October 5, 2006
Poor, Black and Dumped On
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
Most of the carnage -- the terrible illnesses and the premature deaths
-- is hidden.
"The people in those agencies who issue the permits, and then do very
little monitoring and very little enforcement in our communities, they
don't go with us to the emergency rooms where the children are
suffering from serious asthma attacks. And they certainly don't go with
us to the funeral homes where we bury people who are 40 years old and
have died of cancer. They don't see the terrible damage that this stuff
is doing."
Monique Harden, a lawyer and director of a human rights agency in New
Orleans, was talking about a problem that will get no attention at all
in the Congressional elections, which are primarily about foolishness
and the compulsion to deceive.
The evidence has been before us for decades that black people, other
ethnic minorities and some poor whites have been getting sick and
enduring horrible deaths from the filth that they breathe, eat, drink
and otherwise ingest from the garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators,
toxic waste sites, oil refineries, petrochemical plants and other
world-class generators of pollution that have been deliberately and
relentlessly installed in the neighborhoods where they live, work,
worship and go to school.
Two colossal environmental debacles occurred, for example, in West
Anniston, Ala., a neighborhood that is mostly black and mostly poor. A
chemical plant conveniently located there produced thousands of pounds
of potentially deadly polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB's) each year. For
years after the danger was apparent, residents were left uninformed.
Some were later found to have the highest concentrations of PCB's in
their bloodstreams of anyone ever tested.
But the PCB's from the chemical plant were just one of many risks faced
by the residents. In 2003 the military began burning deadly chemical
weapons stored at the Anniston Army Depot in West Anniston. Emissions
associated with burning chemical weapons include dioxins, PCB's,
furans, heavy metals and trace amounts of nerve and mustard gas agents.
The Rev. Henry Sterling, a pastor in Anniston, told me with great
sadness how he had buried his niece who had died from cancer when she
was just 30, and then two days later had to bury two other women in
their 20's, and then the following week two more women in their late
20's.
He added, "My secretary was from here, and she was just 32 when she
died from cancer. We have young men dying, too. But during that short
period it just happened to be all women."
We’ve known -- or should have known -- since at least 1987, when a
landmark study was published by the Commission on Racial Justice of the
United Church of Christ, that wildly disproportionate numbers of
hazardous waste sites have been placed in communities with large
concentrations of black and Latino residents.
Since then an enormous amount of data has been compiled showing that
government and industry alike have used black and poor neighborhoods as
dumping grounds for the vilest and most dangerous of pollutants. You go
to these communities, where the air can be thick enough to make you
gag, and you find that the rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke and
the like are off the charts.
The largest hazardous waste landfill in America is near the small,
rural town of Emelle, in Sumter County, which is part of the so-called
"black belt" of Alabama. It takes in hazardous materials from 48 states
and some foreign countries. More than 70 percent of the Sumter County
population, and more than 90 percent of the population of Emelle, is
black.
The systematic placement of garbage dumps, chemical plants, oil
refineries and other hazardous facilities in communities inhabited
primarily by blacks and other disadvantaged groups is nothing less than
an unconscionable extension of the devastating Jim Crow policies that
have existed in one form or another, legally or illegally, since
slavery.
More than 70 environmental, human rights and public health groups
participated in a bus tour last week -- dubbed "The Environmental
Justice for All Tour" -- that visited communities across the country
that have suffered terrible damage from these blatantly discriminatory
policies.
The tour was enthusiastically received at each stop, but got hardly any
attention from the larger society. The message to blacks and others
struggling with these hideous policies could not have been clearer: we
are not in the least interested in you.
