3 ms·

Nevermind the Times article -- could someone condescend to explain what's wrong with the argument made in the original USC study, actually? Seems pretty straig

• PaulHoule 4y ago
  (1) when I got involved in activism around 1992, many people thought “environmental racism” would be the next frontier but 30 years later it is a bust. It is true black and brown people are badly affected by pollution but it has not been effective in rallying a movement or changing the situation. (And this is coming from someone who started rallying progressive groups that weren’t talking to each other on a big college campus who had that work picked up and built on by others.) (2) The racial frame erodes people’s ability to tell wrong from right which is universal. It is wrong for one person to poison another person, it is wrong whoever is poisoning schoolgirls in Iran now, it is wrong for 3M to poison workers, it would not make it right if blacks were poisoning whites. Seeing capital-B black vs capital-W white as a cosmic struggle might get white people to throw up their hands and think if it is really that way they should double their efforts to poison blacks. So just don’t go there. If you took how to be an anti-racist seriously you might conclude a black and white go into a courtroom the black should win automatically because his ancestors were slaves and that is a mockery of justice. Focus on it being just wrong to poison people with no if’s, and’s or but’s.