7 ms·

The re-framing of this story within the narrative of American racial conflict feels remarkably cheap. Don't misinterpret this as a lack of sympathy for those re

• wccrawford 7y ago
  I don't feel the same way. It wasn't just 1 person in the article saying that, and even quoted a scientist as saying it was largely a racial problem. They disagree with you that the racial component is incidental.
• ocschwar 7y ago
  It's Louisiana. Beneath the Southern charm is still the same layer of active malice that gets facilities like this placed right next to black neighborhoods.
• Spooky23 7y ago
  It’s easy to interpret that way without context. Black and Hispanic communities are always targeted for nasty development because they lack the political power to effectively resist and racist attitudes make it easy to explain things away. It’s really easy to see this as FHA published maps with lending guidelines in the mid 20th century. The redline area (is don’t write mortgages) are black neighborhoods in most cities. If you look at the zoning map, those redline areas usually align with shared residential/industrial zoning.
  • ajxs 7y ago
    I disagree with this completely. If it was overall cheaper to build industrial infrastructure in so-called "white communities", companies would be doing it. This kind of capitalism largely concedes no such moral imperatives. Also, I am absolutely unconvinced that the zoning process is even remotely that simple. Reducing this to even the most ( unrealistically ) simple model, you end up with a chicken vs egg dilemma. If you put industrial zones in close proximity with areas of high socio-economic status, the economically mobile population living there will move away leaving an impoverished area behind. This is a gross oversimplification, but you should be able to see the problem. The relationship between undesirable industrial areas and poverty is indeed systemic, but it's not predatory.
    • u10 7y ago
      How do you figure that 'White Communities' have become more affluent while minority communities are less so? There are plenty of examples of institutional racism, such as redlining, that have resulted in these divides and have/have not communities
      • jonathanwallace 7y ago
        Check out https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34758210-the-color-of-money https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34758210-the-color-of-mo... for more information as to why this might be the case.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • jancsika 7y ago
      > Also, I am absolutely unconvinced that the zoning process is even remotely that simple. Let's back up a second. Are you familiar with the history of redlining in the U.S. in the 20th Century?
    • Spooky23 7y ago
      Robert Moses on building infrastructure that specifically kept blacks and Puerto Ricans out of the Long Island suburbs: > The legacy of segregation in the suburbs, too, can be attributed in part to Moses’ personal biases, Caro says. The city planner didn’t want poor people of color from the city accessing Jones Beach, which was established while Moses was President of the Long Island State Park Commission, so he made it illegal for buses to travel on the parkways there. Furthermore, Caro says, “Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. ‘Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.’ So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses… this is how you can shape a metropolis for generations.” Moses built the NYC Metro state park, expressway and parkway systems. He wasn't a fan of blacks, puerto ricans and poor jews, and deliberately built highway bridges about 4 feet too low for busses to pass, to keep "undesirables" out of Long Island beaches. This was also motivated by the attitude on Long Island, where the KKK was a major force at the time. There's no core principles around business, and particularly at the intersection of business and local government. Realpolitik rules the day. In terms of redlining, here's a great starting point about the city that I grew up in: http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2017/02/16/albany-redlining-history http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2017/02/16/albany-redlining... Key quote to ponder: > "Yet New Deal housing policy also underwrote racial discrimination. The FHA refused to guarantee mortgages in neighborhoods that were under the threat of "infiltration" by black, Hispanic, or foreign families. This policy remained in force until 1950. Although the HOLC wound down its operations in 1951, its legacy long outlived it in the form of redlining maps. Between 1935 and 1938, HOLC consulted with realtors, builders, and bankers in cities around the country. Until the passage of fair housing and fair lending laws in the 1970s, these maps (and later versions of them drawn up by local lenders) determined where mortgage money went -- and to whom."
