Nothing like a little poison ‘fore you die
1st February 2016 · 0 Comments
Poisoning or exposing people of color to harmful chemicals or viruses is hardly a new practice in America.
Andrew Jackson — the same Andrew Jackson for whom Jackson Square is named in the French Quarter in New Orleans — did it to Native Americans by giving them blankets previously used by smallpox patients.
Doctors who took a Hippocratic oath to “do no harm” did it to Black men for four decades by exposing them to syphilis to test the harmful effects of the disease in the Tuskegee Experiment.
Along “Cancer Alley,” the stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, industrial plants inundate communities of color and the poor with deadly chemicals that poison the land, water and air.
So why, some might ask, are public officials feigning shock and outrage after the news of Flint, Michigan residents being poisoned with lead-contaminated water made national and international headlines?
Mostly because it’s easier to pretend that they didn’t know than it is to admit that they didn’t care enough about it to do something about it.
In this case, the “they” are elected officials of all ethnic backgrounds and political affiliations.
They didn’t care because it was happening to poor and/or Black people. Because it wasn’t happening to their children. Because it was simply politically expedient to do and say absolutely nothing.
It is indefensible that elected officials allowed Flint, Michigan residents to drink, bathe in and cook with lead-contaminated water since 2014 and didn’t lose a single night of sleep over the ramifications of what they were doing. Late last week it was reported that elected officials began providing bottled water for state workers in the area in January 2015, making their genocidal crimes against the residents of Flint even more egregious.
Never mind that this was happening to living, breathing human beings or that at least some of the people who allowed this to happen go to churches where they are often instructed to love their brothers as they love themselves.
Never mind the myriad of studies that highlight the harmful effects of lead poisoning on the brain development of children.
They simply didn’t care.
Most of them still don’t care but are saying all the right things and scrambling to cover their you-know-whats.
This is the kind of atrocity one might expect to hear about happening in Nazi-era Germany or in apartheid-era South Africa, not in a nation that presents itself to the rest of the world as the global standard-bearer, a beacon of truth, justice, freedom and equality.
Everyone involved in these heinous acts of environmental injustice should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and summarily placed “under the jail.”
Here in New Orleans, the City That Care Forgot, we know a little something about Black and poor people getting the short end of the stick. That has been happening here for as long as anyone can remember.
In the 1940s, the City of New Orleans built a school for Black children, Moton Elementary School, on top of a toxic landfill, bringing indescribable suffering and illness to generations of Blacks who attended the school.
Almost four scores later, the state-run Recovery School District is still trying to build a shiny new school for Black children atop the former Silver City Dump, the toxic landfill in Central City where Booker T. Washington Senior High School once stood.
So much for growth, progress and learning from the “mistakes” of the Jim Crow past.
Despite all the studies that highlight the harmful effects of lead poisoning, many of the city’s elected officials and law enforcement agencies scratch their heads and wonder why Central City is home to some of the lowest-achieving schools and deadliest streets in the City of New Orleans.
As if lead poisoning isn’t bad enough, the Recovery School District, led by New Orleans native Patrick Dobard, is adamant about building this new school atop the BTW site where dangerous levels of at least eight toxic metals including lead, mercury and zinc have been found.
It tried to build a school there for students at Walter L. Cohen College Prep, refusing to build a school at the uptown school’s current Garden District site because that real estate would fetch a pretty penny on the open market. But a series of legal challenges and negative media publicity have persuaded the RSD to abandon those plans.
But the RSD has since found another entity, the KIPP charter school network, to willingly allow its young charges to attend a new school on the same poisoned ground. It probably helps that the charter school is run by folks who have no ties to the City of New Orleans and therefore no vested interest in ensuring that Black children can be all that they could conceivably be.
In its fight to block the construction of a new school for Cohen College Prep at the BTW site, Cohen’s alumni association got no help from the Louisiana Senate, which voted down a bill by State Rep. Joseph Bouie that passed unanimously in the State House that would have prevented any school district in the state from building a school atop a former landfill.
The alumni association also got no help from self-described eco-friendly New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu or the City Council, who have not even acknowledged the dangerous toxic metals in the landfill.
Nor did the alumni association get any help from La. Education Superintendent John White, then-Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the Environmental Protection Agency or the La. Dept. of Environmental Quality. Ditto for members of the U.S. Congress who hail from Louisiana on both sides of the political aisle.
Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education member Kira Orange Jones, a New Orleans transplant who came here as part of a wave of Teach For America administrators and educators tapped to replace thousands of New Orleans teachers and administrators illegally fired after Hurricane Katrina, has made it clear that she could care less about the prospects of Black children attending a school on contaminated land. It’s simply not her problem, even though she represents New Orleans on the statewide board.
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have visited New Orleans a number of times but have said nothing about this proposed new toxic school. Do you think that no one has filled them in? They certainly have not hesitated to heap praise on the transformation of local schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. Have they been purposely kept in the dark or is this just too much of a political hot potato for them to take it on?
Meanwhile, we hear all the time about how this is the new New Orleans where life is supposed to be better for everyone.
Apparently, very few people lose sleep over the prospects of building a school that poisons Black children and prevents them from becoming healthy, productive adults.
As someone who has watched elected and appointed officials in Louisiana ignore the possibility of a school being built on contaminated land for children, I understand very well how easy it is for some folks to turn their heads and act like nothing is wrong with a school system and political officials who knowingly forge ahead with plans than will endanger the health, well-being and future of generations of Black school children.
Clearly, there’s a Flint, Michigan in every city and state.
The only question that remains to be answered is what are we going to do about the Flint, Michigans and all the decision-makers who have no qualms about endangering the lives of communities of color and the poor?
And they wonder why this writer and others call New Orleans “New Johannesburg”…
This article originally published in the February 1, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
