probably naive.
Generational harm is real, she maintains, but even genetic traits that are passed along are more often caused by external factors, which she details at length throughout Part 2. “When this genetic transmission causes brain damage leading to lowered faculties, it occurs as a result not of innate inferiority, but of a chemical insult,” which is sometimes intentional, she reports. She includes stories of harm caused by unethical and dubious “research” or profit-driven dumping and development, little of which would surprise.
The middle section of the book, then, is a deep dive into all manner of toxins: heavy metals, chemicals, byproducts, microbes, things in the soil and water, things that linger in the air. She indicts faux science, corporations and industry, government, with extensive discussions of lead, tobacco, parasites, pesticides, benzene, arsenic, mercury, PCBs, NTDs, DDT, TCE, PBDEs, BSE, and so many other acronyms (there’s a glossary in the back), and how they pervade our daily lives; she probes who knew what and when they knew it among the corporate and state poisoners; she tells god-awful stories of American communities, among them: Flint, Detroit, Baltimore, Anniston, Philadelphia, New York, Houston, Standing Rock and the Yellow Dog Plains in Michigan’s U.P. She discusses the dangers in “fence line communities” — the people who live adjacent to and are poisoned by coal mines, lead smelters, landfills and such, precisely the effect local activists in Flint are now trying to prevent by opposition to the Ajax asphalt plant in Genesee Township. In just one particularly egregious instance, in Ft Myers, FL, the cynically named “Homearama” comprised a section of parcels bought by the city under the pretense of establishing affordable housing, which instead became a city dump, diminishing the value in all the surrounding homes and poisoning its people for decades.
There are, she says, some 60 thousand chemicals approved in the U.S. for general use, under the U.S. policy of “use until you prove them unsafe” rather than the European policy of “don’t use until they’re proven safe.” The U.S. requires no testing on humans prior to general use. And because proving things unsafe after allegations are raised can be a years- or decades-long process, a lot of harm is done in the meantime. One particularly effective industry tactic, established by the Lead Industries Association (LIA), is in creating a lingering question mark: “Doubt became a useful foil against the expense of regulation….This corporate skepticism is often articulated as a scientific question, to wit, ‘Is there really incontrovertible evidence that lead in paint is a hazard demanding eradication?’” We hear the method repeated in cases against everything from tobacco to Teflon.
Climate crisis also contributes to blight and poison, as warming trends hasten the spread of pathogens and escalate risks of infectious diseases, as documented in post-Katrina New Orleans. Storms ever increasing in intensity and frequency compromise energy and other chemical-emitting plants, breaching safety barriers; post-disaster reconstruction sees debris dumped in vulnerable neighborhoods and building codes relaxed to speed recovery, often introducing toxic materials into newly rebuilt neighborhoods.
Back to my metaphor. The problem with cockroaches, even as a metaphor, is that they reinforce social pressure to believe that people are to blame for just failing to clean properly; blaming the victim is America’s favorite response to social ills, we know. In neighborhoods, environmentally degraded areas often become blighted, as residents are not able to maintain their homes (renters can't coerce landlords; homeowners cannot get loans for homes that have no equity) nor sell them (because the home or the area is no longer desirable for new purchasers).
Thence derided as “slums,” these blighted areas are attributed to the “poor character” of the occupants, with little regard for the circumstances people were forced into. Then, as Washington reports in the case of Flint, the Genesee County Land Bank takes over and takes ownership of so many properties, “driving longtime Flint residents from their homes,” a practice to which the Land Bank sales manager responded with a racial epithet and a charge that Flint’s distressed citizens don’t pay their bills.
Likewise, all these environmental stressors and toxins contribute to neurological deficits that include lack of impulse control, inability to focus, and inability to make sound decisions, all of which contribute to the crime reported in poor, damaged communities. Among other effects, Washington cites a study indicating “the reduction in gasoline lead was responsible for most of the decline in U.S. violent crime during the 1990s.”
Nefarious motives also are assigned to people who are victims: As recently as 2015, Washington reports, “Kenneth C. Holt, Maryland’s secretary of housing, community and development, dismissed the plight of (lead-)poisoned children by speculating that their mothers were deliberately exposing their own children in fraudulent attempts to obtain better housing.” Which I have to note is not all that different from the cavalier attitude the people of Flint experienced from our state government during the water emergency. Washington cites one of those moments in Flint, when a state nurse commented to a worried mom, “It’s just a few IQ points; it’s not the end of the world.” And we in Flint surely remember others, like the Governor’s staff member who told a resident “It’s called the safe drinking water act, not the tasty drinking water act.” In one report Washington cites, lead industry officials referred to Baltimore’s lead-poisoned children (again, overwhelmingly Black) as “little rats,” and their mothers as “overfecund imbeciles.” This attitude bleeds into draconian policies we thought went away, policies that permit or require, for instance, implanted sterilization for women deemed unfit for parenting. (There is no equivalent court-ordered response for men.)
There are other moments that may trigger unpleasant Flint memories: an industry settlement with the PCB-poisoned people of Anniston, Alabama, that was surely too little to make any meaningful remedial difference in the lives of current residents or future generations; the people struggling to make their days work who are also forced to become scientists and community activists just to have clean water; the reality that water was only the latest insult to a city population that had been abandoned after manufacturing had extracted and exploited everything that was available to extract or exploit; and her discussion of the dangers of radiation, which surely flashes us back to the news reports in recent months of a settlement-hungry law firm that used dangerous and unregistered (illegal) scanners to x-ray the bones of Flint children. She also discusses, in a section called “vanished children,” the high number of fetal deaths and a fertility rate that plummeted after the water poisoning.