• rayiner 7y ago
  Ignoring the racial dimension would be inaccurate, for two reasons. First, the fact is that the median income for black household is on the border of the bottom third for white households. So all the things that happen to poor households generally, like pollution, happen more intensively to black households. Second, black neighborhoods are discounted in the public eye even in comparison to their income levels. I grew up in “progressive” northern Virginia, hearing about how PG County (a suburb of DC) was “ghetto.” Two decades later, when I moved next door, I was quite surprised to learn that PG County is just a middle class predominantly black county. One of the richest predominate black counties in the country, and richer than most counties in Virginia that nobody considers “the ghetto.” Those attitudes almost certainly impact peoples’ views about what places are desirable/undesirable/need renewal/etc. Those two phenomena also intersect. Places are worth less because black people live there. Take the DC suburbs, for example. To the west and southwest of DC, you have the Virginia suburbs of Fairfax County, Alexandria, and Arlington. To the north, east, and southeast, you have the Maryland suburbs of Montgomery County and PG County. PG County is better served by Metro, both in number of lines and number of stations, than any other suburban county (and that's been true for 30+ years). In DC, property near a Metro station has appreciated incredibly over the past 25 years. Where has most of that growth happened? On the Virginia side, where there are white people and predominantly white schools. Even today, people are fighting through northern Virginia traffic from places like Reston to get to a Metro station that then takes 30 minutes to get to the city center. Meanwhile, they could get a house in a solidly middle class PG County neighborhood with a shorter trip downtown, for half the price. But they don't, because they do not want to send their kids to predominately black schools.
  • ajxs 7y ago
    > ...all the things that happen to poor households generally happen more intensively to black households. That was kinda my point, but black communities being over-represented among the population at risk does not mean necessarily imply that this action was a targeted predatory action against the black community. If you sample the population of these areas, you're obviously going to find samples representative of larger marginalised communities.
    • 7y ago
• x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
  Seems like when you say "cheapened" you are really saying that the racial aspect makes you uncomfortable. And to say that such events happening to the black community in the South are nothing more than "incidental" is more proof of your comfort and denial.
• maxxxxx 7y ago
  I tend to agree. It’s an issue where people with less money and hence less power get screwed. Stuff like this happens in West VA all the time with the coal mines.
  • eigenstuff 7y ago
    This shit has been on my mind a lot lately: all the atrocities Appalachians have been subjected to, the sewage infrastructure crisis affecting rural black communities in the Deep South, cancer alley, probably even more issues Deep South rural black communities deal with that I'm unaware of, etc. P much my conclusion is nobody gives a shit what happens to people in rural areas, and ESPECIALLY in the rural South. We're all out here, out of sight, out of mind, just "getting what we voted for." However, what goes on with rural black communities IS racially motivated, or maybe a better phrase is "racially justified." BUT. What goes on in Appalachia is ALSO "racially motivated/justified" in the sense that Appalachians are "white trash" and therefore "lesser than" just like black people and therefore in the eyes of some deserving of all their hardships. It's just instead of race, prejudice against Appalachians centers around having a distinct culture completely separate from the rest of America. The Appalachian dialect being synonymous with backwardness and stupidity is a stereotype over 100 years old. It's all a caste system, and imo the whole "Trump Country" narrative just serves to reinforce it and give the rest of America an out for fully reckoning with the continuing legacy of slavery in the rural Deep South and finally just plain recognizing the legacy of extractive industry in Appalachia to begin with. The rest of America's wealth was built on the blood of both of these groups.
• otikik 7y ago
  The problem I see with your argument is that you see things done by the rich (mostly white) as "things that just happen" and things done by the poor (mostly white) as "reaction". The plant did not just "happen to appear" in a black neighborhood. A group of someones decided where that plant was going to be installed in the first place. I'm sure there were lots of other "equally good" candidates. Your argument would work similarly for the incarcerated. Black people make 10% of the US population yet they make 40% of the incarcerated. They lose the right to vote. There's allegedly forced labor and poor sanitary conditions. Do you think this is also "likely incidental"? That black people "just happens to be more incarcerated" than whites? Please consider the recent US history before answering.
