A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind

by Harriet A. Washington

By eliminating pervasive lead, mercury, hydrocarbons, industrial chemicals, prenatal exposures to alcohols, and even exotic pathogens like “red tide” algae poisonings, worm infestation, and trichinosis, we can save the assailed brains of untold people of color. As a bonus, by using techniques ranging from heavy metal and contaminant abatement to educational enrichment to laws against industrial pollutants, we’ll increase the health of our nation as a whole, and likely also help address the dangerous effects of dire poverty. U.S. government action will also be necessary. A federal mandate could remedy the disproportionate racial exposures that hobble cognition. Closing or updating the last four mercury-based chlor-alkali factories in America, for instance, would save an estimated $24 million in economic productivity that is currently lost due to the human effects of mercury pollution.15 Unfortunately, the Trump EPA is moving in the opposite direction. In the waning days of 2018, it took aim at the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which under the Obama administration had funded the “$18 billion clean-up of mercury and other poisons from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants.” After a required sixty-day comment period, the EPA seeks to rescind the act, which it deems not “necessary,” although it and similar efforts have reduced mercury from coal-fired plants by a heartening 85 percent over a decade.16