Of course, asthma’s not nothing. There is truth behind my metaphor. In 2010 alone, according to an industry report, “21,000 U.S. facilities reported discharging 3.9 billion pounds of toxic chemicals into U.S. land and air…. Moreover, industries have dumped 21.8 billion pounds of industrial waste into the water.” Washington reports asthma’s high cost according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: 10 million lost school days; 1.8 million emergency room visits; 15 million outpatient visits; half a million hospitalizations; $14.5 billion in 2000 alone. And disproportionately those numbers represent People of Color.
The whole thing, in fact, is of greater consequence to People of Color, already demeaned by pre-existing bias and expectation of low performance. Additionally, she notes, the stress of racism exacerbates measurably the effects of all the other factors.
People of Color cannot win in America. Only capitalism can win here, capitalism borne of white supremacy.
If Parts 1 and 2 made me mad, Part 3 made me tired and mad. Titled Mission Possible: How to Bolster the Nation’s IQ, it purports to raise people’s spirits by raising their hopes. “The only known national solution is to eradicate harmful, under-regulated poisons from residential housing, schools, water, food and fence-line communities…” she declares, but then spends 60 pages laying the task at the feet of parents.
Though parts of the problem she cites are that doctors don’t generally discuss with their patients the neuro-invaders that are shaping their children’s lives and marketing departments routinely target People of Color and low income people in particular insidious ways, Chapter 6 coaches burdened parents on how to fight a problem they cannot identify: things like enrolling kids in pre-K, fighting contaminants in schools, poison-proofing their homes and water, providing ameliorative foods and snacks, and making “safe household purchases.” In the margin, after each suggestion, I jotted a dollar sign and/or a clock, reminding me that overworked, overburdened and under-resourced parents have hardly the time, money or energy to do any of the things she suggests, much less tackle a complicated and comprehensive program of poison eradication. (This, after she has specifically noted that “dollar stores,” the most convenient and affordable options for families, often have cheap toys and goods imported from non-conforming countries and more likely to be tainted with poisons.)
Chapter 7 assumes parents have time, money and energy left after Chapter 6, and advocates community organizing, legal action and lobbying. There are community activists who do this, we know; we’ve seen them active here in the water war, in the fight for criminal justice reform and better policing, and now in the fight against Ajax. There are fights for racial justice on every front. People of Color are apparently never allowed to be tired or let their guard down. But every moment fighting extracts something. Washington is a Black woman; she knows this and stays in the struggle.
Churches are especially powerful, she claims, and I want to be hopeful. The stories she tells (including stories from the United Church of Christ, of which Woodside is a member), are inspiring; but they are only a few drops of win in an ocean of offense. I’ve heard it said that if churches ever stood as a united front against injustice, the world would change. I’m just not all that hopeful churches will find the will to do that. And my cynical self reminds that churches spend inordinate amounts of energy guarding the holy grail of tax exemption, to the detriment of the common good.
All of that is mostly a recounting of the book; the review part is shorter and, I hope, useful. Here are my thoughts:
Washington is a journalist but I wished for more citations. She is well-credentialed — according to her Wikipedia page, she has been a fellow in ethics at the Harvard Medical School, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University — and has a decades-long tenure reporting on science and medicine. But with 575 footnotes, there were still moments when I wondered whence her data was drawn.
She regularly used the anachronistic and mostly discarded word “retardation” and its derivatives, which was hard to stomach.
Washington also neglected to address the ways that animal consumption contributes to the poisoned world we inhabit. Pandemics, we know, are transmitted from animals to humans, and I hope we will learn this lesson from Covid-19, but we seem resistant to changing our ways. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), the only way to farm animals that can feed the the First World (never mind the second or third), are well documented to cause all manner of human ill. By their design, these CAFOs create and market animals that are not healthy; by their very existence, CAFOs poison neighboring communities’ air, soil and water with waste, stench and by-products, creating many of the types of “fence-line communities” Washington warns about — even lowering life expectancy among their neighbors. Given that she associates hypertension and other physical ailments with mental and neuro effects, I find it distressing that she doesn’t address animal consumption issues — what we eat, how it is grown. She discusses Red Tide, HIV, Mad Cow, and even includes a preface related to Covid, which emerged from an exotic animal market, yet her only mention of the food chain is to advise eating smaller fish for less mercury.
All that said, this is a good book.
For People of Color, perhaps it offers a reassurance that the issues they face, the physical and intellectual challenges — and economic and security issues — in their families and communities, are not character flaws or personal failings, but well-aimed assaults by a capitalistic, white-supremacist culture accustomed to having its own way.
For white people, I hope it can be a call to action, a call to blame less and be engaged more in work that gets at the very definition of neighbor, the very heart of what it means to be community.
“The only known national solution is to eradicate harmful, under-regulated poisons from residential housing, schools, water, food and fence-line communities…” but there is news this week that campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies are causing Democrats to drop the legislative permission for Medicare to negotiate for better drug prices. So, policy solutions don’t seem forthcoming.
There are metaphors, even good metaphors, but no single metaphor can tell us all that we need to know. The book is good; can we learn?