  • ajxs 7y ago
    I disagree with your reasoning. Your use of the word 'someones' sounds rather sinister, the _Someones_ involved in building and running chemical plants aren't going to choose to pay extra to inconvenience minorities, I assure you. I am absolutely certain however that building such industrial development in lower socio-economic areas is advantageous for the companies, as local residents are less likely to be able to litigate, or less integrated within the democratic process overall. I'm not being unsympathetic to the victims of this issue, I'm just not going to attribute this process to outright malice or racism. I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Is the plant really there _because_ it's a black area? Or is it there because it's a poor area, and is it also a predominantly black area because it's a poor area? What economic impact has the introduction of the chemical plant had on the community, did it make it poorer? Correlation does not imply causation, I think there's other explanations for the plight of the area that aren't predicated entirely upon racism.
    • Dylan16807 7y ago
      Building somewhere because the residents have bad access to the law and government is malicious. In some specific decisions the racial bias is all incidental. But that's still exacerbating past racism, and if even a little bit of current racism slips in it can be massively magnified. It's not cheap or unfair to highlight these effects. Decisions don't happen in a vacuum.
• justin66 7y ago
  > However I feel that pushing the racial component of the story cheapened an otherwise good article. Whether the people impacted are predominantly African-American is likely incidental. You are part of the problem.
  • eigenstuff 7y ago
    Lmao for real, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what rural black communities in the Deep South are subjected to because they do not have the political clout necessary to stand up for themselves and their hardships are out of sight, out of mind, so no one else tries to help them fight for better like with Flint. Go do a Google about the sewage infrastructure crisis in Alabama.
    • justin66 7y ago
      That's... funny?
• forgottenpass 7y ago
  It's poverty porn; of course the framing is cheap. It's easy to mistake things like this as meaningful news about pollution, but it's not. "Fold up the newspaper, switch off the news and unsubscribe from everything. It isnt informing you, it isnt keeeping you connected to your society, it just feels enough like is that you keep going back for a little bit more, a little bit more. And after how many decades of consuming your prefered brand content nothing has grown. Everyone trusted them and got robbed, sunk cost fallacy, move on."
  • alexandercrohde 7y ago
    Care to elaborate? (I hope you read the article?) This to me reads like an informative and actionable piece of information that citizens should know about. Specifically: - If there is scientific evidence that living in a certain area can cause cancer, that is something you should probably know. - If there is evidence that your representatives in your state are ignoring EPA recommendations, that is something you should probably know - If you don't understand that air quality can cause cancer, that is something you should probably know
    • forgottenpass 7y ago
      Certainly. I'm going to ignore this article because the details it contains are only a distraction from the shape of my perspective. Coverage about the opiate epidemic doesn't use personal stories to get the reader to take the issue seriously. They do it to trick the reader into thinking they care about the opiate epidemic for long enough to click some ads. If the death numbers didn't make someone shit their pants and get to work on fixing it, some pictures of white trash aren't going to either. A person reading the news in New York would much rather hear about the problems with a failing school district in Appalachia than their own county. It (among other things) lets them project their impression of Appalacia onto the problem, and lets them avoid thinking about the fact they're already ignoring all the issues in their own schools. Approximately nobody who will effect the local school district first hears of the problems with it in the paper. How many people who want to improve the world have actually make it their job? Or volunteer on the side? Or call local leaders every now and then? Or do as little as donate money to charities making a big impact on the world? The presence of real world issues in the news let people lie to themselves that they're doing more than consuming entertainment. The news is written with that in mind. Not consciously, no. But the system has evolved in adaptation to that constraint.
• mymythisisthis 7y ago
  I understand what you mean. I would have preferred an article with lots more technical info.
• drugme 7y ago
  Whether the people impacted are predominantly African-American is likely incidental. The story makes a compelling case that it was in fact very far from incidental.