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Comment by ajxs | Hacker News Reader

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 residents, I feel quite the opposite. I feel strongly about this in particular, that air and water quality is a major issue. One where those impacted are particularly powerless to protect themselves. 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. This is likely the effect, and not the cause. Economically marginalised individuals of all backgrounds are most likely to be impacted by this kind of pollution. If you make any environment unpleasant, people with the means to leave will do so, selecting for the most marginalised populations. Regardless, this is ridiculous... How is this acceptable within the first world?

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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.

> ...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.

It’s not that it’s necessarily targeted maliciously (they probably didn’t sit around and decide “hey, let’s poison a town!”), but things like this happen because black communities are marginalized and have no power (_especially_ in the south). You want to build a chemical plant. Well, the white people have money and power and all kinds of means to fight it: they have lawyers to sue, they have the freedom to show up to Council meetings, they have representatives who share their race and socioeconomic status. Poorer black communities have little to none of that. So it’s easier to build your plant in the poor, black town because nobody there can fight back effectively. Sure, it’s not lynching, you’re right. But it’s still systemic racism, just a softer, gentler version than perhaps your grandfather’s racism.

It’s not as simple as deciding whether or not you want to poison a town.

I'm not sure racism is the right term to use here. This seems more like the inevitable consequence of the cold, heartless, uncaring logic of politics, game theory, and capitalism. To paint it as racism sort of implies that somewhere along the line, someone who doesn't like black people decided to put the pollution there on purpose because of their personal prejudices. But it seems (to me) that this same thing would happen in a parallel universe to any less-powerful community, regardless of whether their marginalized status were due to race, language, legal immigration status, religion, inherited debt, etc.

Racism is probably an indirect cause in this particular case because it contributed to the community's lack of power. But I also think that labelling this as racism does more to confuse rather than clarify the issue, and points to solutions along the wrong axis. If the best solution is reduction of racism, then it makes sense to call this problem caused by racism. If it's actually best solved by economic policy or legal changes, then it's probably more helpful to phrase it as an economic problem or so on. Otherwise we'll be looking in the dark for a racist bad guy to punish and solve the problem, but we won't find one.

That's what systemic racism is: not necessarily a specific animus held by individuals, but an aspect of the structure of society that has effectively racist consequences.

Does the concept pay rent though? There are a lot of ways to end up powerless and marginalized; a legacy of racism is one but I named a few others. Generally the concept that encompasses the result of a group of people being marginalized, irrespective of how it happened, is class.

Does it sufficiently capture reality to say that this discrimination happens to the lower class? In that case, "systemic racism" is mostly acting as shorthand for statistics that black people have less wealth on average, and points to an explanation of why. Or does this happen to black communities over and above that of other communities of comparable wealth? In that case, it makes sense to say that racism is a separate factor, beyond just economics.

I guess what I'm saying is, these are two different concepts with two different implied solutions:

A) A history of racism is why black communities are poor, and all poor communities equally suffer these burdens.

B) Black communities suffer these burdens over and above equally poor communities.

In case A, measures to increase wealth equality might solve the problem. In case B, that might not be sufficient, and deeper causes of lingering racist discrimination might need to be sought.

Just labeling the issue "systemic racism" does more to confuse rather than clarify how to solve it, I think.

What do you mean by 'racist consequences'? Intent can be racist, belief can be racist, but consequences are just the resulting state. A racist policy is one that targets one particular race in a hostile way. A policy that is applied evenly to the entire population but impacts one race disproportionately, while entirely unfortunate, does not in itself constitute racism.

I know this is tangential and a bit of a nitpick, but I feel the semantic difference here is important.

What you just described is called "systemic racism" where the power structures and the rules were established to perpetuate oppression, but done within the rule of law so that no individual in the system seems explicitly racist. If you're looking for a bureaucrat in an office making a decision because they don't like black people, you're not going to find one. Instead, you're going to find things like, e.g. redlining and the interstate highway program.

> Poorer black communities have little to none of that.

So do poorer white communities.

Poor white communities tend to be rural, away from the infrastructure that would support these types of industry. In general, no one builds out there, except for agriculture (which has its own issues; see the on-going fight over smell and water pollution in NC over pigs farming.)

Poor black communities tend to be urban or suburban, right near the cities and commercial hubs where you'd want to build a chemical plant or industrial mill.

Seeing as you are in the area, I wonder what you think or have heard of North Arlington past Lee highway or Shirlington?

Historically and in the current day that is where the black neighborhoods are. However, living in the area for over 20 years people have always spoken better of Shirlington.

PG always had an interesting problem: middle-class professional parents, but teenagers who bought into urban gang culture for no apparent reason. This lead to a higher crime and harassment rate there, leading people to feel like it was a ghetto even if income stats wouldn't reflect.

Annandale had a similar problem, but with the Hispanic crowd.

Disclaimer: I am black. My notions come from the black community.

I don’t know if I heard too much about different places within Arlington. I went TJ, which is basically in Annandale, so there was a large population of folks there from the richer parts of the county that had a negative attitude toward local folks.

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.

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.

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

Check out https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34758210-the-color-of-mo... for more information as to why this might be the case.

> 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?

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...

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

That's... funny?

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.

I understand what you mean. I would have preferred an article with lots more technical info.

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